'Despicable!': Impromptu protest confronts ICE waiting to board shackled detainees
Portsmouth International Airport at Pease is now the New England hub for ICE flights that take detainees from across New England and transport them to states with large detention centers.
Passersby noticing a phalanx of vans and SUVs—part of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation at Portsmouth International Airport—recently staged an impromptu protest outside an airport maintenance gate as officials waited to move the detainees onto the airport tarmac.
As they observed shackled passengers in the five vans, one filled with women, and began taking photos, the officials who had not previously had their faces covered pulled up masks, put on sunglasses, and rolled up the windows. “As the vans started to move through the gates,” a witness recounted, “bystanders began screaming, ‘Shame!’”
The detainees were loaded onto an Eastern Air Express Boeing 737 that had just arrived from Youngstown, Ohio. ICE policy requires detainees to be “fully restrained” by the use of handcuffs, waist chains, and leg irons during all flights. After a stop in Harrisburg, Pa., the flight continued to Alexandria International Airport in Louisiana, which has a 400-bed detention facility on the tarmac and serves as a hub for deportation flights to other countries.
Detainee flights are a regular occurrence at the airport. The recent flights from Portsmouth began in mid-July after the department ended similar operations at Hanscom Field in Bedford, Mass., where the operations faced public protests and drew criticism from local officials.
A pattern has emerged. Three times a week—on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday—a flight operated by Avelo Air, Eastern Air Express, or GlobalX Airlines arrives in the morning, is on the ground for about an hour, and departs for a final destination of Alexandria or Harlingen, Texas.
We know this because we can monitor and track the flights using flight data from ADS-B Exchange, a crowd-sourced platform that collects and displays flight data from volunteer-hosted receivers, which includes the ICE detainee flights that commercial flight tracking vendors are prevented from displaying. (I’m building a public database of ICE flights in and out of Portsmouth, check back for updates.)
Angry residents have pressured local officials to act, but Portsmouth Mayor Deaglan McEachern told the Portsmouth Herald that “there’s very little that the city of Portsmouth is going to be able to do” to prevent the flights. “This is a federal air base, under federal laws. We didn’t make this decision," he said.
A recent court case bears him out. In 2019, the county executive issued an executive order that banned the servicing of ICE deportation flights by the fixed base operator at King County International Airport in Washington. Late last year, a federal appeals court ruled the order was invalid because it violated the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause, which prohibits states from interfering with the operations of the federal government.
Nevertheless, the spontaneous July 22 protest was followed by a large, organized demonstration last night, led by activist groups from New Hampshire and Massachusetts. More than a hundred people gathered to demand an end to the flights—they’re likely to be back.
