Documenting ICE flights from Portsmouth Airport at Pease

Twenty-one flights transporting ICE detainees have departed from the New Hampshire airport since the flights ramped up on July 15.

On July 15, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began operating regular detainee transport flights out of Portsmouth International Airport at Pease.

ICE does not disclose flight data, and the carriers have taken steps to conceal the flights. I will be documenting the Pease flights based on information gathered through ADB-S Exchange—a crowd-sourced platform that collects and displays flight data from volunteer-hosted receivers—and social media reports from observers, notably JJ in DC.

To date, the recorded flights at Pease are all domestic “shuffle flights” with final destinations of Alexandria, La., or Harlingen, Texas—locations that house large detention centers and also serve as deportation hubs.

While it appears that the primary objective is to move detainees to those southern states, a small number of detainees have been removed from some of the incoming flights and taken from the airport as larger groups are loaded onto the planes for the departing flights.

Update: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paused detainee flights at Pease in Portsmouth in September 2025. The flights were shifted back to Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts after being discontinued earlier in the summer. “ICE has resumed using Hanscom Field to support Operation Patriot 2.0,” an ICE Boston spokesperson confirmed. “Flying aliens out of Hanscom allows ICE to move detainees quickly from the intake center at Burlington to a detention center once they have been processed.”

This list will be updated daily. It can be accessed from the Miscellany Blue navigation bar or by visiting miscellanyblue.com/ice.