These 3 airlines run 80% of all chartered deportation flights

Now nearly nine months into his second term in the White House, President Donald Trump and his administration continue to ramp up a widescale deportation campaign targeting more than 10 million undocumented migrants in the United States.

The latest recorded numbers show that over 350,000 people were deported from the U.S. between January and June.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller had earlier this year instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hit targets of 3,000 deportations per day.

This number has so far proven unrealistic, given that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has struggled both with recruitment and finding aviation contractors willing to conduct these deportation flights.

In late August, NBC News reported that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has led a quiet push for ICE to buy and operate its own fleet of planes at the rate the current administration would like to see.

This, too, would be riddled with challenges, as the government would need to independently staff pilots and make sure flights meet FAA standards.

Flights would also need to remain financially viable, given that the budget for ICE has been upped from $9.5 to $75 billion in the bill passed by a Republican-led Congress last July.

Avelo, GlobalX, and Eastern Air Express run bulk of deportation flights

According to numbers unveiled by the Associated Press, over 80% of the chartered deportation flights conducted right now are operated by just three carriers: GlobalX, Eastern Air Express, and Avelo Airlines.

While the first two are chartered airlines largely unknown to the wider public, Avelo also runs commercial flights between many smaller U.S. cities and ran into widescale protests over the choice to accept such contracts from the federal government.

In April 2025, Avelo CEO Andrew Levy called these flights “controversial [but…] too valuable not to pursue.” As a result, the airline has faced protests in states like Arizona, Oregon, New York, Washington, Connecticut, and North Carolina throughout the summer and spring.

In May 2025, hackers also broke into and changed the front page of the website for GlobalX to inform those who came to it that the operator was running deportation flights for ICE.

“Anonymous has decided to enforce the Judge's order since you and your sycophant staff ignore lawful orders that go against your fascist plans,” the front page read before the carrier could regain access to change it.

Running primarily commercial flights, Avelo has faced increased anger from customers over its contract with ICE.

Image source: Shutterstock

Blocked calls signs and tail numbers increasingly used to disguise ICE flights

At the same time, reports have started to emerge around ICE using false call signs and blocked tail numbers to disguise deportation flights from publicly-available trackers and prevent them from being spotted by civil rights groups.

More on travel:

Seattle-based activism group La Resistencia reported that 40 of the 94 ICE contracted deportation flights it tracked in July were listed as “N/A – Not Available.”

Blocking flight data under the Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed program has previously been done in some rare cases to hide movement of high-ranking officials but is now increasingly being used to make it harder to track when, how, and how many deportation flights are being conducted.