No Love for ICE Air: Texas activists protest deportation flight operators

We all know the hassles of air travel. Joining the seemingly never-ending security line at the airport one recent morning, I noticed something new. Among the cluster of tiny signs showing details of random assortments of airport information, one stood out.

A small, barely noticeable poster told passengers, presumably undocumented immigrants, to self-deport themselves for a measly $1,000 payment or risk being held in inhumane holding facilities where food, water, and medical care are often denied. Self-deport, the sign encouraged, or risk an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shooting you down in the street like happened most recently to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastian Duran Guerrero.

It was such a small sign, but it was just another reminder of the cruelty behind ICE’s actions across the U.S. and of the fact that not even the airport itself is a safe place.

Just last month, Lorenzo Thompson, a member of TWU Local 556, the Dallas-based union of Southwest Airlines flight attendants, was taken by ICE while on the job. Should we really be surprised by the airport’s complicity, though?

After all, as we have seen, many businesses that don’t mind complying with ICE as long as there is profit to be had, even at the expense of their own employees. And that’s where ICE Air comes into the picture.

What is ICE Air, you may ask? It’s a network of private corporations contracted by ICE to transfer detainees between camps and remove them from the U.S. via deportation flights. While ICE Air has been around for a while, what is particularly concerning is that the rate of its flights has amped up, and all of them operate with minimal oversight or transparency.

Domestic transfer (“shuffle”) flights between detention centers and deportation staging facilities surged to 9,066 in 2025, a 132% increase over the previous year, with ICE Air flying out of 35 new local airports. From FAA violations to inhumane treatment of the people on these flights, ICE Air’s cruelty has also increased all across the nation.

One airport in the network, Dallas Love Field, is currently aiding in deportation and shuffle flights. It also happens to be a major hub for Southwest Airlines—Lorenzo Thompson’s employer. Southwest, as of this writing, has still not made any public comment on the abduction of its employee by ICE officials.

Dallas leads the nation when it comes to ICE detentions. Nearby Plano, Texas, is home to Atlantic Aviation, which operates over 100 hangars in the U.S., with their most notorious clients being ICE Air and DHS. I sent a FOIA request to the City of Dallas to inquire about its contract with Atlantic Aviation. The response? They don’t have one, in fact, they don’t have any city-related information on Atlantic Aviation. That’s odd, considering Atlantic’s hangar sits on city-owned property at Love Field.

Recently, due to on the ground campaigns by “No Love for Ice Air”—a coalition of local organizations and human rights groups—a series of demonstrations started around the city of Dallas and at Atlantic Aviation headquarters in response.

Many of the protests took place at the height of FIFA fervor. Dallas was one of the host cities, and Atlantic Aviation highlighted a countdown to the World Cup clock on their website while simultaneously carrying out ICE flights from the city’s airport.

Atlantic had a pretty regular cadence of either shuffle or direct deportation flights five days a week when local groups started tracking them back in March, but then something interesting happened. When protests started outside of Atlantic’s Love Field hangar, the company just so happened to not have any regularly-scheduled flights.

After several demonstrations, Atlantic apparently started redirecting ICE flights to Signature Aviation across the runway. Many of these flights have been documented by No Love for Ice Air on their Instagram account.

Clearly, the pressure on ICE Air is working, with more and more media outlets starting to report on this issue. The people can continue pressuring companies like Atlantic and Signature Aviation to not participate in these flights.

Find out if ICE Air is operating at your local airport. If so, pressure officials to stop allowing such operations on public property with taxpayer dollars, and make sure you are following No Love for Ice Air on Instagram to stay informed about what is going on in Dallas and what tactics are working.

If you had your eyes focused on what happened in Minneapolis, please give Dallas the same attention and help us protect our neighbors. Together, we can stand against ICE’s reign of terror, and we will protect our community.

As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.

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