Also media, Hi everyone, and welcome to it could happen here. We are joined once again by Gillian Brockel, who is once again going to talk to us about the terrible actually world of deportation flights, how we can track them, what we can learn from following them, and what it tells us about the US's massive deportation regimes.
Welcome back, Thanks for joining.
Us, Thank you for having me, James, I appreciate it.
You're welcome.
All right, let's get going here this week, got a lot to go and there's been a lot of planes supporting.
People deporting and removing.
So we've really stopped saying deporting because we don't know who hasn't gotten due process and who does and does not actually belong to the country they're being sent to.
Yeah, in many cases, it's more like what we saw in the Extraordinary Rendition, very much so kind of war and terry. I think that's pretty a better way.
To describe it. Yeah, let's start out. Suppose was Djibouti.
Yeah, so the eight men that were sent to Djibouti, that's the flight I first tracked on May twentieth. They were taken on a gulf Stream five operated by journey aviation from Harling in Texas to Shannon Airport in Ireland, and I called the cops in Ireland to try and stop. It didn't work, and then they went to a US military base in Djibouti, where judge had ordered them to remain while he considered their case. So those men are now in South Sudan, where Trump wanted to send them.
They were held in Jibouti for six weeks. We know from court filings that they were held inside a shipping container in a far corner of the base, near a burn pit where the trash for the base was burned, and that smoke from this pit was getting into the shipping container through the events and causing the men and
the ice Gars to cough and feel ill. There was also an independent journalist named Alex Planck who got a photo from a source on the base showing one of the detainees shackled at the ankles and being escorted by an ice guard to the restroom because the shipping container did not have its own restroom. And he said that most of the members of the military at the base didn't even know that they were there. And you know this base is generally considered like one of the worst
assignments to get when you're in the military. Plank said he talked to a defense contractor who said that they stopped sending their employees to that base.
Because it was just too terrible.
So during the six week period, I and other flight trackers we tracked five trips by round trip trips by Journey Aviation jets to and from their base in Miami and Djibouti, all traveling through Shannon. Presumably these were flights that were swapping out ICE guards, but we really don't know because ICE does not provide any information about its air operations. Everything we know is through court filings and
through open source intelligence like the ADSP Exchange. Then on July third, the Supreme Court cleared the way for these third country removals, and this one specifically to South Sudan. All of US flight trekkers were watching the airspace really closely, and we knew that one of Journey's jets was already there on the ground in Jibooty, so that's what we were looking for. But then on the evening of July fifth, about two days later, DHS announced that it was done.
They had removed the detainees to Sausudan via a military flight earlier that day. And I have gone over the air traffic data for that region six times on adsp Exchange, and I haven't been able to spot this military flight. And granted, Djibouti is a real ADSB dead zone, but Juba isn't. Juba actually has quite good coverage, and you know, Addis Ababa also has very good coverage which they would
have had to fly over. So it's clear to me that this military flight, if it happened as DHS claims, probably flew the entire trip with its transponder turned off, which is something that the military can do, but it's not standard.
I think people would be.
Surprised how rare actually it is for military flights to do that, unless they're going on a combat or spy mission. Most military aircraft fly with their transponders on. So if you think about the Iran air strikes a couple of weeks ago, the week before the air strikes, there were thirty two Globe Masters and Strata tankers that flew from
the US to bases in Europe in a single night. That, like every av geek was like whoa you know, and we knew that that happened because they flew with their transponders on, even though it made it really obvious that some kind of military operation was probably imminent.
And then even during the.
Air strikes, these aircraft would take off from Europe with their transponders on, turn them off over the Mediterranean when they were heading east, do whatever.
They were doing, and then turn them back on when they were headed back toward Europe.
So even part of the combat mission, they still have their transponders on. Yeah, So the fact that the flight to Sasudan, which was not a combat or a spy mission, appears to have flown the entire trip with its transponder off is quite notable to me. And you know, I see it as an extension of ISIS tactics on the ground where they are covering their faces and refusing to identify themselves. But I'm, you know, kind of surprised that they got the military to go along with that.
Yeah, if it was really a military flight, right, like it could be something kind of military adjacent like some DHS or other government aircraft.
Right, I mean, we don't know.
Yeah, they said it happened by a military flight on this date, but we don't know.
Yeah, So on July.
Eighth, the spokesperson for the South Sudanese government told the AP that the men were there and that they were quote under the care of the relevant authorities who are screening them and ensuring their safety and well being. We have no idea what that means. Does that mean they're in prison there? Does that mean that they are, you know, going to be sent to their countries of origin as they claimed at one point? We have no idea, yeah, And then just a few minutes ago we're recording this.
On Beciel day, July fourteenth, the same plane that first took these men to Djibouti was scheduled to take off from El Paso for Shannon Airport in Ireland. Once again, where it goes after that, Well, you might know by the time you hear this, but right now it's anyone's guess.
Yeah, it's baffling, like some of this stuff, like the deportations to or no deportations, like rendition to South Sudan.
Right Like even Homan, who's the Trump's quote unquote borders are or immigrations are, seems to be asserting that he has no idea what happened to them once they've landed there, Like right, at one point they suggested that they didn't think they would be detained, but like do they just let them out into the street in I mean, when people are released from custody in the United States, that's exactly what they do, right, they let them out into
the street. Like, Yeah, a lot of volunteers here in San Diego have spent a lot of time, you know, because often people are released without Sometimes they're released without religious garments, which are very important to them. Often they're released without any sort of orientation. Where are they How do they get where they're going? Can they afford a flight? You know, how do they book a flight? Do they
have the relevant documents to book a flight? It's a complete clusterfug And that's it in the US.
Right, And I mean think about it.
If you're like Laoshian or Vietnamese man in your fifties or sixties, which a lot of these men are older gentlemen, and you're what just like led out into the streets of Juba, which is, you know, a big city.
But there's a lot of instability in this country. Like what are you gonna do? It's a big thinker like what you know, Yeah, you're very vulnerable, very vulnerable, and you.
Probably don't have any material resources. It's not that you can get your credit card, take out much of money and fly somewhere else. Nor do these people really have in many cases anywhere to go, right, Like, the reason that they're being taken to third countries is generally that they have withholding of removal or convention against torture claims that they can't.
Be removed to their home countries.
Since we recorded this, we have found out that people in South Sudan are being detained. According to an outlet called The Daily with your South Sudanese outlet, those people are incarcerated in South Suda.
Like the man for Me and Mar.
You know, they're arguing that, you know, I suppose, oh, we can't send him to me and Mar, But if you're going to send him to another place where he's likely to be tortured, is it really any different? And also they are sending people to me and Mar. They have reported people to Me and Marr in the last few months, as you James have reported.
Yeah, that's right.
They've sent more than a dozen people to Memr and seem to be continuing, at least they have not said they will stop. And most of those people were directly detained by military intelligence and MEMMA when they landed, So those people will have been tortured. And yeah, this this other person who had withholding it from removal doesn't.
Mean that he will not be tortured.
I mean, if we look at like migrants making the journey to the United States are routinely kidnapped, tortured, ransom killed, sexually assaulted. I've heard of all of these firsthand. I don't suspect it will be any different. You know, once they're outside the US again, extremely vulnerable. And we saw this a lot in title forty two, when the Trump administration and the Biden administration would just boot people back
over the border. Often they would do lateral transfers, so you enter in the San Diego sector, they drop you in the Laredo sector or somewhere further east. And those people that have zero network right and often don't speak Spanish and are extremely vulnerable. It's pretty much the worst case outcome here.
Well, unfortunately, in the next part, I'm about to tell you about how all of that is about to increase exponentially.
Yeah, talking of things that are increasing, actually increasing. We still just have to do two advertisements every show, so we'll get me one of them now, all right, we are back.
I hope you enjoyed those adverts here.
We had some new ones for like a religiously sansient gold, which I'm very exciting about. This is one thing Jesus loved. It was money change. There's a lot of stuff in the Bible about that.
I think silvers actually, right.
Yeah, I think big precious metals. Guy, love to see currency speculation. Okay, let's talk about Djibouti, a place where the United States has a big base that it is using for housing people that it's renditioning to other countries.
Yeah.
So when we first recorded this, we were just doing a Djibouti update about the men who were renditioned to South Sudan, and we knew at the time that there was another Journey Aviation jet about to take off. And now we know what happened with that flight. It landed again in Djibouti, and two days later DHS announced that it had renditioned five more people to the country of Swatini,
which I've been to. I reported there in twenty eleven, I spoke to teachers who were starving because they hadn't been paid for eight months by the king, who you know is the last absolute monarch in Africa. And you know, the teachers that I spoke to were terrified to disappear into the prisons that these five men have now been
renditioned to. I worked with another independent journalist named Alex Plank, and we published a story using OSIN to prove that that journey flight to Djibouti was carrying the five men and from there they were transported by a C seventeen US military you know, huge aircraft that flew with its transponders off from Djibouti to Swatini to deliver these men.
Seems like that is the emerging standard for these military deportation flights, right at least for the final leg.
Yeah, so the last week has been pretty crazy.
Yeah.
An Omni seven sixty seven did a removal flight to a couple places in Africa, and at least two and perhaps three large military jets also did removal flights from the United States, landing in Gemo just for fun, and
landing in different countries in Africa. Now, the interesting thing about that and about journey is that until this past week, Africa and Central Asia have really been the purview of this other ice air operator that's really gone under the radar, but I think it's possible might be doing some things that are even more sinister than your usual ice air flights.
So this company is called Aircraft Transport Service. They are Florida base, but they are now all of their aircraft are based in Mesa, Arizona, which is an ICE hub, and they're at the end of their five year contracting these special high risk removals to dangerous areas or with you know, allegedly dangerous migrant passengers. Their flights really began to spike in mid February up until July fourth. They have five private jets that they lease from their owners
to operate these flights. And I've looked at all of their flights and it's not clear if they are doing any flights that aren't ICE, but certainly at least most
of their business is ICE. And so I've tracked nineteen different trips, different ice removal trips that they've done since February eighteenth, and most of these have gone to countries in Africa, and that really began to surge around April twenty ninth, And what I've noticed is that on June twenty six, New York Times published a story about, you know, the Trump administration is pressuring all of these countries to accept more of these third country removals, and there's a
lot of overlap between that list of countries and the countries that ATS has been landing in for the last four months. There is a pair of flights in particular
that I find pretty alarming. They went out within thirty minutes of each other on May twentieth, which was the same day that the flight to Djibouti, when the flight that was supposed to go to Sausudan and these flights, so these flights started doing their usual ice removal route, which is, you know, MESA, maybe we stop in Fort Worth to pick up more migrants, then you do a fuel stop in San Juan, you do another fuel stop in Senegal, and then you go wherever you're going to
go in West Africa. These flights, thirty minutes apart from each other, flew directly from San Juan to Mauritanium and we're on the ground for thirty minutes, and then from there flew to Senegal. You know, I can't prove anything because ICE does not communicate about its air operations at all, you know, unless they feel like it because they want to brag about it, or because you know, they're ordered
to bite courts. These flights to me seem particularly alarming as possible flights where there could have been third country removals that we don't even know about. And Marissa Cavas, she's an independent reporter who has a site called the Handbass Get. At the end of April, she reported that there was a third country removal that hasn't gotten a lot of attention, and I don't know why, because it's
really messed up. A third country removal of an Iraqi man to Rwanda, which happened on April fourth, after he legally migrated to the US. He was accused of murder in Iraq. There's incontroversial evidence proving that he did not commit this crime. He wasn't even in Iraq when it happened, but the Biden administration continued with his removal. And because he couldn't go back to Iraq because he would have been executed, they had been looking for a safe third
country for him. They did not finish that when they handed the keys over to the Trump administration. So on April fourth, he was removed to Rwanda. And he has a lot of media contacts and no one has heard from him. I have not seen a report him, you know. I tried to contact his family, was unsuccessful. I contacted his attorney and didn't hear back. So ATS operated a flight.
It began at about eleven thirty on April second to this Fort Worth Airport that's right next to an ICED attention center San Juan, Senegal, and then landed in Nairobi. Now Nairobi is not Kigali in Rwanda, but they're only about an hour apart, and if you look at the flight data, the aircraft at that point had been operating for about twenty three hours straight, which is stretching the boundaries of legality, even if you.
Have two crews. So there's a lot of.
Reasons why ICE might have taken him to Nairobi and then done something else for the last leg I think the most likely explanation is that the crew had to rest and I decided that they didn't want to wait, So they may have chartered a local puddle jumper to take them, you know, over the lake to Kika.
It's pretty common, I think to when I've flow into Kikali. I think I've stopped in Kinshasa and Nairobi. I don't know if it's a big planes can't land there. It's just the kind of the way it works. Fewer people are flying to Kigali directly from the USO Europe than are going to places like King Shasta, Nairobi, so it might just be that they don't do direct flights. But yeah, I don't think I've ever done a direct big plane flight right.
It seems that the only aircraft going in and out of there are going to Nairobi and Kampala, and from there you connect somewhere else.
It's a pretty small airport, so.
So yeah, that's ATS.
They've kind of flown under the radar because global x is doing so much more in terms of numbers. But I think it's quite possible that ATS's mission for the past few months has been to sort of pilot program small amounts of third country removals to these different countries, just like omar Amin. Because after omar Amin was sent to Rwanda, the State Department sent a cable that Mrsakabas obtained saying, oh man, it totally worked. This is great. Let's send ten more people.
At a cost to one hundred thousand per head, right right again, maybe suggesting carcerational one hundred grand is going to cover more than your paperwork, you know.
Right, And just to be clear about, you know, the cost all of these military flights that have been flying around Africa now doing isis dirty work.
Those cost about.
Twenty eight five hundred dollars an hour to operate, and of course cost is the least important thing here. But my god, you know, for an administration that claims to care about government.
Waste, yeah, this is ridiculous.
We don't know how much they're paying people in South Sudan or the monarchy of a Swatini. We don't know what they're sort of bribing these people to accept. I just checked with Mauritania. It's currently a Level three State Department travel warning telling people to reconsider travel due to terrorism and crime.
That's why we're sending people.
I have explained the many and varied human rights abuses that have happened in Mauritania on the show before, so you can go back and listen to other episodes. Do you want to want to hear about those hundreds of Mauritanians, if not thousands, entered the United States in the tail end of the Bid administration. I'm thinking like it was late summer of twenty twenty three when I recall seeing
many of them. Just in my workdown at the border, we often get very hot, like September's octobers in southern California, and a few times I've come across Mauritanian people who were in really bad shape just during those sort of hot months, and it's sort of stuck with me that, like some of the stories they had were horrific treat and I'm sure that it's some of those people who are now being sent back and just the fact that they tried to leave will have made things even worse for them.
So yeah, I mean, these flights going to Mauritania, which includes one of the military flights last week, you know, slavery still exists in Mauritania. There's a minimum of ninety thousand people there who are still enslaved. That's the low
end of the estimates. And you know, it's been illegal since nineteen eighty one, but the practice is really protected by a culture of secrecy, not just among Mauritanian elites, but the multinational corporations who are embedded there and will just kind of look the other way while they're you know, extract natural resources with people in the minds that like
they're not really going to check if they're enslaved or not. So, you know, maybe we're doing third country deportations and removals there. Maybe we're just sending Mauretanians back to a really horrible place.
Yeah, and it doesn't humanly matter, right, We're sending people back to a place where they are very likely to be tortured, to be as you say, like faust, to unfree labor, to be incarcerated without having committed a crime. Doesn't really matter whether people want.
It's fucked.
The embassy doesn't let us people drive around Mauritania at night, have to be in the capital, They can only walk in certain places. Give an idea of like how this double standard is applied. Talking of multinational corporations, I would.
Love to hear from. So let's do that now.
All right, we are back and we were talking about the safety of private jets. Some of these flights have some pretty horrific safety practices, right, and this, like when you mentioned this, it instantly reminded me of a thing that I have had no luck trying to sell stories on for four years. It is standard practice for I and CVP to transport children, children in their custody without proper child seats or other restraints, right, which is you know, to my knowledge, you can get a ticket for that
in some states. Right, Like if you're driving a child, like you put a little two year old in the seat without a like a child seat that they have to have, Like, rightfully, you're endangering that person's life. But apparently our government's doing it every day.
Yeah, I mean the law doesn't apply to the upholders of the law, right, right.
Yeah, many such cases.
Many such cases which I'm about to explain more.
Yeah, let's learn some more.
So these ice flights, you know, most of these are happening on larger jets A three twenties, owing seven thirty sevens inside the cabin. REPUBLICA has done some really good reporting on this from April. There's another outlet called Capitol and Maine that also did a terrific story in twenty twenty one, and the University of Washington also has a lot of research and information on what it's like inside
the cabin of these planes. And you know, as a former flight attendant, I find it fucking disgusting and really unsafe. Flight attendants on these flights are not allowed to look at or speak to migrant passengers. They aren't allowed to serve them food or water. All of the migrants on these flights are shackled wrist to ankles, and some of them, if they're allowed or distressed or just annoying, the ice guards are wrapped in restraint blankets and harnesses and have
hoods put over their faces. Just this morning, JJ and DC, one of the ice air trackers on Blue Sky, posted a video of a migrant passenger in a hood being loaded onto Avello Jet in Seattle and he's being pushed by three ice guards and falls to the ground face first and then they just sort of man handle him back up the stairs.
Yeah.
So, you know, as a former flight attendant, I just want to say, in the event of an emergency, how the fuck is a flight attendant supposed to evacuate the passengers in ninety seconds when their seat belts are getting tangled in their handcuffs? And all they can do is shuffle down the aisle when they can't see because they have a hood over their head. If the cabin loses pressure, how can they reach up for their oxygen masks when their handcuffs are attached by a chain to their leg irons.
How are they going to get the mask on themselves if they're wearing a hood? How are they going to get their life fests on when they can't reach back to wrap the strap around their waists? And these emergencies are not theoretical. We know from court filings that between twenty fourteen and twenty twenty one there were six emergency evacuations of Ice air flights. Of those incidents, the evacuation times of only two are known, and they took two
and a half minutes and seven minutes. And to be clear, we only know about those evacuations because of lawsuits. So there may very well have been more evacuations since twenty twenty one and we just don't know about it.
Yeah, I mean it's likely right, like the Biden administration did it, especially when they were deporting Haitian people, like huge numbers of flights.
Right until May and June September twenty one, when Biden did the Haitian mass deportation. That was the highest amount of deportations that witness at the border has recorded.
Yeah.
That was also the last time I was able to write about Biden's administration policy NBC. I think I crossed the line saying something mean about Uncle Joe.
Yeah.
Yeah, but we should be very clip. This has been a bipartisan thing.
Oh yes, oh yes.
So on each of these flights there is generally one or two ICE officials and at least fifteen ICE contracted guards. Migrant passengers have reported being verbally, physically, and sexually abused by these guards, and flight attendants on board have no power to stop them. In twenty seventeen, ninety two migrant passengers traveling from the US to Ethiopia were left shackled on a plane in the car Senegal for twenty three
hours because the crew timed out. They were kicked, dragged, tied up, threatened by ICE guards, and when the labs filled up, they soiled themselves. Flight attendants report that the guards on these flights regularly ignore their safety commands and will even you know, try and narc on them. They'll complain to the flight attendant's supervisors at their airlines when they're asking people to follow federal aviation regulations, it's like
everyone else in America has to do. But when flight attendants have complained to the FAA about this, the FAA defers to ice. You know, this is not just a matter of like it's disrespectful, two dangerous flight attendants. You know, this is extremely dangerous. And one of the most important parts of aviation safety is something called Crew resource management
or CRM. This is something that all pilots and flight attendants are trained in every year and have to retrain every year, and basically CRM boils down to pilots need to listen to the flight attendants about safety, and flight attendants are trained to be assertive with the pilots about safety.
This was developed after a notorious incident in the nineteen seventies where a plane was on the ground, it was filling up with smoke, and the pilot ignored flight attendants please to evacuate, you know, just for some like garden variety sexism probably, and everyone on board died of smoke inhalation, two hundred and eighty people. So after that, crews are
trained every year to really flatten the hierarchies. You know, I think people think like, oh, the captain has four epaulets and the first officer has three, and you know, oh hierarchy. No air crews are actually very like the hierarchies are flattened intentionally on purpose. They train to flatten it across job titles, across gender, education, racial cultural divides,
because it is safer to fly that way. When everyone feels that, you know, they have a stake in safety and they'll be heard if they say something about safety,
everyone else is safer. So if you've got these ICE guards stepping into the middle of that, throwing their weight around, overruling flight attendants and pilots, and the FAA isn't backing them up, you have confusion about who's in power on board, you have a total breakdow on a CRM, and so beyond just like people physically being able to get off of the planes, this is so unsafe to have this kind of environment with these guards. So the last incident
I want to talk about was in June seventeen. To me, this is the scariest one of all of the safety incidents. There was an ice Air emergency. This flight landed it was filling up with smoke. This is almost just like the plane in the seventies the flight attendants told the pilots to evacuate, and the pilots ignored them. A bunch of people on board were hospitalized. We don't know how many or who, but frankly, everyone on board could have
died from smoke inhalation very easily. And I really think you can point to the presence of the ICE guards here as a big factor in the failure to evacuate. That is not how pilots are trained. So again, yeah, if you're a flight attendant for pilot and you do not want your airline to contract with ICE, now is the time to tell them. Tell your union help flight
attendants for Global X and the Vello get jobs somewhere else. Ye, you know, do whatever you can to slow this down, because it is all about to increase if they get their way.
Yeah, jeez, that is fucking bleak. Yeah, yeah, you said it's going to get bigger. Like let's talk about that, Like can you kind of zoom out and explain Ice Air to us, and like we've talked about these small flights a lot, but like that's not the bulk of the flights they do right right.
So ice Air right now has twelve large jets, you know, a three twenty seven thirty sevens chartered from different airlines that they're using for their deportations, and then these private jets are you know, used less for these smaller, high risk deportations. They're running like thirty thirty five flights a day at this point. So May twentieth turned out to be like kind of a big day for is air because that was the Djibouti flight. That was when ATS
started using the Tyson callsign. It's also the day that the larger operation really just searched in activity. And you know, the other flight trackers tell me that ice Air used to take weekends and holidays off and they don't do that anymore. They were deporting people on juneteenth and July fourth.
In May, ice operated a record number of flights, which was at least one thousand and eighty three flights that flight trackers recorded, one hundred and ninety of which were removal flights and then the rest are like these internal shuffle flights between different ice attention centers and return trips. And then in June they set a record again with one hundred and eighty seven flights, of which two hundred
and nine were removal flights. All of this data is a witness at the border dot org and it's kept by Tom Cartwright, who is a real hero. He has been tracking flights basically by himself for five and a
half years and he publishes very detailed monthly reports. And yeah, as you said earlier, you know he's been tracking this through the Biden administration too, which is how we know that, you know, the Trump deportation machine from the first term, you know, Biden didn't really slow it down that much, and now Trump is picking up the reins again and
surging it again. So the airlines right now that are flying these larger removal flights are Global X also called Global Crossing Airlines, a Vellow Airlines, Eastern Air and on the international and except for ATS, who you know I talked about earlier, has their own contract, all of these carriers who fly for ICE are subcontracted through a flight
broker called CSI Aviation. CSI Aviation signed a five year contract with the Biden administration last year that has been paused because of a lawsuit from a rival flight broker
that wanted that contract. So since late February, CSI has been brokering these flights on a six month no bid contract that started at one hundred and twenty eight million dollars and was quickly doubled and then went up to two hundred and seventy four million, and then just a couple of days ago, I don't think anyone else has reported this, it was raised again to three hundred and thirty nine million dollars.
So they've got about sixty.
Million dollars left on this contract for the next six weeks, and that's before the huge windfall and funding that I just got from Trump's big beautiful bill. The administration has said it once to triple deportations, and right now they
just don't have the aircraft for that. And DHS On Twitter and Instagram a couple of days ago they post I said this really ghoulish meme that said fire up the deportation planes, and there was like a skeleton lifting weights with a caption that said my body is a machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations.
So that's gross.
Yeah, that was really weird. They've been doing a lot of this like post stuff.
Right, Like I said, they only have twelve jets right now. Then they're flying those capacity, so they can't triple deportations unless they start bringing in more airlines.
So the other day.
I posted a call to action to flight attendants and to flight attendant unions saying, you know, if you don't want your airline to do these flights, now is the time to tell them.
Yeah.
CSI Aviation is.
Run by a man named Alan Way and his daughter, Deborah Mastis. Alan Way is the former chair of the New Mexico Republican Party. He's hosted a bunch of Trump rallies over the years. He ran unsuccessfully for Senate and governor of New Mexico in the past on an anti immigrant platform, which local media at the time pointed out, you know, well, you're mostly doing deportation flights, so that
would really be enriching yourself. His daughter, Deborah Masis, was one of the fake electors in New Mexico during the.
Twenty twenty election.
Wow.
Yeah.
She was subpoenut by the House committee investigating the January sixth insurrection, and the New Mexico State Attorney General's office investigated her. Eventually, they're not press charges because she and the other fake electors claimed they didn't know they're fake certifications were going to be used for anything illegal. And the Project on Government Oversight has some pretty good reporting on CSI aviation if you want to see.
That, Yeah, yeah, we'll put it in the show notes.
Like, yeah, insane.
This whole thing is just like completely I would watch or look at some of the footage from inside deportation flights because it is inhumane.
It's yeah.
I mean, I hope that any flight attendants who are forced to work these flights can find a way to quit. But if they can't quit for financial reasons, because all of these people are, you know, very underpaid, you know, I hope that they can provide us with more information about what is going on inside these flights.
Yeah, definitely that will be at least give people a chance to see what their tax dollars are being spent on.
Yeah.
I mean, one of the things that I've been thinking about, you know, terrorism is like a really loaded word that gets misused a lot against black and brown people, But I think that's the right word for all of these removals because they're random, they're violent, they're targeting civilians for political purpose, and their design to frighten the larger population
potential victims. Right, the Trump administration is trying to scare all undocumented immigrants and anyone adjacent to them, since you know, a lot of citizens are being arrested too.
Yeah, or green cardholders, people with buckets of documents are being deported a rendition right now.
And they're saying, you know, they're trying to make them so scared that if they don't self deport they could end up in South Sudan, they could end up in Mauritania. You know, that's what this policy is designed to do, is to terrorize the people of this country.
Yeah. Absolutely, it's pretty bleak.
We have an encrypted email address, so if you are I guess a deportation flight attendant and you would like to talk to someone, I can pass it on to give you. In two you might have your an encrypted email address and you can plug.
It if you do.
Yeah, you can definitely leak to me on signal.
Okay, yeah. Nice.
We have cool zone tips at ProtonMail dot com or cool zone tips at proton dot me. I believe they both work. It's only encrypted if the address that it's sent from is also encrypted, So in the symptance. You would need a proton mail or you can cook up your own encryption. Yeah, that would be the way to
get in touch if you want to get in touch this. Yeah, this just fucking sucks, like and there's going to be so much more of it in the next couple of years with this budget, Like, this is going to become what it already isn't everyday thing.
This is going to become even more common.
I know.
They're also like they're doing some weird shuffle to avoid sanctions with Venezuelan airlines.
Right, yeah, they fly I believe it is, to Honduras and then Venezuela flies their own plane to Honduras to pick them up.
Right, yeah cool, I'm sure that's you have a great time when they get better Venezuela and Venezuela is also offering humanitarian flights for its citizens stuck in Mexico right now. So, like, if people want to do something about this, what can they do?
The first thing you can do is boycott Avello Airlines. They are commercial airlines, so don't fly with them. You can write to the airlines you use regularly right now and tell them that if they are considering contracting with Ice not to that you will boycott them too. You can complain to the FAA about the safety issues on these flights. I doubt that they'll do anything, but I
think there's value in saying something anyway. If you have contacts in aviation or in any of the countries that these people are being sent to, and you find something out, you can leak to me on signal. And if you work in aviation, tell your airline and your union right now that you are not going to operate these flights. And if you want to get started tracking flights yourself. We need a lot of help, especially in the overnight hours.
A good first step is to go to Globe dot adsb exchange dot com and in the general search window type Tyson.
You've been doing really, really great reporting on this, and I'm sure people want to continue to follow it. It is a shame that other outlets are not running it.
But God bless them.
Yeah, just try.
Out there if you want to know what James is talking about. There's a brief explanation at the end of one of my stories that I've written recently at hard g History dot ghost dot io. I have a couple stories there about the recent flights to Africa, and you can read the bottom and you'll find out what James is talking about.
Yeah, it's a little teaser for you, right, go get the t Yeah.
Okay, thank you for joining us. I'm sure we'll hear from you again soon.
Thank you, James.
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