In the four years since its first flight, Avelo Airlines has won loyal customers by serving smaller cities such as New Haven, Connecticut, and Burbank, California.
Now, it has a new and very different business line. You are running deportation flights for the Trump administration.
In spite of the weeks of protests from clients and elected officials, the first Avelus flight for immigration and customs control seems to have left Monday morning from Mesa, Arizona, according to data from the Flightradar24.
The follow -up services show that the plane arrived early in the afternoon at the Alexandria International Airport in Louisiana, one of the five places where ICE makes regular flights. Avelo declined to comment on the flight and the ice did not respond to multiple requests for comments.
The decision of the airline to support the effort of President Trump to accelerate immigrant deportations is unusual and risky. ICE outsourizes many flights, but they are common operated by little -known charter airlines. Commercial carriers generally avoid this child of work so as not to get into politics and bother customers or employees.
The risks for Avelus are perhaps even greater because a great proportion of their flights land or take off from the cities where most people are progressive or centrist that are much less likely to support Trump’s hard line immigration policies. More than 90 percent of the airline flights arrived or departed from coastal states last year, according to Cirium, an aviation data firm. Almost one in four flew to or from New Haven.
“This is really tense, really risky,” said Alison Taylor, professor at the Stern Business School of the University of New York that focuses on ethics and corporate responsibility. “The headlines and the general human aspect of this are not playing very well.”
But Avelo, backed by private investors and led by executives who came from larger airlines, is fighting financial.
The money that the company can earn from ice flights is too good to miss, the founder and executive director of the airline, Andrew Levy, said last month in an internal email, a copy of what was reviewed by the New York Times. The flights, he said, would help stabilize Avelo’s finances as the airline faced more competition, particularly in New Haven and near New Haven, which is Yale’s home and where the airline operates more than a dozen flights a day.
“After extensive deliberations with our Board of Directors and our main leaders, we concluded that this new opportunity was too valuable not to continue,” Levy wrote in email on April 3, a day after Avelo signed the agreement with ICE.
While the military carries out some deportation flights, ICE depends largely on private airlines. There is little public information about those flights, which mainly ICE to a corridor, CSI Aviation, said Tom Cartwright, a retired bank executive who has tracked flights for the rights of the rights of the years on the border, with whiteness. Most are operated by two small charter airlines, Globalx Air and Eastern Air Express, he said.
Globalx began operations in 2021 and performs flights for the federal government, university basketball teams, casinos, tour operators and others. Last year it has grown rapidly and has generated $ 220 million in revenues, but it is not yet profitable. This year, deportation flights to Brazil and El Salvador has operated. Eastern Air Express is part of Eastern Airlines, a private company.
Globalx and Eastern Airlines did not respond to comments requests.
Contracts for such flights provide consistent income from airlines, and the business is much less vulnerable to changes in economic conditions than conventional passenger flights. According to Mr. Cartwright’s count, which is based on a variety of sources, ICE operated almost 8,000 flights during the year that ended in April, most of them within the United States. CSI Aviation only received hundreds of millions of dollars in ice contracts in recent years, in accordance with federal data.
Avelo’s decision last month to join those flights was with a quick reaction.
A few days after the internal announcement of Mr. Levy, the New Haven immigrants coalition, a collection of groups that support the rights of immigrants, began a campaign to press Avelo to leave the flights. An online petition initiated by the coalition has won more than 37,000 signatures. The protests also sprouted near the airports in Connecticut, Delaware, California and Florida, served by Avelo.
The Connecticut and Delaware Democratic governors denounced Avelo, while legislators in Connecticut and New York published proposals to withdraw state support, including a tax exemption on fuel purchases for airplanes, of companies working with ICE.
William Tong, Connecticut’s Democratic Attorney General, demanded responses from Mr. Levy, who postponed the federal government. In a statement last month, Mr. Tong described Mr. Levy’s “insulting and award.”
The Association of Flight-CWA attendees, a union that repeats flight attendees in 20 airlines, including Avelo, raised Conerns. The union pointed out that immigrants being deported by the Trump administration had placed in restoration, which can make it difficult for the work of much more difficult flight attendees.
“Having an entire flight of handcuffed and chained people would hinder any evacuation and injury of risk or death,” the union said in a statement. “It also prevents our ability to respond to a medical emergency, fire on board, decompression, etc. We cannot do our work in these conditions.”
Avelo said that, under his agreement with ICE, he would operate flights within the United States and abroad, using three Boeing 737-800 aircraft. To handle those flights, the airline opened a base at the Gateway table airport and began to hire pilots, hostesses and other staff.
In a statement, Mr. Levy, a former executive from United Airlines and Allegiant Air, said the airline had not concluded the contract lightly.
“We realize that this is a sensitive and complicated issue,” he said. “After significant deliberations, we determine that this wheel of the letter will provide us with the stability of the continuous expansion of our central programmed passenger service and will keep our more than 1,100 crew members used in the coming year.”
The airline, based in Houston, said it had operated similar flights for the Biden administration. “When our country calls, our practice is to say yes,” he said in a separate statement.
In the email last month, Mr. Levy celebrated the fact that Avelo had almost broken in 2024, losing only $ 500,000 with $ 310 million in income. But the airline needs to raise more money from investors, he said. This year’s performance has suffered as the national consumer confidence has decreased, and the airline faces a growing competition.
Avelo was looking for income that would be “immune to thesis problems,” Levy said in email, and pursued charter flights, even for the federal government. To house ice flights, the airline also reduced its presence at an airport in Santa Rosa, California.
Avelo has raised more than $ 190 million, most of them in 2020 and 2022, according to Pitchbook. Mr. Levy’s email said the airline hoped to obtain new funds this summer.
