MINNEAPOLIS — Airport security video shows another way federal agents are taking immigrants to detention centers — in some cases they’re using commercial flights, with escorts dressed like any other passenger.
Video obtained through a public records request shows the 5-year-old boy, who became a face of the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis when he was detained while wearing a bunny hat, being flown with his father to Texas on a Delta Air Lines flight, just a day after they were taken into custody.
Adrian Conejo Arias and son Liam Conejo Ramos seemed calm in these recordings as they were being escorted through the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport by a man and two women dressed in plainclothes. Since the father and boy didn’t appear to be in custody, their trip to San Antonio probably went unnoticed by fellow passengers.
The Trump administration, like its predecessors, is mostly using ICE Air Operations charter flights as it detains hundreds of thousands of people for deportation. Human rights monitors are trying to keep track as detainees are loaded onto planes in shackles in parts of airports the public can’t easily see.
The video of Liam and his father, they say, exposes another route that’s harder for rights monitors to document, despite happening in plain view inside the same airport terminals where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents wearing tactical, military-style gear are now being deployed to support security checkpoints.
What happened in this case?
The father, who was seeking asylum from Ecuador, and son were detained by ICE officers in Minnesota on Jan. 20 and taken to Texas. They were released on a judge’s orders and returned to Minnesota, but then an immigration judge denied their asylum request. The family’s lawyer said they’re appealing.
The video that revealed their commercial airline travel was first obtained by Nick Benson, an aviation enthusiast and activist with MN 50501, a grassroots group involved in anti-ICE and No Kings protests. Benson said he’s never seen children while monitoring ICE charter flights, so he suspected the agency was flying them commercially. He identified the time and day the father and son were flown out of Minneapolis, filed a public records request for the security video — and there they were.
The Associated Press obtained the same video through a similar request to the MSP Airport Police Department. It shows the father carrying the boy’s Spider-Man backpack as a woman shows an airline agent their boarding passes. A man and the other woman follow them onto the jet bridge.
Delta declined to comment on the video. But the airline said most government travel is booked through third-party agencies, with no advance notice about who is flying or why. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
What is ICE Air?
ICE Air Operations transfers and deports people mostly using flights chartered through airline broker CSI Aviation, which has subcontracted with small airlines such as GlobalX, Eastern Air Express, Bighorn Airways, Key Lime Air and Avelo Airlines.
ICE Air continues to rapidly expand both domestic transfer and deportation flights, according to Human Rights First, which documented 1,630 immigration enforcement flights in February alone. Of that total, 183 were deportation flights and 1,170 were domestic transfer flights.
ICE also uses U.S. Coast Guard planes. Flight Monitor said it has tracked hundreds of flights since June in which Coast Guard planes were used to transport immigrants domestically.
“It seems that ICE sometimes uses commercial flights to destinations where they don’t carry out kind of larger scale ICE Air deportation flights,” said Savi Arvey, director of research and analysis for refugee and immigrant rights at Human Rights First.
The monitors use flight-tracking websites to follow the charter planes, but these tools can’t track individual passengers on commercial flights, making them “less in the public eye,” Arvey said. “It adds another level of opaqueness.”
Bellisle and Vancleave write for the Associated Press. Bellisle reported from Seattle. AP writers Rio Yamat in Las Vegas and Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed to this report.
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