Case Study 04 - in progress

Research question:

Did ICE violate a King County ban prohibiting the takeoff or landing of ‘deportation flights’ in April 2019?

This following research was initiated at a Bellingcat workshop in March 2020. My reporting partner Jose Pagliery and I hope to return to this project in 2021.

Overview

Over the past decade, the Air Operations of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, colloquially known as “ICE Air”, has established a sprawling and semi-secret network of private flights that power ICE’s deportation and relocation infrastructure.

According to the Alien Repatriation Tracking System (ARTS) dataset — made public by a 2018 FOIA filed by researchers at the University of Washington— ICEAir has flown over 1.73 million passengers on nearly 15,000 ICE Air Operations since October 1, 2010. Three quarters of the flights were coded as ‘repatriation flights’, ferrying passengers outside of US borders for exorbitant sums.

Recent allegations of egregious physical abuse on ICE Air flights, as well as reports of unlawful deportations, have attracted the attention of human rights researchers across the US. Our current research builds on the report ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: ICE Air and the Machinery of Mass Deportation’, documenting the secretive network of charter flights powering IceAir.

We zoom in on Boeing International Airfield in King County, Washington, where immigrants rights organizers were able to raise support for an executive ban barring ICE flights from accessing the airfield. Our analysis reveals at least three flights in violation of the ban, and we seek to provide open-source documentation to hold ICE Air accountable to local regulations.

Flight N529AU: ‘RPN’ to ‘no call sign’

Every US aircraft is assigned three critical numbers: A serial number serves as the aircraft’s fixed ID; a model number identifies the make and type of the craft; and a callsign or registration number describes the purpose and destination of a particular flight path.

When the first three letters of a callsign are designated “RPN”, they stand for ‘repatriate’, indicating that the flight is operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and that it is actively carrying immigrants back outside of US borders.

Open source researchers have used a combination of serial numbers, call signs and open-source flight tracking data in order to better understand the sprawling and semi-secret network of flights chartered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Air Operations known colloquially as “ICE Air”, that currently moves immigrant communities in and out of America.

In April 2019, a group of researchers at The Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington created a Twitter bot designed to tweet every time a flight tagged “RPN” landed their local airfield in King County, WA. The airfield was a known access point to Initiated in April 2019, the handle @ICEAirKBFI quickly created an open-source mechanism for tracking ICE deportation flights in and out of the local airfield.

On April 23, 2019, King County Executive Dow Constantine yielded to immigrant rights organizers and issued an Executive ban on all incoming and outgoing flights operated by Immigration and Customs enforcement at King County International Airport, stating that ‘using the airport for deportation flights was ‘inconsistent with the County’s obligation to operate the airport in a safe and efficient manner for all persons, not just US citizens’, but did ICE comply?

Using the Twitter bot @ICEAirKBFI, and the complete ARTS dataset retrieved by a 2018 FOIA filed by researchers at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, my research partner and I were able to find three flights in violation of Executive Constantine’s ban on repatriation flights.

Flight tracking data clearly shows flights A82A75, A6AA70 and A6AA70 taking off or landing at King County International Airfield after the ban was imposed on April 23rd.

In addition to violating the ban, there is evidence to suggest that ICEAir pilots took active steps to conceal the RPN call sign that might have alerted authorities to their unlawful action.

While reviewing flight tapes on FlightAware, my research partner and I noticed that flight N529AU departing from King County to Phoenix-Mesa International airport on April 29th changed its call sign from ‘RPN625’ to ‘No Call Sign’ mid flight. Further review confirmed that this pattern was consistent across all three flights in violation of the King County ban.

Methodology

Because of the finite scope of this investigation, were able to draw on a relatively narrow set of tools in order to track flights, confirm their pathways and prove violations of the King County Ban.

1. Retrieve ARTS data - We created a series of filters and a pivot table to pull out relevant data from the national ARTS data set.

2. Use FlightAware to track flight paths - We used date, time and call sign filters to find the RPN flights in question.

3. Compare plane data with Swift models - We looked up publicly available data about the two companies that operate charter flights for ICE, including Swift Air

Outcomes

pending

Acknowledgements

This investigation has been made possible by researchers at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights and immigrant community organizations in Washington state who filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2018, facilitating public access to a complete national data set from ICE’s Alien Repatriation Tracking System (ARTS).[2] My reporting partner Jose Pagliery and I spoke with researcher Phil Neff while reviewing the data and compiling insights from this report.

In addition, this research was initiated during a Bellingcat Workshop in March 2020. Although the pandemic delayed our immediate plans for publication and further research, I hope to continue monitoring #ICEAir and discovering new ways to curtail and expose the illegal and retaliatory actions of US border officials and immigration enforcement.