On your average day, Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee averages around 200 flights per day. But only one of those airlines works with ICE.
Air Wisconsin is a 60-year-old airline which was recently sold, and is currently being used as a key cog in the government's air transportation strategy to move migrants across the country. Over the past year, it's conducted over 1,300 flights for ICE. The number includes flights out of Mitchell, where the airline has a hangar.
WUWM’s Jimmy Gutierrez talked to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Sophie Carson about her reporting on Air Wisconsin and its contract and relationship with ICE. They discussed some of the routes these planes regularly fly and who they’re transporting.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sophie Carson: So an Air Wisconsin plane flying out of Milwaukee may fly to somewhere like an airport outside Detroit or State College, Pennsylvania or Bedford, Massachusetts. They also regularly fly to a couple of different cities in Texas.
Many of these places are places where we know that ICE either has a detention facility, or we know that ICE uses the airport there regularly to shuttle detainees around. So Air Wisconsin has a role in these domestic transfer type flights.
But coming out of Milwaukee, it's important to note, as far as we know, there are no detainees on these planes when they come in and out of Milwaukee.
Jimmy Gutierrez: They're just picking up people from these other cities that you had mentioned, and then transporting them to other detention facilities?
Often to these processing centers in the south where they are put on different kinds of planes and deported or sent abroad.
Before reading your story, I had never heard of Air Wisconsin. Who are they?
It's a Appleton-based airline that has gone through a lot of financial troubles, that up until recently, was running commercial flights [with around] 50-seat jets. And the airline itself was sold in January to a major government contractor called CSI Aviation. CSI Aviation works with ICE, and they have an over $1 billion contract with ICE. So now, they're mostly using this Milwaukee airport hangar that they've owned for over 20 years as a hub for maintenance and crew changes.
After reading your story, I looked up Air Wisconsin and on there website there’s this section where they talk about their values, one of them being “smart decisions.” How has the contract with ICE worked out for them as far as a business decision?
It has allowed them to sell their planes, make some money off of that, and now they are now like a wholly-owned subsidiary of CSI Aviation. But CSI still uses this Milwaukee airport hangar because Air Wisconsin has had this hangar for a very long time. And so they're able to sort of, not have to find more land to build a new hangar and have a new lease. They just are using the hangar that already exists in Milwaukee for their ICE flight operations.
What kind of power do the airports have in these situations?
In these situations, airports do not have a lot of power. That’s what we've found in our reporting. We spoke to an airport expert who said, as long as they're following the terms of the lease, they don't have any standing to stop Air Wisconsin or CSI Aviation from shuttling in and out. [In Milwaukee] the lease says that they're not allowed to do passenger transport out of Milwaukee. And it appears from our reporting that they are not doing passenger transport of detainees. So the lease allows for maintenance, and that's what they seem to be doing here.
What have immigrant rights advocates had to say about these kinds of flights, or issues with these kinds of flights?
The immigrant advocates bring up two pieces. One, that the volume of these flights is concerning because it often means in practice that people are being flown away from their places where they live, to faraway destinations where they are then put in detention centers very quickly after they're detained. So it makes it difficult to find them, but it also makes it difficult for attorneys to represent them if they are states away. And it's also difficult for them to file habeas petitions — that has to be done by an attorney licensed to practice in that area...to declare their detention is illegal.
The other issue is shackles, and restraints. These domestic flights are short, typically. But advocacy groups call attention to these long-haul flights across the globe where people may be shackled for long periods of time at their wrists, ankles and waist.
You and your team looked into Air Wisconsin, these contracts, these operators, the rise in these deportation flights or detention flights. As someone who's reporting on immigration all the time, is there anything in the story that stuck out to you?
I didn't expect to find just how many cities were dealing with this same issue. The scale and sort of scope of ICE-related flights has really ballooned in the last year. And the lack of knowledge and transparency about how many people are on these planes, how often they're running, there's a lot of lack of clarity about this, because it's often these private contractors and subcontractors running these flights.
So it was interesting to read about other cities — big and small — going through this with the same questions: What can we do? What's going on? And then trying to figure out how Milwaukee plays into all of this.
