President Donald Trump’s deportation henchmen appear to have dramatically increased the use of Coast Guard aircraft to transport immigrants, according to flight data, activist flight trackers and video confirmation.
Since June 23, the majority of flights operated by the Coast Guard C-27J Spartan fleet — at least 263 flights — are likely to have been for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), transferring immigrants to and from ICE’s nexus of detention centers in Alexandria, La., Harlingen, Texas, and the Florida Everglades camp known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” according to an analysis of public flight data.
On August 13 and August 22, Rolling Stone watched as federal agents loaded shackled immigrants onto Coast Guard aircraft in Baltimore.
The Coast Guard’s larger propeller aircraft, the HC-130H Hercules and HC-130J Super Hercules, also appear to be operating ICE flights, though to a lesser degree. Flight data for the C-130 fleet show at least eight flights to and from Alexandria or Harlingen since late June.
Like federal emergency funds being used for immigrant detention centers, and agents across the federal government being directed to snatch up delivery drivers in their militarized takeover of Washington D.C., the Coast Guard flights are yet another example of the Trump administration funneling vast federal resources toward its mass deportation machine.
“A Coast Guard C-27 conducted a mission today at the request of ICE and landed at BWI airport,” a Coast Guard spokesperson says, explaining: “The Coast Guard continues to surge assets and leverage its unique capabilities to protect America’s borders, territorial integrity and sovereignty by assisting with the national transport of aliens to designated locations where the Department of Defense will transport the aliens internationally.”
The spokesperson adds that “three USCG aircraft are currently being used” for ICE, which is consistent with the flight data for August 22. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to a request for comment. ICE deferred to DHS.
“It seems like a misuse of Coast Guard assets to me,” says Tom Cartwright, the retired JPMorgan executive who has been tracking ICE flights since 2020. “And you have to wonder why it’s been kept so quiet.”
The Coast Guard, which is part of DHS, has a wide-ranging purview protecting U.S. maritime interests, which includes search-and-rescue missions, disaster response, and enforcing fishing laws. It also does drug and migrant interdiction, which generally means surveilling and intercepting suspected smuggling vessels in the water.
Coast Guard aircraft have been used for a handful of ICE flights in the past, but hauling prisoners across the country is far afield from its normal duties — particularly for the C-27, which until recently was primarily used for search and rescue.
The C-27 missions follow a similar pattern, leaving their stations in Clearwater, Fla., or Sacramento, Calif., flying to the ICE hubs of Alexandria or Harlingen, and spending the next week flying out-and-back trips to midsize cities like Baltimore, Cincinnati, Jacksonville, Kansas City, and Tampa — “NFL cities,” as one activist, “JJ in DC,” describes them — where ICE has been active. Of eight Coast Guard C-27s that have operated since mid-June, all but one appears to have been dedicated to ICE flights. They have landed at the tent camp in the Everglades nine times beginning on July 23 and as recently as Thursday.
The trips have become so regular that JJ in DC was able to figure out their schedule and predict their next moves.
Rolling Stone went to a public parking lot next to a loading area at the back of Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport on August 13 to observe an incoming C-27.
Once it landed and taxied to the loading area, the aircraft’s back ramp opened and three vehicles pulled up toward it — an unmarked van, an unmarked SUV, and an SUV with a DHS seal. Federal agents and guards removed a shackled man from the aircraft and put him into the DHS SUV. Agents spent about an hour signing paperwork, chatting, and loading plastic bags holding immigrants’ belongings into the aircraft, while a Coast Guard pilot did a walk-around safety check for the next flight.
An agent carried an armful of chains to the van, and a short time later, seven people shackled at the hands and ankles were led from the van to the aircraft’s ramp, where they were patted down. All of them appeared to be men, ranging in age from late teens to forties. All appeared to be brown or Latino.
Once they were loaded onto the aircraft, the shackled man in the marked SUV was moved again to the unmarked van. Soon afterward, the agents appeared to notice they were being filmed from the public parking lot and put on hoodies and balaclavas. Two marched toward the fence dividing the loading area from the lot and filmed a random guy who had just parked there.
The man removed from the C-27 and one of the men loaded onto it were wearing gray sweatsuits often issued to immigrants in detention centers, while the other men were wearing their own clothes, suggesting ICE was transporting a mix of people who had been in their custody for some time and some who had been recently arrested.
On August 22, the C-27 parked in an area farther away from the public parking lot. About nine people in unidentified uniforms got off the aircraft from the boarding door and walked to a nearby charter jet. Federal agents then loaded several shackled people, at least one in a gray sweatsuit, up the back ramp. The charter jet flew to Charlotte, N.C.; the C-27 returned to Alexandria.
In addition to the midsize cities, Coast Guard has apparently operated ICE flights to these cities since late June: Biloxi, Mississippi; Columbus, Georgia; Dallas; Hot Springs, Arkansas; Indianapolis; Knoxville, Tennessee; San Antonio; Springfield, Missouri; and Tallahassee. All are near ICE detention facilities.
The Coast Guard conducts an immigrant expulsion flight in coordination with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.
U.S. Coast Guard
Immigrants have long reported harsh conditions, safety problems and physical, verbal, and sexual abuse by guards onboard ICE flights. Like the men in Baltimore, all adult passengers on ICE flights are shackled at the wrists and ankles. (This may be the case for some immigrant children, too.)
Flight attendants for GlobalX, which currently operates the majority of ICE flights, told ProPublica in April that when they raised concerns about how shackled passengers could safely evacuate in the event of an emergency, they were told to “just get up and leave.” In July, activists watching a Seattle airport livestream spotted ICE-contracted guards push to the ground a shackled immigrant with a hood over his head while boarding an ICE flight on Avelo Airlines.
Which detention centers people in ICE custody are transferred to is based largely on capacity, according to the agency, which often results in people being moved multiple times and hundreds or thousands of miles away from their homes. Advocacy groups say this cuts off immigrants from their families and legal assistance, and that frequent and capricious transfers can be used to punish people in ICE custody.
“We’re told that it is a question of logistics, sometimes it often appears that these transfers may be retaliatory in nature, because people are trying to access counsel,” says Eunice Cho, senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. “There is also a suspicion that authorities may be transferring people for more favorable case law in different areas of the country.”
For example, when Georgetown professor Badar Khan Suri was detained in March on specious allegations of ties to Hamas, he was sent on a week-long journey to five different facilities, each farther away from his home in Arlington, Virginia, according to court documents. He ended up in a dirty, overcrowded facility in Alvarado, Texas, despite there being plenty of room at two of the facilities in Virginia where he was briefly held. (Suri was released in May and settled a lawsuit with the Trump administration earlier this month.)
In another case first reported by Capital B News, Haitian national Rony Dieujuste was moved from Palm Beach County to Miami, then to Texas, Arizona, and California. At one facility, he and other detainees had unexplained nosebleeds; at another he slept on a bare metal platform. His American partner struggled to keep tabs on him using ICE’s detainee locator system and would only find out he’d been moved when he called her from a new facility, often in the middle of the night.
“I told him to remain strong. But he is breaking,” she told Capital B in June.
“It takes a huge toll on families, especially when they’re so far away,” Cho says. “It’s as if somebody has died or has disappeared.”
It is unclear how many times on average immigrants in ICE detention are transferred before their cases are resolved, because ICE does not release this data. Nor does it release data about its massive — and growing — air operation.
It’s that lack of transparency that compelled Cartwright, the former JPMorgan exec, to start tracking ICE flights nearly six years ago. He releases meticulous monthly reports frequently cited by the media.
“I just believe the public has a right to know what the scale of this operation is,” he says. “When things are opaque like this and basically totally dark, no one thinks about the people on the planes.”
Cartwright began noticing the Coast Guard’s presence in Alexandria and Harlingen in July, but did not include those flights in his statistics for the month because he wasn’t yet sure they were ICE flights. Now he is certain, he says, and he and Human Rights First — the nonprofit he recently announced is taking over his flight-tracking operation — are working to amend the June and July reports to include them. Even before the additions, Cartwright recorded more ICE flights in July than ever before — 727 domestic transfer flights and 207 deportation and third-country removal flights — on ICE’s network of charter airlines, private jets, and a growing number of military aircraft.
Cartwright also noted that when the Coast Guard assisted ICE in the past, it released public statements about that assistance. This time, the Coast Guard appears to have adopted ICE’s stance of saying little.
On Wednesday, NBC News reported that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem wanted to use billions in funding from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” for ICE to buy and operate its own fleet of 30 or more aircraft. That same day, Air Force members received an email, obtained by journalist Marisa Kabas, inviting them to take part in a program “supporting border operations.”
Noem has been living rent-free in a spacious home designated for the Coast Guard commandant, The Washington Post reported last week. Trump fired the previous commandant, Admiral Linda Fagan, on the second day of his second term, accusing her of an “excessive focus” on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In May, Noem delivered the commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. Dozens of nearby protesters held signs decrying the crackdown on immigrants, telling reporters their beef was with Noem, not the Coast Guard.
“Congratulations,” Noem told the cadets. “You’re the first graduating class of a brand-new Coast Guard.”
