Over the past eight years, roughly 34,000 immigrants have been deported on hundreds of flights leaving from Washington state’s King County International Airport, or Boeing Field. Now in what is believed to be a first in the nation, Dow Constantine, the county’s executive, has signed an order seeking to ban any further flights by Immigration and Customs Enforcement through the airport.
Some 100,000 undocumented immigrants annually are torn from their families and deported through ICE Air—yes, that’s sadly a real thing—a division of ICE that charters planes to fly deportees back to their home countries, at a cost of about $7,785 per flight hour. In King County International Airport alone, a new report states that ICE Air has chartered nearly 500 flights since 2010.
Under the executive order, “new contracts would prohibit those companies from servicing flights transporting immigrant detainees.” But, it’s not as simple as it sounds, because ”the county has accepted grants that forbid it from discriminating against any aircraft, according to the FAA.” Airport director John Parrott tells The Seattle Times that “’there’s a very subtle nuance with the FAA.’ The agency does not allow ‘unjust discrimination’ but does allow ‘just discrimination,’ he said, meaning that the county has to have a reason.”
The county believes that reason is the devastating human and fiscal costs of deportations, which “raise deeply troubling human rights concerns ... inconsistent with the values of King County, including separations of families, increases of racial disproportionality in policing, deportations of people into unsafe situations in other countries, and constitutional concerns of due process,” according to the executive order. In one of the most horrific ICE Air flights, a group of Somali immigrants sued after they were kept shackled and bound for nearly two days in a botched flight from hell back in 2017.
According to the ensuing class action lawsuit, “U.S. immigration agents ‘kicked, struck, choked and dragged detainees’ during the journey, and some of the Somalis were put in straitjackets.” When the plane parked on a tarmac in Senegal for nearly an entire day, the plane’s toilets overflowed and some detainees were forced to urinate on themselves. A federal judge halted their deportation just hours before they were again to be placed on another flight.
Remember, this all happens with our tax dollars. “Here in King County, we are a welcoming community that respects the rights of all people,” said Constantine. “My executive order seeks to make sure all those who do business with King County uphold the same values. Our goal is to ban flights of immigrant detainees from our publicly-owned airport, and I hope members of Congress shine a light on this practice and how it is currently funded.”