By Arnie Alpert, Active with the Activists

Arnie Alpert spent decades as a community organizer/educator in NH movements for social justice and peace.  Officially retired since 2020, he keeps his hands (and feet) in the activist world while writing about past and present social movements.

PORTSMOUTH—At its regular board meeting Tuesday, leaders of the Pease Development Authority heard pleas for them to halt flights carrying detained immigrants out of Portsmouth International Airport, which the Authority oversees.  After listening to nearly 90 minutes of testimony, board chair Stephen Duprey said the board is sympathetic to concerns about ICE’s practices and that they would ask PDA staff and lawyers to look into what steps they can take.

The message, delivered by 27 speakers, was consistent throughout and in line with a petition calling for “an immediate end to the use of Portsmouth International Airport for ICE deportation or transfer flights.”

Kathleen Slover said more than 1700 signatures, mostly from New Hampshire residents, had been gathered in a matter of days. “These flights make the Pease Development Authority complicit with practices that are cruel and violate fundamental human and Constitutional rights. Further, they harm our economy, divide our families, and betray the values we hold as a state,” the petition said.       

“We know that you are not the deciders about who uses this airport,” Slover said, “but you are influential, and we ask you to carry our message to stop allowing ICE flights at Pease and refuse cooperation with ICE operations, to call on the FAA and the New Hampshire Congressional delegation to stop these flights immediately, and to advocate for humane immigration policy that supports our economy and families and values.”

Since July, flights from Portsmouth have been carrying shackled immigrant prisoners to airports in Louisiana, Texas, and Florida, where they are detained pending deportation.  The conditions under which immigrants have been apprehended, jailed, and deported have been widely criticized.

“I have been sick, and that’s why I’m here, over the images of car windows being smashed in and people being dragged out, and of ICE agents who are masked without name tags, carrying weapons and assaulting people, and arresting people without due process. This is not my America at all,” said Sandell Morse, who said she is 86 years old.  “I don’t want to see people dragged in handcuffs onto planes from my city’s airport.”

“And so what can you do?” Morse asked.  “That’s the question I would like you to ask yourselves.”

Responding to Morse, with a few dozen people in the board room and about 50 more watching from an overflow room, Duprey said that the Authority has no authority over planes using the airport.  “Basically, the FAA controls everything that we do here,” he said.  “We have to let any plane that is legally certified to fly and registered land and take off here, and we must offer it services. Failure to do so would create sanctions that the State of New Hampshire couldn’t withstand.”

In recent weeks, members of local activist groups have been using public websites to track flights in and out of Portsmouth.  On several occasions small groups have shown up in public areas near the runways where they have videoed shackled prisoners being led from vans and loaded onto planes.  Some of the vans are believed to be coming from Strafford Corrections in Dover, which for years has served as an immigrant detention center.  Others are reported to be coming from Massachusetts. 

The flights from Portsmouth began when ICE ceased using Hanscom Field in Massachusetts for deportation.  The flights are operated by Eastern Air Express, Avelo, and GlobalX, mostly headed for Alexandria LA, Harlingen TX, and Jacksonville FL. 

The New York Times has called Alexandria “the deportation capital of America” and reported on July 31, “More deportation flights have taken off from there than from any other place in the United States, and more domestic ICE flights have passed through there than anywhere else, according to a widely cited database of ICE flights.”

Above, PDA board chairman Stephen Duprey is pictured at Tuesday’s meeting. ARNIE ALPERT photo

The Pease Development Authority is a state agency that was created when the US Air Force ceased its operations at the Pease Air Force Base, which occupied 4100 acres in Portsmouth, Newington, and Greenland.  Through conversion from military to mostly civilian use in the early 1990s, the facility has become a major center for private commercial and industrial enterprises.  That includes the Portsmouth International Airport, which currently serves commercial flights on Breeze and Allegiant Airlines and also serves as a base for the NH Air National Guard.   

The Authority’s board is headed by Duprey, a prominent Concord real estate developer long involved in the Republican Party.  The board’s vice chair is Neil Levesque, who heads the NH Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College.  

In addition to the airport, the Authority oversees the Pease International Tradeport, the Skyhaven Airport in Rochester, a golf course, and the NH Division of Ports and Harbors.  The Ports and Harbors division is wrapped up in a scandal involving its director, Geno Marconi, 73, who was indicted last year for allegedly deleting an email related to the investigation, and sharing information that violated the Driver Privacy Act, is on paid leave. His wife, state Supreme Court Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi was indicted for allegedly trying to influence the criminal investigation into Geno Marconi by meeting with then-Gov. Chris Sununu and speaking with PDA Chairman Duprey.

When news that Portsmouth Airport had become a departure point for mass deportation flights, community activists began to mobilize, drawing from groups including South Church, Seacoast Indivisible, Occupy Seacoast, Moms Demand Action, American Friends Service Committee, the Seacoast Interfaith Sanctuary Coalition, and 350NH.  One demonstration has been held at the entry to Pease, and further actions are under consideration.  

“When you look out across the property that you’re responsible for, what you’re seeing is people being disappeared from their lives right in front of you, people kept from legal representation, forced to wear full body chains as they board planes that will take them to hellish, overcrowded concentration camps in this country, where the cruelty is the point,” Astrida Schaeffer told the board.

“A dark cloud is in view,” former U.S. Senator Gordon Humphrey said. “The Pease Development Authority unwittingly has been made complicit in the denial of divine rights and the denial of human rights, and the denial of inalienable rights, and the denial of the rights in which we are endowed by our Creator.”  Citing the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, he said the country’s most fundamental principles are that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty without the due process of law.

“Liberty, that doesn’t just mean doing whatever you want. It means staying out of the hands of law enforcement, staying in your home, having your family around you without fears of being kidnapped by hoodlums, in effect.  A dark cloud has appeared, and it’s going to get darker and bigger because ICE’s budget has been tripled. It’s going to get more complicated. You’re going to be unwittingly more complicit, because there are going to be more flights, more human beings taken off the streets and flown out of this trade port.”

“What can you do?” the former Senator asked.  “Find out and do something. Don’t just be passively complicit.”

Above, former U.S. Senator Gordon Humphrey is pictured speaking to the PDA board at Tuesday’s meeting. ARNIE ALPERT photo

Cathy Wolff, a member of the Interfaith Sanctuary Coalition, spoke in a similar vein.  “As horrific as everything is that ICE is doing right now it’s possibly just the beginning. I am not a person who believes in conspiracy theories, usually, but I believe we are facing a pending martial police state,” she said, citing the dispatch of troops to Los Angeles.  “I think the ICE-stapo will be maintained, as our president has said, ‘maybe the homegrowns will be next.’  So therefore action against the horrendous things that ICE is doing is not just in the name of immigrants. It has a lot to do with where this nation is going.”

Alluding to a famous quote from German pastor Martin Niemoller, Wolff concluded her short remarks saying, “First they came for the immigrants, but I was not an immigrant.”  Niemoller, who was eventually jailed by the Nazis, confessed that he originally did nothing, because he wasn’t in one of the persecuted groups.  “Do something,” speakers repeatedly pressed the PDA board.

“ICE has no regard for our Constitution and due process of law,” said Doris Hampton, the daughter of Holocaust survivors.  “I ask you, please, think creatively. Think what can you do as a member of this commission to put a stop to the flights.”

While Eastern Air and GlobalX are charter operations, Avelo also operates commercial flights, including out of Manchester-Boston Regional Airport.  The company has been targeted for pressure campaigns by pro-immigrant groups, though little attention has yet been mustered to its local presence.  A “Stop Avelo” protest is planned for Portland Airport on August 21 at 5 PM.

According to the ICE Flight Monitor, a project started by Tom Cartwright from Witness at the Border but now being run by Human Rights First, 13 ICE flights left Portsmouth between July 15 and August 16.

The Flight Monitor reports 67 deportation flights left Alexandria in July headed for Peru, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Ecuador, and El Salvador.  Forty-five flights left Harlingen that month with the same destinations.  “In July there were 1,214 total flights, the highest level since I started recording in January 2020, and above the prior high month of 1,187 in June by 27 (2%),” Cartwright wrote in his latest monthly summary. 

The Flight Monitor also counts transfer flights within the United States and reported that GlobalX ran more flights than any other carrier. 

Pro-immigrant activism in Portsmouth took off in early July when ICE apprehended four workers at a local Mexican restaurant.  According to a resolution adopted by the City Council August 4, “in recent months, there have been reports of federal immigration enforcement activity within the City of Portsmouth and across New England that has caused fear and undermined our citizens’ sense of wellbeing and public safety. This reported conduct includes federal officers arresting and detaining individuals without affording due process rights; refusing to share information about the reason for an individual’s arrest or the location where an individual will be detained; wearing masks and refusing to provide identification and questioning residents about their immigration status based on their race or ethnicity.” 

Rev. Kendra Ford made the PDA board aware of the City Council resolution and also mentioned that one hundred years ago, Portsmouth began calling itself the “City of the Open Door” as a way to push back against Ku Klux Klan organizing in the region. 

Rep. Heath Howard of Barrington also brought up an episode of local history.  When Ona Judge, who was enslaved in the household of Martha and George Washington, fled to Portsmouth and President Washington ordered  a local official to apprehend and return her, the local official refused to comply.  “I encourage you all to do what you can in your positions to fight back against these unconstitutional orders from the Trump administration,” said Howard, who is running for Congress in the first district.   

Be brave, have courage, speakers implored.

“History is going to judge this moment,” said Christian Urrutia, a human rights lawyer and National Guard member who is also running for Congress. “History is going to judge this moment, just like it judges the internment of the Japanese in World War Two, just as it judges the people that fought against the civil rights protesters, just as it judges the folks that upheld separate but equal.”

“And I ask all of you in your individual capacity and as a board, speak out against this.  The one thing this moment needs is courage, and I ask all of you to exercise it,” said Urrutia, the final speaker in the public comment period.

When Urrutia finished, Steve Duprey offered final comments. “Your statements are moving and impactful,” he said, adding that he believed the other board members were sympathetic as well.  “We’ll ask the staff and our attorneys to look into some of these ideas to see if we can achieve a consensus on what steps, if any, we can take.  We’ll report back. I don’t know how long that will take. We will find out what if anything we can do, and then what this board is going to do. And then, speaking just as a citizen and not in my role as chairman of this authority, I am in support of the sentiments that we’ve heard expressed here today, and I’m proud to stand with you.”

At that, the dozens of activists filed out of the board room and the overflow room, satisfied that they had been heard.   A Portsmouth police officer hired by the PDA returned to his cruiser.   

A GlobalX plane landed at Portsmouth Airport shortly after noon.