Pressure Campaign May Be Working
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 from the American Friends Service Committee since 2020, he keeps his hands (and feet) in the activist world while writing about past and present social movements.
MANCHESTER—It was a relatively quiet afternoon at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport on Sunday, but those who drove by the terminal would have noticed eight people with signs protesting against Avelo Airlines. The protest was timed to coincide with the departure of Avelo Flight 605, headed to Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina, where another demonstration took place.
Avelo, a budget carrier which flies passengers from MHT to three North Carolina airports as well as Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, has for months been flying shackled immigrant prisoners between domestic airports under contract to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency with primary responsibility for carrying out President Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda. Avelo has also operated “removal flights” carrying deportees from Arizona to Guatemala. The practice has aroused a nationwide protest movement, including a boycott, intended to pressure the company to end its involvement in the deportation business.
Avelo is not transporting immigrants out of Manchester. But they are one of three airlines that has been flying them out of Portsmouth under contract with ICE.
“We want them to cancel that contract,” said Jimmy Trinh, a spokesperson for the Southern NH chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which organized the demonstration. “Our goal is to pressure them to make it financially unfeasible for them to run these flights. And if they cancel their contracts, we’ll stop trying to pressure them, but if not, we’re perfectly fine with them going out of business.”
The Houston-based carrier is the only airline with an ICE contract that also has scheduled commercial flights. Many of the ICE flights, including those which have departed from Portsmouth International Airport, are “shuffle” flights which transport detainees to airports closer to the border, from which the prisoners are taken to detention prisons, grouped with others from their home countries and put on removal flights, mostly to Latin America.
The other airlines which have operated ICE flights from Portsmouth, Global X and Eastern Air Express, are charter companies and therefore more immune to consumer boycotts.
According to Human Rights First, which publishes the monthly ICE Flight Monitor, ICE contracts directly with CSI Aviation, which in turn subcontracts the flights to airline firms such as Avelo. In July, Avelo was responsible for 20% of all ICE flights and 10% of removal flights, the group said.
“This combined protest between North Carolina and New Hampshire is to demonstrate the resolve of us all across the country to get Avelo to drop their contract with ICE. Avelo’s decision to try to profit off of human trafficking is a clear demonstration of their willingness to collaborate with this administration in its attempts to terrorize our immigrant communities,” DSA said in a statement prior to the protest.
“We are not asking people to make the difficult choice of confronting a violent deportation machinery directly, we are asking them to make simple changes to their spending habits here on this airline, and any other airline that might try to do the same. Avelo is making money by destroying our communities, we have to show them we won’t let them,” the group said.
DSA also protested at MHT on August 6. Another group held signs protesting Avelo’s ICE flights on a busy Manchester road leading to the airport on May 31.
In Durham, North Carolina, where Avelo Flight 605 landed at Raleigh-Durham (RDU) at 5:07 PM, members of Engaged Durhamites for Democracy held their own protest. “We have been demonstrating since late April to put pressure on Avelo to stop coordinating with ICE to deport passengers,” said Kathryn Pollak, a spokesperson for the group. “They often fly passengers without due process and in shackles, which causes moral distress for Avelo flight crews as they cannot keep their passengers safe. We hope that by doing a joint event with Manchester we can raise awareness further to those traveling on that Avelo flight, encouraging them to not fly Avelo until they sever their contract with ICE.”
Pollak’s group, which is affiliated with Indivisible, has been protesting at RDU every week since April, and now has a permit for a quiet protest inside the airport terminal every Monday.
Indivisible’s “Ground Avelo” campaign, and another called the Coalition to Stop Avelo, have both been promoting protests and a boycott. In addition to its attention to potential passengers, Ground Avelo is calling for pressure to be put on Avelo’s university partners, the states and municipalities which run airports, and the company’s leadership, which together they label as the “pillars” that hold up the company’s business. By weakening the pillars, they believe they can push the airline to cease its involvement in mass deportation.
It’s not clear whether the protests and boycotts are having an impact, but Avelo recently announced it will suspend its Manchester flights in January. “Avelo unfortunately made the difficult decision to pause service at MHT, with their latest flight scheduled to depart on January 5, 2026. They plan to continue to explore opportunities in MHT and hope to return for the summer 2026 season once they identify the right mix of markets and frequencies,” says a statement on the MHT website.
The airline has suspended flights from Portland Airport in Maine and will end all its West Coast flights in October.
Reporting on early September protests at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, Travel and Tour World said there is a “growing national movement aimed at drawing attention to the role of airlines in facilitating deportation flights. Across the United States, similar protests have been staged targeting airlines involved in deportation activities. The movement has garnered increasing support, with more protests expected in the coming weeks.”
The online publication, which calls itself, “the premier digital B2B [Business-to-Business] integrated media platform in the travel and tourism industry,” added, “As the focus on deportation flights intensifies, the question of the ethical responsibilities of airlines operating in the U.S. continues to be a point of contention. These protests have brought to light the increasing desire among travelers and tourism stakeholders for more transparency and accountability in the way airlines collaborate with government agencies on sensitive issues like immigration and deportation.”
Avelo passengers I spoke with inside the terminal were unaware of the airline’s connection to ICE flights. One, a Durham resident named Matt, said he would consider joining the boycott.
Jade Curtis, a resident of Dover who was outside the terminal with a sign reading, “No Human Being is Illegal,” said she had been unaware of the Avelo-ICE connection until recently. “As soon as I heard about it I was definitely on board to come down here and protest it and make more people aware.”
Avelo’s deportation flights have also drawn the concern of the Association of Flight Attendants, which represents Avelo workers. In a September 18 letter to Avelo’s CEO, the union president, Sara Nelson, said, “Our Union and the Avelo flight attendants we represent have grave concerns about safety on Avelo flights flown for the Department of Homeland Security to deport detainees of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE flights). Based upon reports we are receiving from our members, Avelo is not following FAA safety requirements.
“Recent press reports have documented how ICE flights by other airlines have not accounted for passenger safety in the event of an emergency,” Nelson’s letter continued. “Flight attendants were not trained on evacuation of restrained passengers, and were discouraged or prohibited from performing safety checks and cabin walk-throughs required by the FAA. No modifications were made to the aircraft cabin to ensure restrained passengers could be evacuated in an emergency. No protocols were developed to apply FAA safety rules such as requirements for emergency row exits. Unfortunately, these issues are now occurring on Avelo ICE flights.”
An Avelo flight on September 5 appears to be the most recent immigrant transfer flight from Portsmouth, according to local activists who have been monitoring the airport. They say it was carrying 30 people.
In its latest ICE Flight Monitor, Human Rights First reported, “Since taking office on January 20, 2025, the Trump administration has pursued an unprecedented mass deportation agenda. U.S. officials have adopted a range of new tactics to achieve this objective, including expanding the use of expedited removal, sending people from the United States to offshore detention facilities in the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo, terminating protected legal statuses, disappearing people without due process including to a high security prison in El Salvador, and forcibly transferring individuals to other countries of which they are not citizens. These actions, many of which have been determined to be unlawful by federal courts, have been carried out with little to non-existent transparency, while thousands of people’s lives are uprooted from communities across the country and their rights are systematically violated.”
“Before removal, individuals are often moved repeatedly between ICE detention centers and staging facilities via domestic ‘shuffle flights.’ These frequent transfers not only disorient individuals but also make it significantly harder for them to access legal counsel and maintain contact with family. Between January 20 and August 31, 2025, the Trump administration carried out at least 4,422 shuffle flights—a 43 percent increase from the same period in 2024—including a monthly record of 805 flights in August 2025 alone. Among them were at least 81 flights to offshore detention facilities at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay Naval Base—six of which occurred in August. At the military base, individuals are detained thousands of miles from the United States and face abuse and mistreatment.”
Reports of inhumane conditions in ICE detention facilities as well as those run by private prison companies continue to reach the American public. “Children, including the very young, have been spending weeks or months in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in a remote part of Texas where outside monitors have heard accounts of shortages of clean drinking water, chronic sleep deprivation and kids struggling for hygiene supplies and prompt medical attention, as revealed in a stark new court filing,” The Guardian reported on September 28.
Manchester-Boston Regional Airport is owned by the City of Manchester and is governed by a public board with members appointed by the City and the Town of Londonderry. Jimmy Trinh from Southern NH DSA said, “I think our next actions are going to be focused on pushing changes at the municipal level to keep them [Avelo] from returning to MHT.”