When Avelo decided to relocate airplanes to Phoenix/Mesa and operate deportation flights for the federal government, you probably saw the headlines raking the airline over the coals.
- Avelo Airlines Faces Backlash for Aiding Trump’s Deportation Campaign
- Thousands pledge to boycott Tweed-based Avelo over ICE deportation charters
- Is Avelo Airlines Regretting Its Decision To Operate ICE Deportation Flights?
There were protests, though none got as much attention as the billboards put up by Seth Miller who you probably know as the founder of PaxEx.aero. Under the name of the AvGeek Action Alliance, a campaign called avelNO! has been started with taglines like “Does your vacation support their deportation?”
The billboards were around for just a few short days, telling people to stop flying Avelo because it was working with the feds to deport illegal immigrants. This has now descended into a court fight with neither side seemingly interested in backing down. [Correction: The initial billboards were removed due to the court fight, but alternate artwork has gone back up.]
It might seem easy to take sides here. Either you support mass deportation of illegal aliens or you don’t, right? But there is so much more to this story, and it is a warning for anyone trying to run an airline in these politically-choppy waters. Sometimes, there are no easy answers.
Let’s think about this from Avelo’s perspective. We all know that at the beginning of the year, domestic leisure travel demand started to weaken quickly largely thanks to economic uncertainty spun up by President Trump that continues to this day. Some airlines admitted it earlier than others, but a ULCC like Avelo was bound to feel the pain a lot more than most since it doesn’t have the exposure to nearly as much premium demand, which has held up better.
As that pain started to hit, Avelo was growing, taking delivery of airplanes. In Q1 2025, the airline had more than 17 percent more capacity scheduled than the year before. Up until that economic shift, this seemed like a good move as the airline had shown it could actually generate a profit, at least some of the time. But when demand tanked, the dreams of profitability became a dream deferred.
Avelo is also not an airline with a big financial cushion. It had about $23 million in cash and short term investments at the end of the year, the latest public data available. With demand tanking, you have to be very concerned about the future of your business if you’re running Avelo.
But then, a lifeline. The government is not going to run flights to send illegal aliens out of the country on its own. Instead, it puts out contracts for airlines to operate deportation flights or, often, for third parties to subcontract with airlines. This is nothing new. Airlines have operated these kinds of government flights for years in various forms. For Avelo, this had to look like the best chance to stabilize the business. It could take three airplanes out of its 20 (now 21) that were probably not making money and turn them into money-makers overnight.
This must have felt like a gift. Avelo needed something stable during a downturn, and then like manna from heaven, this opportunity appeared. I mean, what could be more stable than doing work on behalf of the federal government? It’s a time-honored tradition.
That is where the story might have ended in any other year, but this time, it did not. As we all know by now, the Trump Administration has had a big focus — as much as it can be focused on anything — on ramping up immigration enforcement. But the ramp-up this time around began earlier. The reality is that removals of illegal aliens jumped in 2023 under President Biden’s administration, so you might have expected a huge backlash at that time. It did not appear.
Sure, President Trump is making a lot more noise about it, and I have no doubt Avelo considered this. But if you’re Avelo, this had to seem like a no-brainer to do this work and save the company.
The other side paints a different story of what’s happening, and the facts back much of that up. Yes, deportation flights are a normal part of the business of the government, but the Trump Administration has looked to go around the law on more than one occasion to speed up the process.
There have been cries of due-process being denied to these illegal immigrants — something that is guaranteed to anyone in the United States regardless of legal status by the Constitution itself in Article I, Section 8, Clause 2. There is an exception for “Rebellion of Invasion” which has been waved around by the Trump Administration as a hard-to-defend justification. But even going beyond that, there have been high profile cases of mistakes, and then once people actually are deported, they are sometimes being sent to countries where they aren’t from.
In a situation where people and companies perceive constitutional protections being eroded, what can they do? Where do they draw that line in the sand? That is really the issue at hand here. There is no clear answer.
If you’re Andrew Levy running Avelo, should you risk the future of your company to do what’s right, if you think that’s how this decision breaks down? That answer may be “no” now, but there may come a point where the answer to that question is “yes.” It’s never a bright line, so it’s hard to know when that time will come.
Right now there are plenty of comparisons of President Trump’s administration to Nazi Germany casually floating around, most of which aren’t legitimate. Regardless, that always brings to mind the famous poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller that starts with “First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out…” and ends with “Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me.”
People who mean well do not want to let that happen, but it is extremely hard to compare the genocide of the Jews, Roma, gay and disabled people, and others to what is happening today deporting people who are not legally in the United States. Even if there was an equivalence, putting up a billboard to boycott an airline is completely useless in actually stopping what’s happening. As a friend said to me recently…
Not a single person’s ‘big reget” in Germany was not taking out a billboard calling for the boycott of the local Mercedes dealer.
The problem is that there is a point when a government morphs into an autocratic regime that starts like this and eventually crosses a line. I’m not definitively saying that this is an autocratic regime in the US, but there are certainly people who are worried that’s where we’re heading. And those people want to do something to protest. Even if it’s a useless boycott, it can result in stray bullets, figuratively and literally. Sometimes, as was the case in Los Angeles where a few isolated incidents of burning cars and attacking police occurred during otherwise peaceful protests, it actually helps accelerate the very thing that was being protested.
While a few may make more risky and truly honorable protests by, say, doing errands for illegal aliens so they don’t have to risk being in public or even harboring them, the vast majority will do what’s easy if they do anything at all. And that is where Avelo finds itself in the crosshairs. The easy thing to do is say you won’t fly an airline you probably weren’t going to fly anyway.
Avelo can’t be surprised by this. Doing ICE flying absolutely invites anger and criticism from the part of the country that has already decided it’s time to mobilize. That may very well have a real negative impact on Avelo’s business if the protests gain more traction. So far, they’ve certainly gained more ground that I would have expected, but if the alternative is bankruptcy and failure, then it’s hard to see Avelo making another choice considering the landscape today.
At some point, the switch flips, but it is a slippery slope so it’s not always easy to recognize when the time has come. If Avelo was using illegal aliens as slaves to operate these flights or it was sending them to be executed, then it would reach the heights of what German companies faced in WWII. But even then it didn’t happen overnight. And we obviously aren’t there today. The gray area is daunting, and you don’t want to be on the wrong side of history. Avelo will have to continue to navigate this mess, and other airlines will likely find themselves in the same place over the next few years, stuck in between that rock and a hard place.
