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.
86 comments on “Avelo Gets Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place”
Did not expect to find this type of article on CF today.
Making me think deeply…
Me niether. Mostly because CF said he wasn’t gonna opine on this. Glad he did though
What I do appreciate about the article is the equilibrium Brett found in trying to state the facts, the few bullets of humor to lighten the mood and understand all sides.
Presentation qualities that are way too rare these days.
So a big thanks for that !
Agreed as it is a very sensitive subject, but it needs to be spoken about & not be kept in the shadows.
I’m not going to scroll down and even look for it, but will just respond to the quintessential list of airlines also doing deportation flights that I’m sure is down there.
My immigration attorney wife sums it up like this: They used to deport bad people who generally needed to be deported. Now they’re just deporting anyone they can get their hands on, and ignoring the fact that only the immigration courts are authorized to do so.
That’s the difference, Chad.
Who is Chad ? Is that you Kenneth?
Avelo is a business and is not doing anything illegal. End of story
Morality and legality are 2 completely different matters …
You can have principles you want to adhere to even if doing so means being on one side or the other of the. yellow line of the law
Exactly. And IMO, Avelo chose the wrong path.
I’m aware that many travelers may not factor this into their travel plans, but if nothing else, I hope Miller’s billboards prompt them to consider an alternative carrier.
No one said what Avelo was doing was illegal, but what they are doing is aiding & abetting a wannabe dictator. As a result, Avelo will need to accept the perception by the public. And as we all know, public perception means everything to a company regardless of size.
You mean like German companies during the War had no problem with using Jewish slave labor. Your flip comment was not fully thought through.
And people who choose not to fly Avelo because of their choice are not doing anything illegal either.
The Germans were always very careful to put a facade of legality on what they did in WWII.
At the Wannsee conference (which kicked off the Final Solution) in 1942, there were 15 officials of which eight were lawyers. That’s not a coincidence.
Legality is the bare minimum and far from what we should expect.
Everything the Nazis did within Germany was under the power of the law, it can be argued, until the Wannsee conference in 1942 primarily because it created a different definition of Jewish ancestry pertaining to those who would be “evacuated” that contradicted many aspects of the Nuremberg laws passed by the Reichstag in 1935. Don’t confuse this statement about legality within Germany with the myriad illegal activities that were occurring along the Eastern military front.
Fully 11 of the 15 Wannsee participants were lawyers. The English translations of the official minutes generally listed 7 or 8 participants with the Dr title indicating a lawyer. However, there were participants not denoted as such who were lawyers, Erich Neumann and Wilhelm Kritzinger. Further, depending on the translation, Martin Luther and Gerhard Klopfer were sometimes listed with the Dr honorarium, sometimes not. Including all 4 of these men yields 11 total lawyers. Only Heydrich, Eichmann, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Muller and SS Lt General Otto Hofmann were not lawyers.
Only one of these 11 lawyers objected to anything posited during this meeting from a legal basis, Wilhelm Stuckart, whose objections were likely due primarily to pride of authorship as he was one of the co-authors of the law for the protection of German blood and honor, one of the Nuremberg laws, and the Wannsee protocol for racial determination were quite different than under those laws.
“Avelo cant be surprised by this” is the one place where I disagree with you here Cranky, as I’ve been amazed but not too shocked by the number of people in business especially who thought a second trump administration would just mean tax cuts and deregulation, turning a blind eye that much of the economic stability in the first was the result of successful efforts to stymie trumps dictatorial fantasies, not enable them, those guardrails of which have been dismantled.
There’s the duo quotes from an anonymous wall streeter who said on inauguration day “yeah we get to say the R and P words again!” And then three months later when tariffs hit said “we didnt vote for this!”
So, it doesn’t surprised me that business executives, who are almost monkey trained to NOT think outside the system have been unprepared for what’s come.
As far as what’s next, im curious what will happen in Connecticut, with the atate threatening avelos tax breaks and the deportation issue going away no time soon
This administration is actively undermining/ignoring the founding principles of this nation. I’m sure someone’ll come along soon enough with a 3000-word stemwinder trying to rationalize it all, but there’s no escaping the truth of what the WH is doing. It’s un-American.
Avelo, by extension, is helping facilitate that. They are on the wrong side of history, and no one should let them forget it.
Agreed. I’m disappointed that Brett gave us such a wishy washy both sides post.
Making money should not involve upending people’s lives and facilitating that is unethical.
That being said, once they stop the flights they can always pull a Valujet and rebrand to AirTran or something.
From a business standpoint, beyond the discussion of whether this is a right or wrong move, they have disrupted travel by customers who had paid for tickets on the aircraft that were rerouted. We got a cancellation notice on a flight to Concord/Charlotte less than a month before the flight was to occur (and a day after this announcement was made). The message we received was “Regrettably, we had to cancel your flight to accommodate changes elsewhere within our network,” so I can only assume where that plane ended up going. While I am certain that that plane was going to be nearly empty (I was surprised they were flying that route in the first place), we had to jump through hoops to rebook on a different airline at a fare that wasn’t 5 or 6x what we were paying on Avelo. Why would I subject myself to that experience again? I’m sure Avelo will make some money to stay afloat, but after those ICE flights are gone, they’ve lost a customer (and I can’t be the only one) for the future because I’ve lost some trust in their ability to get me from Point A to Point B without cancelling and forcing me to pay a higher fare elsewhere.
S – The travel disruption piece is a good point, but I think what they found is that they had some pretty terrible-looking routes from a demand perspective. I wonder if they would have ended up canceled anyway due to low demand. Having a profitable contract would definitely make the decision easier, but I’m sure it made a few enemies.
I fly Avelo from New Haven to Atlanta all the time. Nothing has changed. Planes are pretty full. People are ignoring the 20 protesters hanging outside. Life goes on.
Quoting Sydney Polick from “Eyes Wide Shut,” life goes on… till it doesn’t.” It was a warning directed at Tom Cruise near the end of the film. I wouldn’t be so flippant about this Avelo story if I were you.
Until it doesn’t.
Any idiot in revenue management can fill a plane unless a very large fraction of the population is boycotting, which no one is arguing is happening here. The question is whether they have to lower their prices a bit relative to what they would otherwise be able to charge to do so. A few percent headwind on fares that the rest of the industry isn’t facing can hurt in a low-margin business like aviation.
And though I’m sure you’re right that most Avelo passengers ignore the protestors, I would also bet that most Avelo passengers (like most of the general population) have no idea about the charter flights or the protests. A few of them probably see the protesters, take out their phone, and look up what’s going on. And a few of those probably don’t like what they see and may either not fly Avelo again at all or give other airlines a preference (or choosing to take their next vacation driving to the Berkshires instead of flying to Florida). So Avelo has to lower their fares a bit to keep that cabin full.
Flip side: there are probably some MAGAts who support these deportations — especially the unlawful ones — and will give Avelo a preference. But probably relatively few based in New Haven! But I suspect there are more people who lean away from Avelo because of this than lean towards Avelo.
TSA reports the busiest day in Tweed history was April 13th, 2025, the Sunday before Easter which is a popular day for spring break travel. On April 13th, 4,008 passengers went through the airport.
https://www.wfsb.com/2025/06/09/i-team-tweed-congestion-leads-missed-flights-over-spring-break-changes-promised/
With this being a Tuesday post tinged with political stuff , I’m putting the over under of comments at 100.
I enjoyed the nuance of Brett’s original post. This is actually something I’d like to see more of in the media many America s consume. The current situation makes for great memes and Facebook one-liners, but a discussion of the grey areas takes more words than the average consumer wants to read.
As for Avelo, well they have a responsibility (acting within the law) to survive as a business. Seems they are doing that. Their question is whether the backlash is worth it. That’s a math equation. Easy. It’s also probably more ethically sound to blame the administration for creating the current situation than it is to blame Avelo for trying to operate within it.
Regardless of how you feel about Trump, et al, I think it’s fair to say we’re navigating uncharted waters. Different companies will tackle that in different ways.
Not what I was expecting to read in my morning email gauntlet. Thanks CF.
Agree 100%….growing tired of all this liberal nonsense, CF included, and sadly The Air Show podcast. Simply report the facts and stick to the facts, without trying to inject your bias – isn’t that what journalism is “supposedly” about? Avelo is a business fighting for its survival, that’s the truth. I wish them only the best.
First Cranky is a blogger. While he states facts when they are available, he also posts his opinions in this blog every day. That’s a major reason why I follow him. Sorry you let your biases color your belief system.
Just report the facts for what they are, leave the opinion out of it.
Once again, we are here for analysis and commentary from CF on the industry – more than facts. If you just want facts and nothing else, there are other websites out there. Enjoy.
Navigator – What on earth are you going on about? Nobody is coming to this website for straight news, because this is not a news site. I am not a journalist. This is my opinion site, and if you don’t like it, you are welcome to stop reading. But telling everyone you disagree with that they should stick to delivering straight facts is silly. Now, if a place is pretending to be a news site but it’s really just opinion, then I will gladly stand up and agree with you that they should stick to the facts. In fact, let me know when you’re ready to go tell that to Fox News.
How quickly some forget the hundreds of thousands of passengers without driver’s licenses or passports or any other identity required of legal American residents or citizens that were carried northbound from border cities over the past year by multiple US airlines
Are you referring to the stunt that the governor of Texas pulled off with sending migrants to northern cities? Because im pretty sure those were ferries by charters like Eastern Airlines and not actually Commerical airlines that regular travelers can buy tickets on.
Unless youre knee deep in some conspiracy I don’t know about
It has been well-documented that US scheduled passenger airlines including the big 4 carried hundreds of thousands of people from US border cities that only possessed CBP orders to appear in court – often with dates years in advance.
Not only did just about all of the US airline industry benefit from the huge influx of people northbound from the border but there were well-documented concerns in the US industry that airlines were carrying passengers that were not subjected to the same level of identity requirements that legal American residents and citizens are subjected to
Just as with the weather, political winds change direction.
I’m interested in knowing more about this.
There’s a big difference between carrying someone to another place within the US to await their court dates (which were/are so far in the future because the immigration courts are short-staffed) and carrying people bound in shackles and possibly being sent to countries where they don’t come from and may not even speak the language.
As for the security concern, flight safety can be assured without identity documents, just do a more intensive search, just like people without RealID-compliant ID are being processed right now. A problem, but one with a relatively simple answer.
You’re saying that hundreds of thousands of people were carried without required ID?
Can you provide a source, I would be interested to know more.
Tim, I’m going to call bullshit on this.
First off, even once people get to the US they’re subject to being screened by CBP.
Second, when airlines (or any other common carrier) transport people to the US who are not permitted to enter, that airline is fined, in addition to having to provide return transportation. An airline isn’t going to risk fines to do this.
He’s talking about people who entered this country across the land border or by boat and then flew domestically from cities in the southern US to other places to wait for their immigration hearings. They were usually traveling to stay with friends or family who already lived here – hearing dates were being set 2-3 years in the future because of court overloading. (I don’t believe there are that many people this happens to now.)
Many of them did not have passports or other photo ID, but were permitted to fly after screening. It’s basically the same enhanced screening that’s always been available for people without ID, usually people whose ID has been stolen or lost and the occasional extremist who just refuses to get a government-issued ID. It’s the same thing that’s happening right now with people who still don’t have a RealID-compliant driver’s license (some states dragged their heels long enough that there are still valid state IDs out there that aren’t compliant) and who don’t have a passport.
Ah. Thank you for the clarification CraigTPA. To me that is a non-issue. People flee, they were screened. What’s the point of complaining about that?
Thats what I thought he was alluding to but that has nothing to do with any contracts with the big airlines whatsoever… that was a tsa/dhs/immigration court decision and airlines just having regularly scheduled flights to south texas
ALPA, among others, expressed concern about the process of accepting people for transport without the same time of identity vetting that is required of American citizens and legal residents.
IIRC, the current administration did end the use of the CBP app as identification at TSA checkpoints.
and the big 4 carriers AND OTHERS participated in the northbound transportation of passengers from border cities and benefitted financial to a far greater degree than little Avelo ever will hauling people back out of the US.
ALL of these airlines operated and are operating legal flights performing functions of government policy.
It is no more immoral or unethical for any of these companies or depending on which direction the flights are going.
Tim, people travel at airports without ID all the time. There is a known procedure that the TSA follows in cases like this..
Re: “ALL of these airlines operated and are operating legal flights performing functions of government policy. It is no more immoral or unethical for any of these companies or depending on which direction the flights are going.”
People flying commercial airlines of their own accord between US cities has a big difference from the deportation flights that Avelo is flying: The passengers are on them voluntarily.
Participating in providing services to remove people from the country who have not been ordered removed by a court, or voluntarily chosen to be deported is assisting in the violation of law, and is immoral.
Elon should have suggested using the feds Janet planes. They’re even 737s.
This issue does highlight the challenges businesses are faced with in this environment. Customers demand that you side with them or you won’t get their business.
Makes it tough to navigate.
Even little things affect us. My engineering firm looks at damaged buildings after storms. We got into a tiff over whether it is the Gulf of Mexico or the (stupid) Gulf of America. Had people freaking out whichever way we called it in our reports.
I made the executive decision to just call it the Gulf and leave the rest alone.
This is just where we are.
In a media landscape often driven by emotion, turning to the numbers is the best way to find clarity. This is especially true of the current political debate, which has been sensationalized to the point of obscuring the facts.
We should take a cue from experts like Seth Miller and Brett Snyder. While their world is aviation, their value comes from a rigorous, data-first approach to analyzing everything from passenger experience to airline networks. It’s a standard they mutually respect, as evidenced by their joint event appearances and collaborative work on awards panels. Applying their level of factual analysis here is essential.
DIRECT LINK TO READABLE DATA TABLE: https://i.postimg.cc/8cNHHSSM/temp-Image-UB1u-EN.avif
Fiscal Year President New Legal Permanent Residents (Green Cards) | CBP Total Encounters | ICE Removals²
2009 Barack Obama 1,130,818 | 556,041 | 389,834
2010 Barack Obama 1,042,625 | 463,382 | 392,862
2011 Barack Obama 1,062,040 | 340,252 | 396,906
2012 Barack Obama 1,031,631 | 743,628 | 419,384
2013 Barack Obama 990,553 | 815,635 | 438,421
2014 Barack Obama 1,016,518 | 857,216 | 414,481
2015 Barack Obama 1,051,031 | 707,761 | 333,341
2016 Barack Obama 1,183,505 | 868,971 | 344,354
2017 Donald Trump 1,127,167 | 526,901 | 295,368
2018 Donald Trump 1,096,620 | 683,178 | 337,287
2019 Donald Trump 1,031,443 | 1,148,024 | 359,885
2020 Donald Trump 707,362 | 646,822 | 185,884
2021 Joe Biden 740,002 | 1,956,519 | 59,011
2022 Joe Biden 1,018,349 | 2,766,582 | 72,177
2023 Joe Biden 1,195,400 | 3,201,144 | 142,580
2024 Joe Biden unknown. | unkown. | 357,253
2025 Donald Trump unknown. | unkown. | 72,179 (January 26, 2025 – May 3, 2025)
ICE will publish final and official totals for Fiscal Year 2025 upon the conclusion of the fiscal year on September 30, 2025.
https://tracreports.org/reports/759/
https://www.cbp.gov/document/stats/nationwide-encounters
https://www.ice.gov/remove/removal
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/20/nx-s1-5235329/why-deportations-hit-a-10-year-high-in-2024#:~:text=The%20number%20of%20removals%20conducted,during%20the%20first%20Trump%20administration.
The current situation requires that we ask several critical questions. First, what does the data show? It is essential to distinguish between factual trends and political rhetoric. We must also consider to what degree public perception is being shaped by partisan media coverage, and whether political parties are more focused on fueling a feedback loop than on addressing the core issue.
When analyzing media coverage of this issue, the principle of consistency is paramount. If we are to move beyond political rhetoric, we must demand consistency—not just from our leaders, but from our media. The current furor over Avelo Airlines serves as a perfect case study. While observers like Seth Miller are now highlighting this practice, it raises an unavoidable question: where was this level of scrutiny when airlines were flying undocumented people under prior administrations?
Without a consistent application of outrage, the conversation isn’t about the issue itself; it’s about partisan advantage. This is how the public gets drawn into biased reporting and how political parties feed off the controversy.
The fundamental difference, in my view, is not about the numbers but about the fact that the current administration is publicly crowing about their deportation efforts, going to great lengths to instil fear in immigrant communities, and presenting their deportations as driven by animus motivated by skin color, religion, and non-English-sounding names. Regardless of the numbers, that is materially different than the Biden and Obama administrations, in which they certainly attempted to focus deportations on a legal process instead of scoring political points with the anti-immigrant crowd.
The reality is that there is a limit to how many people American can deport in a given time period — a few hundred thousand a year. Trump doesn’t have the organizational skills, the budget from Congress, or the ability to ramp up staffing to materially change that. He does have the ability to choose how those efforts are focused to make them both more arbitrary — to make more people justifiably afraid — and more capricious. And Avelo operating deportation flights in those circumstances is what I think people are really protesting.
Excellent information Rick! Unfortunately those who dislike President Trump don’t want to realize that their beloved former President Obama deported 5-million illegal aliens–with nary a whimper in the press and certainly no outrage. President Biden allowed 12-million illegals (all portrayed by the left as regular hard-working folks) to walk across the border. Now I dislike President Trumps grandstanding about everything he does, but I will take this over an America only concerned about gender ideology, DEI, preferred pronouns, more than two sexes, critical race theory (all being indoctrinated into our children in America’s schools) cancel culture, allowing rampant antisemitism on college campuses, Ev’s, climate change, and BLM . I hope Avelo’s business survives the hysteria–we need all the airlines so we travelers have choices.
“an America only concerned about gender ideology, DEI, preferred pronouns, more than two sexes, critical race theory (all being indoctrinated into our children in America’s schools) cancel culture, allowing rampant antisemitism on college campuses, Ev’s, climate change, and BLM” exists only between the ears of small minded individuals who elected a convicted felon and insurrectionist to protect them from these made-up problems.
I am really surprised that the new Global Airlines didn’t offer up their A380’s! Oh wait, that means that they have a strategy. Silly me!
If it wasn’t for the problem of many of the airports the flights are going to not being able to handle the A380, I wouldn’t put it past this administration.
This can be a very complex issue. And I believe there’s quite a bit of misinformation being floated around about it by people on both extremes. This piece is a refreshing change from all of the hyper-partisan, politically motivated rhetoric on the issue.
Since Cranky quoted the Constitution, I will, too. Article I, Section 8 of that document reads in part, “The Congress shall have Power … To establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization …”. So whether one agrees with the current policies or not, it’s the federal government’s job to enforce immigration and naturalization policy.
Moreover, since airlines engage in interstate and international commerce, the federal government is also involved. To that point, the aforementioned Article I, Section 8 also reads in part, “The Congress shall have Power … To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”.
This country has always had a bit of a conflicted policy (if one can call it that) on immigration and naturalization. But that discussion is best held elsewhere. Again, thanks for the nuance on this issue. It’s something sorely missing from the vast majority of political discourse in this country – even if this is supposed to be an airline blog.
If you’re gonna cite the COTUS Don’t forget Article I Sec. 9 Clause 2
Not to mention the Fifth Amendment.
Well said Brett, I have been reading your blog for almost as long as you have written and always enjoyed seeing your take on things.
I sympathize with the folks running Avelo, trying to keep afloat and keeping their employees employed but at the end of the day, I won’t be flying them anytime soon. That is a real bummer because I wanted to. They have developed an interesting niche but their pull down of Santa Rosa shows that flying from one small city to another is not all that profitable, reminds me of SkyBus.
XP has had some real stunners of dumb routes over the years, and you are correct, some of them are reminiscent of Skybus.
ILG to Melbourne, Florida was a classic in this respect. I think that actually operated for a time, but was quickly killed.
Though it’s worth noting that not every Skybus alternative airport was a loser. The pick of the litter might be Punta Gorda, which Allegiant now flies almost 2mm passengers a year. I guess if you throw enough manure at the wall, something might stick. “There must be a pony somewhere!”
But yes, your point is well taken. There were a number of Avelo STS routes that were incomprehensible.
Thanks for the shout out, I think. ;)
A couple things to clarify about my position on this issue, and the billboard campaign.
1) The boards are back up, albeit with alternate artwork, pending resolution of the lawsuit. I think I have a pretty strong position but we’ll see where things end up.
2) I 100% respect that Levy likely had to make a choice between taking this contract and the business collapsing. I believe this was the wrong choice. And that sucks. I liked the Avelo approach and was impressed with how the company was evolving to meet demand.
But I also believe that, knowing full well that the current administration is actively flouting the law around who is being deported and to where, choosing to participate in that activity is the wrong thing for a company to do. If the only way to stay in business is through participating in terrible actions, then it is time to close up shop.
That’s not an easy decision to make. But I believe it is the correct one. And I believe encouraging others to consider that impact while booking travel is a useful effort. I have no idea if it will move the needle on loads or revenue for the carrier. But it is what I can do right now, and was worth trying.
3) To the point about sending people to be executed, I’m not quite as convinced as Brett on this part of the situation. Sending people to countries where they’ve had a non-removal order owing to reasonable belief of threat is certainly a step down that path. Ditto for sending people to a third country, where they’re imprisoned in a facility that historically does not see anyone released. Which is not to say Avelo is specifically flying those people or those trips; I don’t know the full details of every case. But the Administration is absolutely doing that, so I feel there’s enough of a situation that the carrier must consider those factors in deciding whether to take the contract or not.
4) Regarding some people booking towards Avelo rather than away, I’ve heard that, especially in the NH State House talking with my colleagues across the aisle. I don’t believe they will actually book, based mostly on where the flights are available. But it is part of the conversation.
I have no regrets about putting up the billboards. I’m working on new copy and art and funding to extend and expand the effort.
Seth – Oh whoops, I have now updated the post to note that the boards are back up. Sorry about that!
Thanks for the additional color on your thinking. I think that’s really helpful and I hope others will read it.
At the risk of sounding like a quant geek, Avelo must evaluate the net present value (“NPV”) of contracting with ICE, inclusive of lost cash flows from other services, against the NPV of a passenger operation not chartering for ICE. Given Avelo’s size, market fungibility and Management’s likely assessment of the revenue impacts of ICE flying, I’m sure they concluded the protests would have little near-term impact and no long-term impact.
Lots of companies do lots of things that aggravate one or more customer groups. Bud Lite’s embracing of a trans influencer is one example of an action that’s had significant market consequences. Another would have been divesting and boycotting of firms that did business in South Africa during the Apartied era.
Avelo’s duty to its shareholders is to maximize profitability within legal bounds of the flags under which it flies. Avelo has done that with its ICE flying. We shall see if the protests are noise or not.
Ultimately, if Avelo fails it likely won’t be because of ICE flying.
Davey – See, I do think other stakeholders matter, not just the stockholders. There is, or at least should be, a moral obligation to do what’s right. The problem is that it’s never easy to know what that is all the time. And to me, we were in one of those gray areas here. In the long run, a good CEO can make the argument that being morally right will be financially right as well. But that’s not easy.
Sigh
I was hoping we were moving past cancel culture.
85% of the posters on here would not have survived watching one week of Johnny Carson’s tonight show.
As Tim Dunn spelled out, every carrier has been involved in this issue one direction or the other.
They are all trying to make a buck.
I don’t agree with a lot of the implied bias here, but I RESPECT CF and all of your opinions and believe I can always learn a few things.
The aviation industry has one finger in political world all of the time. It’s part of it.
While you may perceive it as another case of “cancel culture,” others seem it as a matter of human rights and adhering to due process. I’m a moderate who believes the dems obsession with DEI, transgender people in sports, cancel culture, were all the absolute wrong things to focus on for the most recent election which is why they lost. Illegal immigrants who commit crimes should be deported. Full stop. Every country does that and the US should be no different.
In this case, though, it’s a larger constitutional issue whereby the Trump administration has chosen to ignore court rulings, due process and laws it views as unnecessary. Unfortunately, Avelo has gotten caught up in a much larger political issue over which the airline has little control. This is why they are being targeted. There are also safety concerns that have been well documented by Avelo flight crews in several publications.
Biden and Obama both engaged in deportations, as have most presidents. And the Federal government should. Why this has become such a political firestorm is that in the rush to deport, mistakes are being made – a lot of mistakes – and those mistakes are not admitted even when they are rarely corrected.
it should also be noted that few of us have the facts about why anyone is being charged esp. during the heat of the moment or media reports.
One side was convinced that Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s rights were being trampled and he was just a good family man. The administration deported him, got lots of pushback and he is now back in the US including in court in a case that the feds say looks a whole lot like human, weapons and drug trafficking.
There is due process for U.S. citizens and there are different processes for non-citizens.
Abrego Garcia has been the most discussed single person in this whole debate and he was deported to his birth country.
Charges that the government is snatching up law-abiding residents should be evaluated very carefully; maybe it is happening but there are plenty of otherwise law-abiding undocumented residents of the US that will remain here and have nothing to fear.
It should also be noted that some countries are sending their own aircraft to the U.S. to pick up deportees, others are using their own airlines, and others are accepting U.S. civilian or military deportation flights.
There are simply dozens of deportation flights operating around the world every day.
Tim – Those are not the sides of this argument. In the case of Abrego Garcia, the truth is that there was an order barring him from being deported. It doesn’t matter if he’s a terrible human or a great family man. That’s for the court’s to decide. The courts were not obeyed and that is the problem.
I understand the arguments on both sides.
I am addressing those that said that he was a family man and should not have been deported -and those statements have been made in multiple cases. The feds had a thick case on him which no one bothered to mention and he will now get due process. Let’s see in 20 years if he ended up better off being brought back to the US or if he had remained in El Salvador.
Yes, the law should be followed for and by all. and that includes removing a small fraction of people that entered the country as undocumented aliens and are dangerous to society. The vast majority of undocumented residents are not at risk.
regardless of what side you are on, immigration was one of the issues that was credited for tipping last November to the red team with a sweep of swing states and it remains the President’s single best issue in polling. The further the pendulum swings in one direction, the further it swings in the opposite direction.
Coastal folks might not agree but there are a lot of people in the country that struggle to reconcile the opposition by some to allowing the government to enforce the law from those that advocate for following the law.
Avelo was (and is) acting as a contractor to the government to fulfill the wishes of the majority of Americans – in February and today. and Avelo is following the law.
Ive been quiet on this one hoping to only comment on issues pertaining to the aviation industry, but you clearly dont understand both sides, but I understand why you may want to write that to try and trick people into being reasonable.
Most people on the left wouldn’t care at all what would happen to Abrego Garcia if he were given the due process he were entitled to by the constitution. But he wasn’t, pretty much every judge who has ruled on this says he wasn’t and in the end the constitution provides no provision to be circumvented by the “majority opinion” (or so you think) in February or ever…
I dont know whats going to happen to Avelo in the long run but just wanna clear that up, while you’re claiming to “understand both sides” solely so you can distort one side.
Sincerely,
A CF reader that is no less patriotic than you because I live closer than you to an ocean
coastal folk,
again, I understand fully that courts said he could not be deported. and the U,S. Supreme Court has given the administration the green light to accelerate deportations of many others. Courts ordered him to try to bring him back and they did.
Innocent people are simply not being swept up by the feds and deported. It just isn’t happening.
The Obama administration did not pull off 9 million legally flawless deportations.
Since the interest is in following the law, let’s see how the lawsuits by CA trying to block the administration from doing what it is doing in LA turn out.
Either you believe in rule of law, or you don’t.
Don’t like the law? Change it, don’t ignore it.
Why bother when this bunch of clowns has proven that ignoring the law is a much more successful strategy. At least for those lacking any sense of morality or legality.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is that all the reports I’ve seen describing these flights say the deportees are shackled, and several have quoted flight attendants as saying they’ve been told that in an evacuation they just need to leave the plane.
How can an airline executive justify telling his FAs that in a fire situation they’re just supposed to leave people to burn to death?
This just ties back into what separates the Trump deportations from previous ones: they’re not concentrating on criminals, just on numbers. Children with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, masked thugs grabbing people at jobs citizens don’t want…it’s performative cruelty to throw raw meat to the large faction of racists among their supporters.
TL;DR:
too busy “just enjoying watching cars burn at the mostly peaceful protests”
And January 6th was a “protest,” not an attempt subvert an election.
January 6th was an armed insurrection and everybody unlawfully inside the US Capitol should have been shot that day or any other day. Laws matter. Not just the ones you like.
Bill, I hate what happened on January 6th inside the US Capitol. However laws matter, and those who carried out the armed insurrection were entitled to due process of law. As those who have been deported outside of the judicial process.
And in the George Floyd protests, there were pretty clearly agitators leveraging the situation.
This is a weird time – we know, for a certainty, that bad actors are trying to influence our elections and much else through social media.
We’d be naive to think that such players aren’t acting in other ways too. Doesn’t take much to pay someone to throw a Molotov cocktail.
Eastern (aka Dynamic Air) and new sister company, Eastern Air Express both based at MCI have been flying deportation flights for a while
Small US charter companies have always been in some pretty, uh, interesting businesses.
The now long-departed Vision Air’s Part 121 certificate was allegedly issued so it could perform CIA redition flights in the Global War on Terror. Sierra Pacific does a lot of work for the US Forest Service, but its long-term owner, Gar Thorsrud (now deceased), was also the principal at Intermountain Aviation, a CIA front. That’s not a tin-foil hat assertion, it’s just straight up true.
Avelo was originally XTRA, which was one of those charter carriers – the Avelo business plan was designed to elevate it out of this business.
Scuttling back to ICE for three aircraft worth of flying very much represents an acknowledgement that that business plan has not worked.
Well done handling a very polarizing subject in a fair, thoughtful, and only mildly-opinionated way. I would have been harder on Avelo, and I have been! My family of 4 is going with Breeze over them on a competing route this summer because of this issue.
The whole thing to me, stinks. As an avid Avelo fan across the pond, I had been holding out hope XP would start up HVN-AMS service as its first transatlantic offering, but now that its mired in this scandal, I’ve lost almost all hope that we’ll get to see Avelo in Netherlands – or anywhere in Europe.
I don’t mean to be harsh, but I’m not sure how you ever got the hope that a small ULCC that operates only 737s would ever fly outside North America or the Caribbean. Even if they had a 737 variant that had the range to fly from their most successful base – New Haven – to Europe, given their financial state they couldn’t afford to get ETOPS certified.
The ULCC model just doesn’t work on transatlantic markets – it’s been tried and tried but it just doesn’t work. It was just reported yesterday that Play is expected to pull out of TATL by the end of summer. The closest thing to a ULCC on these routes is Level, and they’re not a “real” ULCC, just a brand name for IAG.
Craig –
Those are great points and I fully realize my desire of seeing avelo in Europe was a long shot at best. But a guy can hope, right? And as a fan of avelo since day one I’ve always held a glimmer of hope it could happen one day.
While it’s never say never I realize the chances took a major hit with the ICE business so I’ll just have to keep hoping.
I think what’s missing is the larger context of Avelo’s progress over time.
It has not made great profits since it started four years ago, and the sudden need to sign an ICE contract came shortly after Breeze entered New Haven, CT, which was Avelo’s biggest base (presumably reflecting its relative performance versus wherever else it flies), at the end of 2024.
This certainly had an operational impact – there were news stories of horrendous HVN traffic backups around Xmas/New Year. And then shortly thereafter Brian Sumers’s blog carried news that Avelo was seeking yet more capital – and Avelo’s own internal communications surrounding the ICE contract was pretty open about the fact that the first quarter results were dire. So one assumes that Breeze also had a financial impact.
If it is in fact the case that the carrier depends heavily on that one base, it suggests that Avelo’s issues are deeper that whatever general industry trends might be.
One thing I suspect is true – Avelo did not expect this to be a long-playing issue. We’re now at least two months into this (no?) and it keeps percolating. Cranky’s post is just another item in a steady stream. One suspects that Avelo’s PR people wish it was not so.
I can maybe see this in the context of saving employees jobs.
But new airlines and bankruptcy are like water and water. They mix well and frequently.
I don’t respect people and won’t patronize people who support and facilitate human suffering. Especially when it is done in violation of the Federal Court’s Constitutional orders. (As determined by the US Supreme Court.)
I remember an interview with a prominent investor who passed on investing in Juul early on, deciding it was not a good idea to facilitate nicotine addiction, and him still supporting the decision not to invest even though he didn’t make a lot of money.
Making money is not the end all and be all. Our country would be better off if more agreed that this should be the case.
So I support a boycott of Avelo, as well as any actions to support employees who want to leave Avelo.
Of course I just watched an Allegiant air flight land at Andrew’s Airforce base so… what do we know
That’s fascinating.
They probably also do troop charters. Which given the show of military might that is reminiscent of soviet fascism that is happening this weekend in Washington DC, makes a troop transport the most likely canidate.