Inside ICE Air: Flight Attendants on Deportation Planes Say Disaster Is “Only a Matter of Time”
www.propublica.org
Current and former flight attendants for GlobalX, the private charter airline at the center of Trump’s immigration crackdown, expressed concern about their inability to treat passengers humanely and to keep them safe.

A lot of the article is through the eyes of a flight attendant named nicknamed Lala. Attendants must be on flights due to FAA regulations but they don’t have much to do. On ICE Air - they’re not supposed to interact with the passengers.

Lala was accustomed to the hard realities of working charter flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She’d learned to obey instructions not to look the passengers in the eyes, not to greet them or ask about their well-being.

[…]

Flight attendants received training in how to evacuate passengers but said they weren’t told how to usher out detainees whose hands and legs were bound by shackles.

[…]

Neither the ICE Air handbook, nor FAA regulations, nor flight attendant training in Miami explained how to empty a plane full of people whose movements were, by design, so severely hampered. Shackled detainees didn’t even qualify as “able-bodied” enough to sit in exit rows.

To flight attendants, the restraints seemed at odds with the FAA’s “90-second rule,” a decades-old manufacturing standard that says an aircraft must be built for full evacuation in 90 seconds even with half the exits blocked.

Lala and others said no one told them how to evacuate passengers in chains. “Honestly, I don’t know what we would do,” she said.

There was a flight where a little girl had a medical emergency. She was on the plane with her parents.

The day the girl collapsed on Lala’s flight, the pilot turned the plane around and they crossed back into the United States. The flight landed in Arizona. Paramedics rushed on board and connected the girl to their own oxygen bottle. They began shuttling her off the plane. Her parents tried to join. But the guards stopped the father.

Shocked, Lala approached the ICE officer in charge. “This is not OK!” she yelled. The mom had seizures. The family needed to stay together. But the officer said it was impossible. Only one parent could go to the hospital. The other, as Lala understood it, “was going to get deported.”

[…]

Lala eventually left because of the little girl and her family, because she couldn’t do the deportation flights anymore. Her GlobalX uniform hung in her closet for a time, a reminder of her career as a flight attendant. Recently, she said, she threw it away. She never learned whether the little girl lived or died. Lala just watched her mom follow her off the plane, then watched the dad return to his seat.

“I cried after that,” she said. She bought her own ticket home.

  • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    44·
    3 days ago

    A second said his planes’ air conditioning kept breaking — an experience consistent with at least two publicly reported onboard incidents — and their lavatories kept breaking, something another flight attendant reported as well. But the planes kept flying. “They made us flush with water bottles,” he said.

    I was once stuck on the tarmac for almost an hour because the rear bathroom had a small leak in the faucet. They deplaned us to get it repaired, which took another 2 hours. The pilot didn’t want to leave without it fixed. Apparently, that level of caution is optional.

    Another recalled taking a planeload of children and their escorts on a domestic transfer from the southern border to an airport in New York. He tried to slip snacks to the kids. “Even the chaperones were like, ‘Don’t give them any food,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Where is your humanity?’” (A second flight attendant said that children on a New York flight were fed by their escorts.)

    This needs clarification. When they say “escorts” are they saying “not their parents”? Are they trying to remain neutral in the description because it can’t be known if the people with the children are or are not the children’s parents? Who are these “escorts”?

    The rare guidance some flight attendants said they received on carrying out ICE Air evacuations came during briefings from pilots. What they heard, they said, was chilling and went against their training.

    “Just get up and leave,” one recalled a GlobalX pilot telling him. “That’s it. … Save your life first.”

    He understood the instructions to mean that evacuating detainees was not a priority, or even the flight attendants’ responsibility. The detainees were in other people’s hands, or in no one’s.

    Disgusting.