Posts
2/21/21
ICE Air Weekly Activity – Week of 15 Feb 2021.
Week severely impacted by weather. Average daily flights are around 18 and this week the daily flights were M-F, 6, 7, 3, 3. This week there and 18, respectively. In a typical week there are 21 removal flights. This week there were only 12. In a typical week there are 89 total ICE Air legs. This week there were only 37.
2/19/21
We don’t have to reach very deep into our xenophobic souls to find an assumption that is resilient and persistent: the belief that the threat of contagious disease comes from foreigners, a greater threat, for instance, than the risk you might run at a basketball game at an American high school gym. This unfounded belief is based on no evidence at all that disease, like Covid, is any more prevalent in the migrant population than it is at an an all-American Thanksgiving dinner. It is simply not so.
2/15/21
ICE Air Weekly Activity – Week of 8 Feb 2021.
Business As Usual Continues. Average Weekly Removal Flights Last 3 months: 20.5. Average Weekly after Inauguration (last 3 weeks): 22.0.
21 Removal flights to 6 different countries, 1 over the prior 6-week average.
95 total ICE Air legs, 11 over the prior 6-week average.
7 Removal flights to Haiti, bringing February already up to 11 removal flights, just 1 under the record month of 12.
2/11/21
I am at a loss every time I see this. Someone points out, as witnesses are asked to do, that policies are causing suffering among migrants. That the Biden administration is expelling people by the thousands. That people, often people we know, remain in squalor along the muddy banks of the river. People who send us messages pleading with us not to forget them. As if we could ever forget them.
2/8/21
Let’s look at consequences. In this case the consequences of the Biden administration trying to thread a needle.
They have been slow-walking any decision about Title 42. What’s Title 42? It is a little determination that was arm-twisted out of the CDC, an order that allows the US (contrary to international law) to immediately, with no legal recourse or a ruling of any kind, expel anyone who comes to our border. Doesn’t matter where they come from. In practice, we are expelling lots of Mexicans to Mexico. But we are also expelling Central Americans to Mexico. Haitians to Mexico.
2/7/21
ICE Air Weekly Activity – Week of 1 Feb 2021. 25 Removal flights to 8 different countries, the most since the week of 26 October, and 7 higher than the prior 6-week average (includes 2 holidays).
103 total ICE Air legs, also the most since week of 26 October, and 24 higher than prior 6-week average.
Cancellation of a flight to Africa (Cameroon, DR Congo and Angola) one hour before flight time (see notes below).
“Suspension” of flights to Haiti in the near term, after a very unusual 4 flights this week.
2/6/21
We have learned that a detention camp for teens is opening again in Carrizo Springs, Texas. It is run by Baptist Child and Family Services, the organization that ran the camp along the river in the Borderlands of west Texas at a Port of Entry. It was called Tornillo. It became a symbol of all that is wrong about immigration policy. A movement grew as people gathered to witness what they could of the children inside. Without witnesses the children would have been invisible. One child later told us that there were times during his confinement when he could not remember his own name.
