The deportation flight was in the air over Mexico when chaos erupted in the back of the plane. A girl had collapsed. She had a high fever and was taking ragged, frantic breaths.
The flight attendant, Lala, grabbed the plane’s emergency oxygen bottle and rushed past rows of migrants chained at the wrists and ankles to reach the girl and her parents.
Lala worked for Global Crossing Airlines, the dominant player in the network of deportation contractors known as ICE Air. GlobalX, as the charter company is called, is lately helped the Trump administration fly hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador despite a federal court order blocking the deportations, triggering a showdown that could become a full-blown constitutional crisis.
Lala and six other current and former GlobalX flight attendants provided a window into a part of the deportation process that is little understood, ProPublica reports. For migrants who have spent months or years trying to live in the U.S., it is the final bit of the country they may experience.
Some 85% of the administration’s “removal” flights — 254 flights as of March 21, according to the advocacy group Witness at the Border — have been on charter planes. While there are ICE officers and hired security guards on the charters, the crew members are civilians, ordinary people swept up in something most didn’t knowingly sign up for.
The flight attendants were most concerned about their inability to treat their passengers humanely and to keep them safe.
They worried about what would happen in an emergency. Could they really get over a hundred chained passengers off the plane in time?
“They never taught us anything regarding the immigration flights,” one said. “They didn’t tell us these people were going to be shackled, wrists to fucking ankles.”
“It’s only a matter of time,” one attendant said, before a deportation flight ends in disaster.
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