Illegal immigrants get one-way trip home on ICE Air

Illegal immigrants get one-way trip home on ICE Air


By ERIC PALMER
The Kansas City Star


The MD-80 that took off Friday from Kansas City International Airport carried about 120 passengers. Some were headed for Mexico, others to Central and South America.

Once off the ground, food and beverages would be served.

The flight was one of up to 180 flights flown each month by Kansas City’s only locally based airline. While most are to Central and South America, others are to such exotic locales as Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Palestine.

Yet most Kansas Citians will never get a seat on one of the flights — nor would want to.

The little-known Flight Operations Unit was established by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2006 to handle the repatriation of the surging number of illegal immigrants caught up in tougher enforcement.

In fiscal 2008, which ended Sept. 30, the airline delivered more than 76,000 OTMs (other than Mexicans) back to their homes, a 51 percent jump from two years before. It also delivered abo ut 134,000 Mexicans, mostly to places like San Antonio or San Diego, before they were bused to20the border.

This year’s budget for all transportation and removal efforts is $281.4 million.

It is not unlike running Delta Air Lines, said Craig Charles, a 22-year veteran of the immigration service and a Shawnee Mission South High School graduate, who is now acting director of flight operations for what is known as ICE Air. It works to fill every seat on each plane to keep costs low, keep flights on time and treat its passengers well.

“We are all about cost-effectiveness and safety and getting these people back to their homeland as fast as we can,” Charles said in an interview Friday at the flight operations offices in the Briarcliff West development.

Most illegal immigrants have come in by land but all of them cannot be removed that way, said Pat Reilly, public affairs officer for ICE Air.

“Mexico is a sovereign nation and it doesn’t take people who are not entitled to be there either, so if they are other than Mexican, they have to be flown over Mexico,” Reilly said.

Speed means savings

ICE Air is an outgrowth of the Justice Prisoner and A lien Transportation System (JPATS), which moves federal prisoners as well as illegal immigrants. T hat system is headquartered in Kansas City, and Charles became the liaison from the immigration agency in 1996.

Initially, illegal aliens from countries other than Mexico were mostly moved on commercial aircraft.

With the formation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, ICE kept officers with JPATS to monitor movements of illegal immigrants. But by 2006, ICE was growing so fast that the JPATS system couldn’t keep up.

So ICE Air was formed.

ICE contracts with JPATS, which has four MD-80s, to handle domestic flights. It leases four 737s from private contractors to handle flights to Central and South America and the Caribbean. It also leases larger aircraft for less- frequent transcontinental flights to Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

All told, ICE Air flies to more than 190 countries.

Charles said his “customers” were the 24 ICE field offices that take custody of illegal immigrants and are responsible for their welfare until they are removed. That means housing, feeding and health care. Some are kept in ICE facilities, others in county jails through contract arrangements. So the faster ICE can fly them out, the less the cost is to taxpayers.

Rei lly said growth has been fed by beefed-up enforcement, particularly two programs:

One tries to identify every illegal immigrant booked into a county, state or federal jail. ICE arranges for their deportations while they serve jail time, and is waiting for them when they get out. They once were usually released when their time was served.

About a third of the “removals” last year came from this program.

The other enforcement effort involves 100 teams looking for the half-million illegal immigrants who have ignored legal orders to leave the country. The 38,000 arrests in fiscal 2008 that resulted from this initiative was twice the fiscal 2006 arrests.

Such efforts have forced the system to become more efficient. It has reduced the length of stay that illegal immigrants are in ICE custody from about 90 days to 30 days.

‘I wish to stay here’

It was a cloudless but cold and windy day Friday when a large tour bus, three vans and a Ford F-150 pulled into the driveway of Executive Beechcraft at KCI.

Of the 60 passengers, including one woman, only Horacio Hermoncillo, 22, agreed to discuss his journey. He sat in a van, handcuffed and shackled like the other deportees .

Hermoncillo came to the U.S. on a visa four yea rs ago for the money, then never went home. He knew a bit about fixing cars and landed as a mechanic in Chicago for a “great” man who he said taught him a lot. It allowed him to send money to his family.

But on a recent vacation to St. Louis, he was stopped by police and his illegal status was revealed.

He said he hoped to open a mechanic’s shop when he returned home. But he had mixed feelings about his return to Mexico.

“I wish to stay here. The money is better, but I’m going to my country,” Hermoncillo said. “My mom and brothers will make a big party with a lot of beer.”

Once the MD-80 landed, the buses and vans pulled into a semicircle next to the plane, creating a staging area.

Canvas, plastic and paper bags containing underwear and belts, cell phones and other belongings were laid on the tarmac as a phalanx of men in blue U.S. marshal uniforms and sunglasses disembarked. They were unarmed. Weapons are not allowed on the tarmac, or in the cabin of the plane.

Then in twos and threes, the illegal immigrants were taken off the bus and out of the vans. Some were dressed warmly, but others had only shorts and T-shirts. Each was patted down, and cuffs and shackles were checked to make sure they were not biting=2 0into skin before boarding.

The domestic flights, manned by the U.S. Marshals Service, require that the passengers be handcuffed and shackled onboard.

With the illegal immigrants already on the plane, the flight would have more than 120 passengers. Like any airline, ICE Air tries to fill every available seat to tamp down costs.

“It costs the American taxpayer around $700 a seat,” Charles said. “If we sent everybody on commercial airlines, we just couldn’t afford it.”

To use its planes to best advantage, ICE Air employs a system of spokes and hubs, like most airlines. It flies people in from nearly 20 cities, including a weekly flight to Kansas City to pick up the illegal immigrants rounded up from Kansas and Missouri.

Flights end up in hubs such as Mesa, Ariz., and San Antonio. From those hubs, Mexican nationals are bused to the Mexican border and released. Those other than Mexicans are combined and flown to other cities from which regularly scheduled international ICE Air flights take them to their home countries.

On the international flights, which are handled by ICE employees, all nonviolent, noncriminal passengers have the chains removed.

Reill y noted that when most illegal immigrants get into the ICE system, they have served t heir time.

“They have paid their debt to society and now they are being removed on immigration issues,” she said.

Onboard meals might be a sandwich, a bottle of water and an apple. No oranges because they are sticky and messy. No milk because it can cause upset stomachs. After all, this is the first time that many of these passengers have ever been on a plane. There is a nurse on every flight.

Treating well those being removed pays dividends in getting cooperation from other countries in managing immigration issues. But Charles said there was no reason not to.

“We really want to make a good impression on these people,” he said. “Those of us who have been around this for 20 years, we have seen the plight of these people. We can’t get personal with this but again, there is no reason whatsoever that we can’t treat them with as much respect as is possible. No one holds a grudge against these people.”