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ICE Surges Deportations at Hanscom as More Demand Transparency

ByToby Sackton

The week of August 16th there were 3 ICE flights from Hanscom taking 73 Massachusetts residents away from their families to be scattered in prisons around the country. The next week starting the 23rd, there were 7 flights, taking 174 chained and shackled residents to unknown prisons, a 133% increase.

We know about this because of a dedicated group of “birders” who, at risk of harassment, document each ICE flight and count the number of detainees. But at Boeing Field in Seattle, King County has installed a web cam to provide a public view of the ICE flights, and they publish the number of people from Seattle flown out on each flight.

There is no excuse for Massport to oppose facilitating transparency around ICE flights. It is legal and in the purview of the airport operator. Although we cannot prevent these flights directly until we win political power in DC, we can document all ICE operations that take place on Massachusetts State property.

Our demand for full transparency has united all of the groups working to oppose ICE deportations from Hanscom. The DE-ICE Hanscom coalition, of which Lexington Alarm is a founding member, has begun a postcard campaign to Massport and Gov. Healey.
The Hanscom Field Advisory Commission sent a letter to Massport demanding transparency and that they consider a web cam.

Too many of our neighbors in Lexington and nearby towns simply are not aware of the vast movement of shackled and imprisoned humans that represents one of the worst human rights abuses in U.S. history, similar to the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. In both cases, detainees broke no criminal laws and were abiding by all US civil procedures when they were rounded up, separated from their families and communities, and sent to prison camps.
For most of this year the best information anyone has had about ICE operations at Hanscom has come from a small group of “birders” standing on public ground with long lenses and binoculars. Using Habeas Flight Watch, the monitoring system we built after a December 2025 meeting with the Governor’s staff on Hanscom issues that now tracks ICE air operations nationally, we know when flights are due at Hanscom, even surprise ones not on any regular schedule.

That is what happened at the end of August. Instead of the normal pattern of 3 flights a week, between Sunday, August 23rd and Saturday, August 29th there were 7 flights. 171 men and 3 women were shackled and put on these flights. The Hanscom flights go on to other destinations. Many times the flights go directly to Alexandria, Louisiana where there is a major deportation prison staging facility. But that week six of the seven flights went to Indianapolis, then on to Denver where new prison space is now available, or Alexandria, La. These may be staging areas for the crackdown on Haitians which is currently underway in Ohio. ICE normally clears out detention facilities in an area prior to a surge, and we believe the many flights to Indianapolis were connected to this.

Transparency is dangerous to ICE, which is why they fight it so much. Each flight at Hanscom is met by a convoy of transport buses, black SUVs, a fuel truck and even Mass. State Police vehicles. They park to obscure the aircraft boarding as much as possible. They have tried to put up screens on airport fences in some locations. The obstruction is the tell. An operation with nothing to hide does not spend effort on sight lines.

The value of the record is not abstract. A Brockton woman from Ecuador was in ICE custody and her family was told nothing. We had the Hanscom flight dates and destinations and could tell them that none of the flights that day connected to Ecuador. Two days later the family learned she was being held in Michigan. LUCE, the immigrant assistance group, confirmed she was still in the country. In Indianapolis, video of teenagers being walked onto a plane got widely promoted on social media and changed what that city understood about what was happening at its own airport. Documentation can sometimes give families the location of the person they have lost and confirmation of where they are. It can give attorneys the jurisdictional facts a habeas petition requires and it gives reporters something they can publish.

We are not alone in reaching this conclusion. Over the past year activists have gone to airport authority boards in Detroit, Indianapolis, Denver, Dallas, Salt Lake City and San Francisco with the same demand: publish the flights and let the public watch. In Twin Falls, Idaho — not a blue county — volunteers film transfer flights every Tuesday and Thursday and have documented hundreds of detainees flown out by late August. The Reno-Tahoe Airport Authority admitted it learned of ICE activity at its own airport by monitoring social media.

Seattle is the paradigm of transparency. Having lost a court fight to ban the flights, King County Executive, operator of Boeing Field, built the alternative: a public log of every ICE flight into and out of Boeing Field, posted weekly; four cameras livestreamed 24 hours a day; a county employee whose job is to observe and log the flights; and a written policy protecting the right to stand there and watch. It is running today. It is lawful. It exists because a public airport operator had the will to build it.

Massport can build the same thing, and Hanscom’s four town advisory body has formally asked it to. On August 14, HFAC Chair Margaret Coppe wrote to Massport’s Hanscom director conveying two motions passed unanimously at the commission’s August 11 meeting: that Massport treat all observers in public areas equally, with no limits on duration or recording; and that Massport provide publicly viewable web cameras covering every detainee transfer, explicitly modeled on Boeing Field. HFAC asked for an answer by its September 15 meeting.

Massport has not done anything the community has asked for to increase the transparency of ICE human trafficking at Hanscom. Without pressure it will not do so here either. So DE-ICE Hanscom, the coalition of which Lexington Alarm is a founding member, has begun a postcard campaign to the Massport board and the Governor. The ask is short, and it requires no change in federal law: open the tarmac to public view.

We are clear about what this does and does not accomplish. Cameras at Hanscom will not end the shackling. They will not end the targeting of people who have lived and worked here for decades, and they will not bring back anyone already flown to a country they left as a child. That ends when we take political power in Washington and not before.

But the record makes the accounting possible. Every flight logged, every date, every destination, every video of people in chains becomes evidence that this happened here, in our name, at our airport. ICE wants to operate in secret so they will never be held accountable. We will not allow that. When we say ‘Never Again’, and the reckoning comes, we will have some of the evidence and documentation to prosecute ICE crimes, and to make sure in Congress that such abuses can never happen to immigrants in our country again.

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