Greater than a dozen ICE detainees are taken onto a aircraft in shackles Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025 at Minneapolis-Saint Paul Worldwide Airport. (Photograph by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)
When Marco Azogue climbed the steps onto a aircraft parked on the tarmac of Minneapolis-St. Paul Worldwide Airport, shackled on the wrists and ankles, he assumed the aircraft was taking him to his dwelling nation of Ecuador.
Not one of the brokers or aircraft workers spoke Spanish. They didn’t reply him when he requested the place they had been going, or whether or not they would give him his belongings — his pockets and telephone, which he hadn’t seen in days.
“We had no thought the place we had been going — they didn’t give us a proof for the place they had been taking us,” Azogue mentioned in Spanish in an interview with the Reformer.
The aircraft, it turned out, was headed for Louisiana. Brokers loaded Azogue and different immigrants right into a van, which drove for a number of hours into the countryside. Azojue would spend a number of days in an immigrant detention middle in Little Pines, Louisiana, earlier than being ushered onto one other aircraft, this time certain for Ecuador.
Azogue was swept up within the mass deportation effort ushered in by the election of Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress, which has poured cash into efforts to beef up the infrastructure wanted to expel immigrants by the lots of of 1000’s.
A person lays out shackles on the tarmac as greater than a dozen ICE detainees are taken onto a aircraft Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025 at Minneapolis-Saint Paul Worldwide Airport. (Photograph by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)
The exercise is in every single place, if the place to look: Minnesota will quickly be dwelling to a U.S. Customs and Border Safety facility on the St. Paul Downtown Airport, MPR reported just lately. The Trump administration is contemplating reopening a closed non-public jail in Appleton as an immigrant detention middle. The sheriff’s places of work in eight Minnesota counties have agreed to help ICE in deportation actions.
Vacationers passing by way of MSP stroll and drive by immigrants like Azogue weekly as aviation corporations employed by the Division of Homeland Safety perform deportations from the state’s largest airport. Deportation flights had been traceable for years utilizing standard monitoring web sites, however the federal authorities has just lately taken steps to obscure the flight data from the general public.
Most deportation flights are carried out by non-public constitution planes, in response to ProPublica. Flight attendants working them instructed ProPublica they weren’t allowed to talk to detainees or present them with meals or water.
On the morning of Nov. 12, three unmarked white vans pulled right into a again entrance to the airport. They drove throughout the tarmac, the place a aircraft operated by Key Lime Air was ready.
The vans pulled right into a semicircle surrounding the steps resulting in the aircraft door. Then brokers patted down round 20 immigrants earlier than they climbed one-by-one — slowly, shackled — up the steps and into the aircraft.
A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Airports Fee, which oversees MSP, mentioned federal legislation prevents MSP from limiting entry to public or non-public plane operators.
“The Metropolitan Airports Fee doesn’t coordinate or get any advance notification of normal aviation or non-commercial flight operations at MSP Airport, which would come with authorities owned or operated plane,” the spokesperson mentioned.
ICE detainees are pushed to the tarmac earlier than being taken onto a aircraft in shackles Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025 at Minneapolis-Saint Paul Worldwide Airport. (Photograph by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)
Nick Benson, a photographer and longtime planespotter, has noticed deportation flights since earlier than President Donald Trump’s second time period. However the frequency of deportation flights appears to be rising, he mentioned, and he’s involved by efforts to obscure the motion of the flights from the general public.
Benson makes use of open supply data to find incoming and outgoing deportation flights, and shares his pictures and observations on-line.
“I feel it’s essential for individuals within the Twin Cities to understand that each one of these items isn’t simply one thing that occurs in Chicago or Portland or elsewhere — that it’s occurring right here too…. I feel it’s historic, and it’s value realizing and documenting that it occurs,” Benson mentioned.
Judges have discovered that Trump’s immigration authorities have violated the due course of rights of detainees. Civil rights legal professionals cost that the administration has turned to previously off-limits strategies for arresting individuals: utilizing tax knowledge, concentrating on faculty grounds and church buildings and arresting individuals as they exit courtroom appointments.
Benson mentioned he’s noticed deportation flights out of MSP on planes owned by Key Lime Air, often known as Denver Air Connection; Jap Air Specific; and, up till a couple of months in the past, GlobalX. The airways use house and providers from Signature Aviation, which runs a personal plane terminal at MSP. Not one of the corporations responded to Reformer requests for remark.
“The airline corporations, they don’t seem to be solely complicit, however they’re accountable. They’re making an energetic selection to choose income from the federal authorities over human lives,” mentioned Drew Harmon, chair of Minnesota 50501, a progressive grassroots group organized in response to the second Trump time period.
ICE detainees look out the window of a aircraft after being led onto it in shackles Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025 at Minneapolis-Saint Paul Worldwide Airport. (Photograph by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)
Azogue, one of many deportees who handed by way of MSP, was arrested on the federal courthouse at Fort Snelling after a listening to in his asylum case, he mentioned.
He was below the impression that he would have an opportunity to attraction his case in a future listening to. He has no felony file. When he exited the courtroom, brokers arrested him.
“We present up for courtroom trustingly, pondering we’re doing all the pieces proper, however what we don’t know is that after we get there, it’s like a trick,” Azogue mentioned in Spanish.
He landed in Guayaquíl, Ecuador, hours from the mountain city the place his household lives. When he landed, he had $40, no method to contact his household, and no entry to the small financial savings he’d constructed whereas cleansing industrial buildings in a single day in Minneapolis. He purchased a bus ticket with the money and borrowed a telephone from the lady sitting subsequent to him so he might let his household know he was on his means.