MAGA Inc.: CSI Aviation

Plane spotters have long been able to track celebrities like Taylor Swift as well as clandestine U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) flights to Guantánamo Bay, for example, by monitoring their flight logs that are listed on public websites using tail numbers—identifiers for planes similar to license plates on vehicles—and air traffic call signs (a set of characters used by pilots when communicating with controllers on the ground).

(Click here for the table of contents of MAGA Inc.: A Guide to Trump's World of Crypto Czars, Tech Titans and Prison Profiteers.) 

But two months after Trump became president in 2025, a group of airlines on contract to CSI Aviation, started to ask flight-tracking websites to stop publishing their tail numbers. These companies also suddenly switched to using the air traffic call sign “Tyson,” which is the sign that Trump used for his personal plane during his first presidential term.

Investigations by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and immigration advocacy group La Resistencia quickly spotted that CSI Aviation was the air charter company hired to transport migrants for Trump's mass deportation campaign conducted by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

“Nobody has usually ever heard of the[se] airlines,” Scott Keyes, founder of Going.com, a flight deals site, told CBS MoneyWatch, a finance news division of CBS News. “They are charter airlines that don’t have a set schedule on a website.”

Publicly-available flight tail numbers are vital “to be able to understand how ICE is conducting its enforcement and deportation activities,” Eunice Cho, senior counsel for the ACLU National Prison Project, an initiative committed to criminal justice reform, told CNN television. “Sometimes this is the only information that the public has with respect to where ICE is placing people because of a general lack of transparency around detention and deportation under this particular administration.” 

Activists were sharply critical. “Families can’t trace where their loved ones are being sent, they’re just being disappeared…..If we can’t observe how human beings are being treated, we are worried human rights will be violated,” Guadalupe Gonzalez, a spokesperson for La Resistencia, told CNN.

“These ICE flights represent a system operating in darkness,” said Savi Arvey, director of research and analysis for refugee protection at Human Rights First, a nonprofit human rights advocacy organization, in a press release. “People are disappearing…all without transparency or due process.”

CSI Aviation

CSI Aviation is a shadowy private flight broker and medical transport services provider founded in 1979 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, by Allen Weh, a retired Marine Corps colonel. It has been awarded some US$2.9 billion in federal contracts since 2008, largely by ICE, according to data posted by the federal government. The most recent was a no-bid contract worth up to US$585.5 million, which went into effect in March 2025, to deport migrants.

As a broker, CSI typically sub-contracts to smaller outfits like Avelo Airlines, Eastern Air, Eastern Air Express, GEO Group, GlobalX, Kaiser, Key Lime Air, OMNI Air and World Atlantic (Caribbean Sun), according to Human Rights First.

The company’s past operations have attracted allegations of mistreatment. For example, in 2017, 92 refugees were placed in shackles for almost 48 hours on a CSI-contracted deportation flight headed for Somalia. “The guards did not loosen the shackles, even when the deportees told them that the shackles were painful because they were too tight, that their arms and legs were swollen and were bruised,” their lawyers wrote in a class action complaint that was filed with a federal court in Florida.

That same year, a plane operated by World Atlantic for CSI Aviation carrying 129 detainees from Miami to an ICE center in Louisiana was forced to land in Georgia after the cabin filled with smoke and fumes. “Passengers started to yell, telling me to open the door, but the plane was still moving,” a senior flight attendant said in an incident report. “This time the smoke was getting thicker and much more visible.”  

Abuse Allegations                                        

The Trump administration initially vowed to deport as many as 1 million people by the end of 2025. A total of 2,138 removal flights to 79 countries have been recorded between Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025 and December 31, 2025, amounting to a 44 percent spike over the same time in 2024.

As the number of weekly ICE deportation flights have increased, so have tales of alleged abuse.

On January 24, 2025, a GlobalX plane flew to Brazil, carrying 88 passengers. “On the plane they didn’t give us water, we were tied hands and feet, they wouldn’t even let us go to the bathroom,” deportee Edgar Da Silva Moura told the AFP news agency.

“The most difficult moment was when the air conditioning broke down in the air; people started feeling sick, some fainted, and the children were crying,” Kaleb Barbosa, one of the other passengers, told G1, a Brazilian news website. “The engines were shutting down during the flight; it was terrifying, like something out of a movie.” 

“It was terrible, I was handcuffed by my arms, legs, and waist; they didn’t respect us. They beat us. They said they were going to let the plane be shot down and that our government was worthless,” Carlos Vinícius de Jesus, another passenger, told G1.

Five days later, a GlobalX aircraft carrying 40 passengers traveled to Honduras. “They brought me here in chains from last night until we arrived. We are not criminals,” Dagoberto Portillo, one of the deportees said, according to El Heraldo, a Honduran newspaper.

Flight Attendants Blow the Whistle

Flight attendants on GlobalX planes have shared stories of how migrants were treated by ICE security guards, with ProPublica, an investigative journalism newsroom.

“Lala” - a former flight attendant who asked to use her nickname - explained that ICE guards prohibited the flight attendants from most regular procedures such as speaking to the passengers, giving them food or making eye contact. The attendants were also forbidden from walking down aisles without a security guard and from sitting in aisle seats next to the passengers or wearing the company-issued scarves (in case passengers grabbed them).

“Not being able to serve them, not being able to look at them, I didn’t think it was right,” Lala told ProPublica.

Another attendant recounted an experience of attempting to give snacks on a flight filled with children. “The chaperones were like, ‘Don’t give them any food,’” the attendant told ProPublica. “And I’m like, ‘Where is your humanity?’” 

The flight attendants were also shocked that the passengers were chained up. “They never taught us anything regarding the immigration flights,” another attendant told ProPublica. “They didn’t tell us these people were going to be shackled, wrists to fucking ankles.”

Some migrants were even placed in a full-body WRAP, a straitjacket-meets-sleeping-bag restraining device. One flight attendant described it as getting “burritoed.” 

Attendants say that they are not informed on what to do with the shackled prisoners in case of an emergency evacuation, despite the fact that this is one of the highest priority tasks in their job.

One flight attendant said they were often told: “‘If a fire occurs in the cabin, if we land on water, don’t check on the immigrants. Just make sure that you and the guards and the people that work for the government get off.’”

Current and former employees of Avelo Airlines (which was another major CSI subcontractor until recently) have shared stories and concerns similar to GlobalX’s employees.

One anonymous Avelo employee told the American Prospect magazine that shackled migrants have been often held onboard for hours on end when flights were delayed, forcing some passengers to relieve themselves in their seats.

A former Avelo flight attendant told Arizona’s Family news platform that migrants on deportation flights are unable to move quickly because they are weighed down by their shackles and struggle to buckle themselves in. “Any flight attendant, any aviation professional, anybody can look at that situation and say that it’s a disaster waiting to happen,” he said. 

Indeed, on November 13, 2025, an Avelo ICE flight carrying 88 people was forced to make a rapid emergency landing due to cabin pressure loss, leaving six people injured and experiencing nosebleeds, according to the American Prospect.  

Piercing the Black Box

In an attempt to peel back the curtain on CSI’s clandestine deportation operations, Tom Cartwright, a 72-year-old former J.P. Morgan executive turned refugee advocate, started a project to track ICE flights for Witness at the Border. 

“There is no disclosure, there is no reporting, this is by design not transparent,” Cartwright told the Verge, a technology news website. “People deserve to know what is happening.” 

From January 2020 to July 2025, Cartwright tracked over 40,000 ICE flights, using free aviation-tracking apps. He triangulated information from data like the company name, aircraft registration and airport to figure out if a plane was carrying migrants.

“People who needed help started reaching out to me. For example, a lawyer with a client about to be deported to Ecuador would contact me to ask when the next deportation flight to Ecuador would be so he could make sure a family member would be there to meet him,” Cartwright told El País newspaper. “By analyzing the data, I can tell him the next flight will most likely depart from this location, on this day, at this time. That’s deeply gratifying. It’s behind the scenes, but it makes a real difference.” 

“His work brings essential transparency to U.S. government actions impacting thousands of lives and stands as a powerful example of citizen-driven accountability in defense of human rights and democracy,” Uzrz Zeya, CEO of Human Rights First, told the Associated Press news agency. (Human Rights First now operates the ICE Flight Monitor started by Cartwright.)

Cartwright is not the only person tracking CSI's charter network. A military veteran who goes by the name “JJ in DC” on Bluesky routinely tracks deportation flights. He sounded the alarm about then-CSI subcontractor, Avelo, covering its branding on its planes in all-white paint to try to keep deportations under the radar.
  
And volunteers at Seattle watch live video feeds on local county-operated cameras to take notes of flight tail numbers and the number of migrants embarking and disembarking from aircraft.

Company Response

When senior Democrats on the Homeland Security Committee in the U.S. Congress asked Allen Weh to provide details of CSI’s activities and subcontractor network, referencing allegations of “dangerous conditions” on flights, the company deferred the questions to ICE, stating that their work was legal and “strictly operational.”