ICE deportation flight leaves NH after 31 hours, exposes chronic problems
Local officials, activists and a former Omni flight attendant slammed the airline and ICE's decision not to cancel the scheduled deportation.
An ICE-chartered deportation plane holding shackled migrants took off from Portsmouth, NH, Tuesday morning, 31 hours after it landed there for what was supposed to be a brief refueling stop.
Photos taken by local activist group Pease Watch showed migrants who appeared to be South Asian men and women reboarding the Boeing 767 operated by Omni Air International at 6 a.m. local time. The plane took off about two hours later bound for Sofia, Bulgaria, a regular ICE refueling stop, and is expected to land around 4 p.m. ET.
The plane left Harlingen, TX, at 9:13 p.m. ET on Sunday and landed in Portsmouth just after 1 a.m. Monday. It remained stuck on the tarmac for 14 hours, during the height of the blizzard. The aircraft had heat throughout the ordeal, and caterers provided food, to the shackled migrants, federal agents, ICE-contracted guards, and the crew onboard, DHS officials said.
The aircraft was finally towed to an auxiliary terminal on Monday afternoon, where passengers disembarked. Migrants were held in the terminal overnight.
DHS did not say whether the migrants remained shackled in the terminal, but migrants deported on a number of Omni ICE flights that experienced long delays in recent months all remained shackled, according to interviews with migrants, immigration attorneys and former Omni flight attendants.
An activist flight tracker who goes by "JJ in DC" said he was shocked to read from news stories that Portsmouth airport officials learned of the incoming aircraft only 15 minutes before it landed. He knew about it early Saturday evening, hours before it took off from Harlingen, TX, and predicted then that if the flight went on as planned it would get stuck in the blizzard.
"[ICE's] addiction to 'secrecy' is self-destructive," JJ said.
Many Omni employees have quit in recent months over what three former Omni flight attendants described to me as the airline's unsafe practices and cruel treatment of migrant passengers on ICE flights. When told about the flight into a blizzard and the subsequent delay, one of them told me, "That sounds insane, but it also sounds just like Omni."
A day before this flight, another likely ICE flight operated by Omni landed at Portsmouth and sat on the tarmac for 7 1/2 hours before returning to Alexandria, LA, an ICE detention center hub. It had been scheduled to fly to Sofia, Bulgaria. The reason for the delay and the aborted trip is unclear, though flight data and air-traffic control transmissions indicate the aircraft's pressurization system may have been malfunctioning.
In December, an Omni ICE flight sat on the tarmac at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport for more than 10 hours before returning to El Paso, flight data shows. A former Omni employee with knowledge of the flight said the delay was caused by a mechanical issue, adding, "They just push the maintenance back and back and back, because they don’t make money when they’re not in the air." Flight data shows the plane restarted its deportation trip more than a day later. An immigration attorney who had clients on this trip told me his clients were shackled for 82 hours straight.
In October, another Omni ICE flight sat on the tarmac at BWI for 6 1/2 hours before returning to Alexandria and restarting its trip the next day, flight data shows. A Laotian man deported on that trip told me he was shackled for 72 hours.
Omni has not responded to a request for comment. This story will be updated if they do. Omni and its parent company were sold to private-firm Stonepeak last April. Since then, its ICE flights have quadrupled, according to my analysis of flight data published in Mother Jones.
The blizzard-grounded plane was likely the seventh Omni ICE flight to land in Portsmouth so far in 2026. Previous flights made deportation stops in Armenia, Egypt, India (three times), Kuwait, Kyrgystan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan. The stop in Egypt was a transfer deportation of Russian nationals; the stop in Kuwait was a transfer deportation of Iranian nationals, according to Human Rights First.
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