ICE flight refuels in Ireland again; Irish activist pressed police to investigate

A private jet conducting an ICE removal flight has landed in Ireland for a seventh time since last May, flight data shows. 

The aircraft, a Gulfstream V operated by ICE charter Journey Aviation, left the ICE hub of Mesa, AZ, at 2:28 a.m. local time Wednesday, and landed at Shannon Airport eight and a half  hours later. 

“There is very strong evidence that human trafficking is happening here,” said John Lannon with the activist group Shannon Watch. He said he had called the Gardaí (Irish police) and asked them to inspect the aircraft – as is the group’s standard practice. After pressing several officials, he said he was told a police car was going up to investigate but had not gotten a response about what happened before the plane took off again.

This story will be updated once the aircraft arrives at its destination. 

Wednesday’s flight comes amid increased criticism in Ireland of the Trump administration’s cruel treatment of migrants, including an Irish man named Seamus Culleton who has spent nearly five months in an ICE detention center he described to the Irish Times as “like a concentration camp, absolute hell.” 

In January, a Journey ICE flight that refueled in Shannon carried eight shackled Palestinians to Tel Aviv, where they were transferred to a check point in the West Bank, first reported by Haaretz. A second Journey ICE flight landed in Tel Aviv via Shannon on Feb. 2.

All adult migrants and some children on ICE flights are shackled at the wrists and ankles attached to a chain around their waists.

‘It’s an obscenity’

The Irish people in general have long supported the Palestinian cause, and members of Shannon Watch and the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign demonstrated outside the airport last weekend to protest its use by US military planes helping Israel in its genocidal campaign on Gaza, and by ICE for removal of Palestinians and others. 

“To hear that Palestinians were held in shackles on the tarmac at Shannon Airport is just really disgusting,” Zoe Lawlor, a member of the IPSC, told me. “It’s an obscenity that not only are we facilitating the US military, but we’re now facilitating the US government and Trump’s fascist goons in ICE, the people who killed Keith Porter, Alex Pretti and Renee Good.”  

Journey ICE flights have landed in Ireland with shackled migrants onboard at least seven times since last May, flight data shows. At least three of those flights carried migrants of a variety of nationalities who ended up in prisons in South Sudan, Eswatini and Rwanda – countries to which they have no ties.

MORE: Tracking Trump’s Third-Country Removals

A fourth, previously unreported Journey ICE flight landed in Cairo via Shannon on Dec. 6. Nothing is known about the migrants on this flight, but Egypt has been used multiple times by another ICE airline, Omni Air International, for transfer deportations of Russian dissidents and asylum-seekers to Moscow. 

“There is evidence that there are people who have been subjected to cruel and degrading treatment while on Irish soil,” Lannon said. “And our argument is that when the planes land, in the same way that our police, the Gardaí, can and do get on buses to check who is on the buses, then they are quite within their rights to do the same at the airport. And we’ve had enough incidents of planes from companies like Journey Aviation to indicate that there may well be breaches of national and international law here.”

While the leftist news site The Ditch has covered the flights for months, and a few lawmakers have raised the issue in Ireland’s parliament, the Dáil, Irish government officials have so far avoided answering questions about if the treatment of the migrants on the flights violates Irish law. On Monday, the Department of Transport told the Irish Times: “Stops at Irish airports by private aircraft and commercial charters which are technical stops for non-traffic purposes (ie, not picking up or setting down passengers), do not require prior authorisation from the Department of Transport.”

MAGA Billionaire’s Jet Does ICE Flight to Sierra Leone

The same Journey aircraft that did the ICE flights to Israel landed in Sierra Leone Tuesday, following ICE’s usual southern route through San Juan, Puerto Rico, according to flight data.

Notably, Journey leases this aircraft from Zionist MAGA billionaires with close ties to Trump. Father and son developers Michael and Gil Dezer built several Trump-branded condos in the 2000s and have maintained close ties with Trump over the years. Their aircraft was first used for ICE removal flights last October, as I first reported for Zeteo, and since then has been used for ICE at least five more times. 

The ultrarich often lease their private jets to charter airlines like Journey part-time in exchange for a massive tax break Trump instituted in his first term. 

Gil Dezer feigned ignorance of ICE’s use of his plane to The Guardian last week, despite my repeated calls and emails to his offices in Florida and New York last fall. And now that his awareness of the flights is a matter of public record? Well, as the flight data shows, his collaboration with ICE continues.