Air Marshals are being pulled from commercial flights to ‘serve sandwiches and check lice' on ICE deportation flights

CNN

6 days ago

President Donald Trump has vowed to carry out the largest deportation operation in American history, and his administration has been tapping employees from across the government to aid his ambitions of removing a million immigrants a year.
That now includes, for the first time, using Federal Air Marshals to guard some of the thousands of deportation flights operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement this year.
The Federal Air Marshal Service was created in response to a rise in airplane hijackings in the 1960s and tasked with stopping terrorists after the 9/11 attacks. But since June, some 200 Air Marshals have also been redeployed to provide security on flights filled with detainees in ICE custody, who are being shuffled from detention centers around the US, or deported to a growing number of ICE Air destination countries, according to sources and documents seen by CNN.
The unprecedented arrangement has sparked concerns that marshals are being diverted from guarding against potential national security threats onboard commercial passenger planes.
Instead, according to two sources familiar with the matter and documents seen by CNN, these highly trained agents are taking ICE assignments — some, willingly, others, under intense pressure from supervisors — where they are serving sandwiches and acting as flight security guards.
The Air Marshal National Council, a group that lobbies for Air Marshals' interests, this month sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, which oversees the Federal Air Marshals, accusing the Trump administration of undermining security on commercial aircraft by redeploying Air Marshals onto ICE Air flights. The group says they've also filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general.
The ICE redeployments 'undermine aviation and national security and expose federal officers to unsafe and improper working conditions,' the Air Marshal National Council said, citing concerns that marshals on these flights were unarmed while transporting passengers.
The council also pointed out that the federal government has hired a private contractor, GEO Group subsidiary GEO Transport, to provide security onboard ICE deportation flights.
Sonya LaBosco, the executive director of the group, says marshals are being deployed to essentially work as security guards for the private contractor, and to perform duties including checking for lice and cleaning aircraft.
The council contends that GEO Group is using unarmed government agents to provide onboard security for ICE flights—a job the company was contracted and being paid to do.
LaBosco was concerned that this highly unusual arrangement could constitute 'contract fraud,' with public employees doing the work covered by the company's contract.
'We are supplementing a billion-dollar company's security staff for these deportation flights,' she said.
Asked to comment on these concerns, Russel Read, a spokesman for TSA told CNN in a statement: 'TSA's Federal Air Marshals are proud to support our ICE colleagues by providing in-flight security functions for select [ICE] flights. This new initiative is part of the interagency effort to support the President's mandate and DHS's mission to secure the homeland.'
The GEO Group referred CNN's questions to ICE, an agency overseen by DHS.
The company announced last year that it had secured a five-year contract deal with ICE worth $25 million a year 'to provide air operations support services,' though it was unclear whether this was the contract the AMNC's complaint was referring to.
In a letter responding to the Council reviewed by CNN, TSA said the redeployments were in line with Trump's immigration goals. The agency had assessed risks, TSA said, and found that it 'has not impacted Federal Air Marshals' deployment on domestic and international flights to assess, address, and mitigate varying potential risks and threats to transportation and travelers.'
For decades, the US government has used flights for deportations, dating back to the 1940s and 1950s. Flights have taken place under recent Democratic as well as Republican administrations, but in Trump's second term, they have been turbocharged.
Not only has there been an uptick in removal flights, but also domestic flights within the US to transport deportees between local airports in towns and cities across the country, including some that had previously never hosted ICE flights.
According to Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that tracks immigration activity, since Trump took office in January to June, flights have increased 34% — to 4,748 flights — when compared to the same time period in 2024. The group has used publicly available flight tracking information to monitor ICE flights since 2020.
This number includes moving detainees domestically between ICE facilities as ICE agents ramp up immigration raids in cities nationwide.
In June alone, Witness at the Border says there were 209 deportation flights to 41 foreign countries, and nearly 700 domestic 'shuffle flights' of ICE detainees being moved around within the country.
To supplement the huge undertaking, ICE has relied on several other parts of the federal government, including the US Marshals Service, FBI and, now, the TSA's Federal Air Marshals division.
According to the sources who spoke to CNN, Federal Air Marshals assigned to ICE flights are now sometimes collecting thousands of dollars in overtime pay. Though marshals have been used to aid with immigration operations at the border in the past, they have not previously been used on deportation flights.
'They're just walking the aisles and handing out ham sandwiches. They get overtime, it's an easy gig with little responsibility,' according to one source familiar with the deployments.
The source quipped that the marshals are essentially 'serving as highly paid guards' aboard the flights.
According to an internal DHS memorandum seen by CNN, TSA agreed to provide as many as 250 marshals to ICE for its flight operations. TSA employs between 2,000 and 3,000 Air Marshals in total.
One Air Marshal who had been placed on a 5-day deployment to provide security on a deportation flight bound for West Africa gave a sense of the job as being filled with unpredictability. The person arrived for the assignment, only to find the flight delayed, and spent three days waiting by the pool for what amounted to a 'vacation' before the next flight.
The Air Marshal Association, the union representing Air Marshals, said they supported the redeployments. 'The Federal Air Marshal mission has lost its focus under TSA, so assisting with criminal alien deportations allows our highly skilled agents to perform a vital security function while we wait for lawmakers to create a standalone Federal Air Marshal agency,' its president, John Casaretti, told CNN in a statement.
However, redeployments have drawn serious concerns from others.
'After 9/11 the only job we [Air Marshals] have is to thwart another hijacking on a commercial passenger plane,' LaBosco, of the Air Marshal National Council, told CNN. 'We should be using federal air marshals for the job they should be doing.'
GEO Group is just one company in an ecosystem of firms that allows the complex US deportation system to work.
Besides a vast network of local airports, there are private and commercial charter flight companies; aviation partners for on-the-ground logistics and refueling; and even providers of passenger boarding steps and security onboard aircraft.
'Right from the early days, Immigration Naturalization Services [the precursor to ICE] were fielding offers and soliciting offers and also receiving unsolicited offers from people looking to make a buck off of the business of deportation,' says Adam Goodman, author of 'The Deportation Machine' and professor at the University of Illinois Chicago.
With the passage of the president's tax and spending package, some $14 billion will be allotted to ICE flights, according to DHS.
Plans are underway to bolster the federal government's fleet to carry out more deportations, according to senior Trump officials. Both established players and new companies not previously involved in ICE flights and detentions are vying for contracts.
Asked about ICE's deportation flights operations plans, a DHS spokeswoman said: 'ICE's goal is to swiftly remove illegal aliens from this country. The sooner ICE removes dangerous criminal aliens from our nation, the safer our entire country will become.'
Priscilla Alvarez, Holmes Lybrand and Aaron Cooper contributed to this report.