Hidden in Plain Sight: ICE Air and the Machinery of Mass Deportation

  • Date: April 23, 2019
Hidden in Plain Sight ICE Air report cover

At the request of immigrant community organizations in Washington state, in 2018 the University of Washington Center for Human Rights filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for data about deportation flights operating at the King County International Airport (Boeing Field), and obtained an extract from ICE’s Alien Repatriation Tracking System (ARTS) specific to that airport. Recognizing the importance of understanding these patterns at a national level, we then filed a request for the entire ARTS database. In December 2018, we obtained the national dataset analyzed in this report. We believe this is the first time any portion of the ARTS database has been made public, and that its release can shed significant light on both the structure of the ICE Air network and the collaboration of public authorities in its operations.