The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California is suing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain records revealing how the agency intends to carry out President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportation and detention plan.
The suit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court, demands that ICE disclose contracts for commercial and charter flights as well as ground transportation and internal procedures necessary to deport noncitizen detainees, including those with unaccompanied children.
“The records sought, address a matter of great public concern,” the suit states. “Despite the critical role these flights play in the removal system — in many instances, serving as the mechanism for deportation — ICE Air remains shrouded in secrecy.”
The ACLU alleges that over the past few decades, the infrastructure of deportation flights has shifted from a government-run operation by the U.S. Marshals Service using federally owned planes to a “sprawling and opaque” network of flights on privately owned chartered aircraft.
“This secrecy has masked responsibility for serious abuses and danger on ICE Air flights,” states the suit. “ICE’s air removal operations are a matter of widespread media and public interest.”
ICE spokesperson Mike Alvarez said Tuesday the agency does not comment on ongoing or pending litigation.
The lawsuit was filed after ICE failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request from the ACLU in August. It follows Trump’s comments reiterating his promise to launch the largest deportation program in U.S. history on the first day of his second term beginning Jan. 20.
In 2023 under the Biden administration, ICE Air Operations conducted 1,178 flights, removing more than 142,000 noncitizens to more than 170 countries, including 69,902 who had been charged with or convicted of criminal activity, the agency said in a report.
Although ICE Air flights play a critical role in the removal process, details about its deportation infrastructure remain secret, according to the ACLU.
“This secrecy has masked responsibility for serious abuses and danger on ICE Air flights,” states the suit. “The information sought in the request will shed critical light on ICE’s removal processes and help to inform the public of the risks that would result if ICE Air’s capacity is further built out.”
Specifically, the ACLU is asking the court to order ICE to immediately release:
• All ICE contracts and records regarding air transportation to execute removals, including flights leaving the U.S. and domestic flights transporting noncitizens between detention sites.
• Documents containing information on what ground transportation is used to transfer noncitizens to airports for removal flights.
• Records showing the airfields ICE uses, or has access to, for removal.
• Memoranda and other documents regarding ICE’s policies or procedures for staging noncitizens, including unaccompanied children, for removal before flights.
Trump confirmed Monday he intends to declare a national emergency that would allow for deployment of the U.S. military to carry out the mass deportations, but has not offered specifics on how the operation would be accomplished.
“Little is known about how President-elect Trump would carry out his mass deportation agenda, but what we do know is that this proposal has already instilled fear among immigrant communities,” Eva Bitran, director of immigrants’ rights at ACLU SoCal, said in a statement. “The public has a right to know how its taxpayer dollars could be used to fund deportation flights that would tear apart not only families but also our communities.”
The unauthorized immigrant population in the U.S. grew to 11 million in 2022 but still is below the peak of 12.2 million in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center. Most of the population does not have criminal convictions.
In an October report, the American Immigration Council claimed mass deportations would be devastating to the U.S. budget and economy. The cost of a one-time mass deportation operation would total about $315 billion, according to the report. The price tag would include $89.3 billion for arrests, $167.8 billion for detainment, $34.1 billion for legal processing and $24.1 billion for removals.
It would cost $88 billion annually to deport 1 million immigrants per year, with the majority of the funds going toward building detention camps, the report states.
Additionally, mass deportation would hurt several key U.S. industries that rely heavily on undocumented workers, particularly the construction, agriculture and hospitality industries.
The American Immigration Council, an advocacy group, said it was unable to estimate the additional hiring costs for the tens of thousands of agents needed to carry out 1 million arrests per year, the capital investments necessary to increase the ICE Air Operations fleet of charter aircraft, and a myriad of other costs to ramp up federal immigration enforcement.
“To speak of the enormity of the fiscal and economic costs of mass deportation is not to minimize the importance of this suffering,” the report states. “It is to reinforce just how radical a step a deportation campaign targeting millions of undocumented immigrants, who have been so integral to the U.S. economy and American communities, would be.”
Other groups, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform, point out that illegal immigration is costing states as well as the federal government billions of dollars in social services to handle the influx of immigrants illegally crossing the southern border or seeking asylum.
In 2022, FAIR said, California spent the most on illegal immigration at $22 billion, followed by Texas at about $9 billion. They were followed by Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.