Several months ago, a coalition of clergy I am part of (CLEAR DFW) was instrumental in preventing the sale of an industrial warehouse to the Department of Homeland Security for the purposes of warehousing humans. We’ve known for some time that this effort, while something to be celebrated, wasn’t the end of the quiet fight against ICE in North Texas.
Now, local organizers with El Movimiento DFW working with national organizations Human Rights First and Lexington Alarm have been tracking flights from the government’s Ice Air Operations and confirm that fixed-base operator Atlantic Aviation is providing ICE a backdoor entrance to the city-owned Dallas Love Field Airport.
Love Field is unique in terms of airports. It’s owned by the city of Dallas and governed by the city’s Department of Aviation, which has oversight of Love Field and Dallas Executive Airport. That this city-owned airport is complicit in the trafficking of humans across the country should not go unnoticed by the city’s taxpayers.
Most Texans know Love Field as home base for Southwest Airlines. However, the in-town airport also has a separate commercial and private flight sector that does not operate out of the main terminal, which faces Mockingbird Lane. Instead, these other lesser-known flights operate out of often-overlooked buildings facing Lemmon Avenue.
The entire property is owned by the city, however — a city with a mayor twice elected as a Democrat but who became a Trump-supporting Republican four months after his reelection in 2023. The Dallas City Council, meanwhile, is embroiled in a hot controversy over plans to abandon the I.M. Pei-designed City Hall — perhaps to make way for another Trump ally to build a sports arena.
Fixed-base operators like Atlantic Aviation lease space at airports across the country and provide refueling and maintenance support for chartered planes. Atlantic Aviation isn’t the only FBO providing ICE access to airports and assisting in the shuttling of individuals across the country and to destinations outside the U.S. More recently, Signature Aviation drew the ire of Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey. As Healey noted in her letter to the CEO of Signature:
A significant majority of people detained by ICE … over the past year have no criminal convictions or charges. They are hard-working, productive and beloved members of our community who have been indiscriminately targeted for deportation proceedings.
The use of private flights has allowed ICE to supercharge these deportation efforts. ICE uses private flights to quickly remove residents and sever them from their family, friends, community, and legal counsel, obstructing due process of law. …
You are the charter companies’ point of contact, you ensure that the planes are fueled up, your personnel open the gates to allow ICE’s vehicles into the airport, and you escort ICE’s vehicles with detainees to the tarmac and into the deportation planes.
What Signature Aviation was doing for ICE at Hanscom Field, Atlantic Aviation is doing for ICE at Love Field.
What is especially noteworthy about Atlantic Aviation’s operation at Love Field is that the company currently has a countdown for the World Cup and encourages people to utilize its services as they travel to Dallas for this international event.
That a company advertising its services for the World Cup is secretly involved with transporting people detained under dubious legal circumstances is unconscionable.
What’s happening at Dallas Love Field and elsewhere is an open secret that deserves the public’s attention.
Air Wisconsin flight 7221 on Sunday, May 24, is the kind of flight observers have been tracking for months — with one notable exception. The flight arrived from Fort Hood, stopped at Dallas Love Field where a large group of shackled individuals were loaded onboard. From there, the flight went to Alexandria, La. That this flight originated from Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, rather than El Paso, which is home to Fort Bliss, is telling. While the public knows Fort Bliss is home to Camp East Montana (which has just been named in a lawsuit over the horrific conditions there), there is no publicly available information available about Fort Hood being used to detain immigrants.
Yet, flight records show Fort Hood is clearly part of the network for ICE Air. Since the flight on May 24 to Dallas Love Field, Air Wisconsin has flown two more chartered flights from Fort Hood to Love Field.
Air Wisconsin and Atlantic Aviation have something else in common: Money.
Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Atlantic Aviation’s parent company, KKR & Co., is reportedly exploring options for the FBO including a potential sale to Apollo Global Management in a deal worth $10 billion. Air Wisconsin recently was up for sale and was purchased by CSI Aviation, which is owned by former New Mexico Republican Party Chair Allen Weh. It is rapidly becoming a central part of ICE Air. The company has a $1.5 billion contract with DHS.
According to John Putnam, an organizer with El Movimiento DFW who has been tracking flights in and out of Atlantic Aviation’s terminal for months, domestic “shuffle flights” come through Love Field five or more times per week. The planes are owned by Eastern Airlines (based in Kansas City, Mo.) and Air Wisconsin (based in New Mexico). They often arrive from El Paso, pick up detainees in Dallas, and then fly to Harlingen, Texas, or Alexandria, La. (the “hub” of ICE Air). These flights shuttle immigrants from detention center to detention center and sometimes to staging sites for deportation.
Less frequently, Global Crossing Airlines (GlobalX based in Miami) flights have been documented coming from Phoenix and headed to Tapachula, Mexico, deporting immigrants.
As Gov. Healey noted in her letter to the FBO operating out of the airport near her, the majority of the people being transported by ICE Air are not criminals and instead are in the midst of some sort of legal process in our country. This fact was reported by the Libertarian think tank Cato Institute which, utilizing the government’s own data, released a report in fall 2025 showing 73% of those being detained by the Trump administration had no criminal convictions.
This raises the very real question of Atlantic Aviation, the city of Dallas, Air Wisconsin and others being complicit in what amounts to human trafficking by the U.S. government which international law defines as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of people through force, fraud or deception, with the aim of exploiting them for profit.”
Each of these entities is profiting from the movement of humans — the vast majority of whom are not criminals and are being deprived of their legal rights — across state and international borders. The textbook definition of human trafficking.
Mara Richards Bim
Mara Richards Bim serves as a Clemons Fellow with BNG and as program director at Faith Commons. She is a spiritual director and a recent master of divinity degree graduate from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater artist and founder of the nationally acclaimed Cry Havoc Theater Company which operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023.