ICE Uses Celebrities’ Loophole to Hide Deportation Flights
Celebrities like Taylor Swift have long used a little-known Federal Aviation Administration program to shield their private jets’ flight records from public view. Now ICE is using the program to hide information about its deportation flights.
To obscure its planes, which ship immigrants out of the country on deportation flights, ICE is taking advantage of a long-standing program created by the private jet lobby. (Josue Decavele / Getty Images)
For years, the country’s rich and famous have used a little-known Federal Aviation Administration program to shield their private jets’ flight records from public view — among them Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, and Steven Spielberg.
Now this decades-old program has a new client: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass deportations.
To obscure its planes, which ship immigrants out of the country on deportation flights, ICE is taking advantage of a longstanding program created by the private jet lobby, The Lever can confirm. For years, the scheme has allowed celebrities and Wall Street CEOs to partially block their flight data from public view.
Its use by the Trump administration’s immigration enforcers is part of a mounting effort by ICE and its contracted private charter airlines to keep the planes’ flight paths hidden from the public. CNN first reported on the trend, noting that ICE’s charter airlines were requesting some of the planes in their fleets be scrubbed from public flight tracking sites.
Deportation flights — like Swift’s private jet, whose enormous carbon footprint has stoked public outcry — can still be tracked in real time using other public data. But ICE’s use of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s private jet blacklist underscores how a growing push for privacy by the corporate jet lobby is being deployed to limit public oversight of ICE’s draconian immigration crackdown.
Activists and journalists have for many years tracked ICE’s secretive deportation flights, which critics say subject passengers to cruel and inhumane conditions. People being flown out of the country by ICE are frequently shackled for the duration of the journey, and advocates have documented a pattern of medical neglect on the planes. As one ICE Air flight attendant told ProPublica this spring, a disaster on one of the flights is likely “only a matter of time.”
The charter airlines to whom ICE pays enormous sums for deportation flights are the same airlines, like Avelo Airlines and GlobalX Air, that transport professional sports teams around the country. Until recently, these airlines’ fleets could be tracked on public websites like FlightAware and Flightradar24, the same sites that track whether your flight on a commercial airline like Delta or United is delayed.
In recent months, according to multiple sources, these obscure charter airlines have for the first time begun requesting that some planes in their fleet be added to the FAA’s Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed list — LADD — a specialized program developed by the private jet lobby decades ago to keep aircraft data off of public aggregator sites like FlightAware.
“We’re seeing these commercial aircraft being added to the LADD list and then subsequently being employed under contract by the government for these deportation flights,” Ian Petchenik, the communications director with flight aggregator website Flightradar24, told The Lever.
Commercial planes have in the past been occasionally added to the LADD list, he said, for “very specific reasons,” like charter planes flown in the course of a presidential campaign. But ICE’s use of the list appears to be unprecedented: “It’s certainly new,” Petchenik said.
First ElonJet, Now ICE Air
In the 1990s, the FAA began sharing real-time air traffic data with airlines, hoping to improve operations across the industry. Other commercial vendors were eventually allowed access to this data, some of which — including the website FlightAware, which launched in 2005 — began publishing real-time flight data for both commercial and private aircraft, both for the public and for industry use.
The new transparency drew opposition from the $250 billion private aviation industry, which argued that publishing the flight data of billionaires’ and celebrities’ jets posed “security” risks.
In collaboration with Congress, the National Business Aviation Association, a corporate jet lobbying group, in 2000 launched a program that would allow private jet owners to block their aircraft’s identification information from FAA data released to private vendors — cloaking their jets’ movements.
The group “has long believed that security and other imperatives make it absolutely essential to protect our Members’ aircraft and flight information from being made widely available, which is why we created [the program],” a representative said in 2010.
For more than a decade, the program was managed by the National Business Aviation Association, which fed the requests to federal aviation regulators. But in 2011, under the Obama administration, federal regulators signaled that they no longer planned to honor the block requests unless private jet owners submitted evidence of a legitimate “security concern” — essentially gutting the program.
This sent the private jet lobby into a panic. The National Business Aviation Association quickly sued and marshalled hundreds of groups to line up in opposition. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank bankrolled by right-wing dark money interests, announced that the new rules would “destroy” the privacy of corporate jet fliers. Under industry pressure, the FAA backtracked just months after the 2011 announcement, allowing the Block Aircraft Registration Request program to continue. But now it would be managed directly by federal regulators, not by trade groups. In 2019, the program’s name was changed to LADD.
There are tens of thousands of private planes currently on the blacklist, according to a tracker maintained by Jack Sweeney, the online researcher who has become famous for tracking private jets owned by — among others — Taylor Swift and Elon Musk.
Both the pop singer and the billionaire were incensed by Sweeney’s live trackers, which post real-time flight data on social media about the comings and goings of the private planes. In December 2023, Swift’s lawyers sent Sweeney a cease-and-desist letter. Musk for a time banned Sweeney from Twitter over “ElonJet,” the account that tracked Musk’s jet location. But Sweeney has refused to take down the trackers.
Musk’s and Swift’s private jets are both on the LADD list, which means people can’t find them on sites that rely on the FAA for flight-tracking data, like FlightAware. Sweeney, however, uses entirely crowd-sourced flight data, collected by volunteers around the world who use their own DIY receivers to pick up live data from planes overhead — allowing him to bypass the LADD list’s restrictions.
Just like Musk’s private jet, the positions of ICE’s deportation flights will remain available even if they are flown on blacklisted planes, thanks to the enthusiasts who feed this information, called ADS-B data, into open-source exchanges. The workaround has infuriated Musk, who has advocated against flight-data crowdsourcing.
Sweeney was surprised by the recent additions of private charter airline planes used in deportation flights to the LADD list. Earlier this month, he highlighted two aircraft owned by Avelo Airlines that had been quietly added to the program.
“I was like, ‘Why are these Avelo planes on the list?’” he told The Lever. “Those are commercial airliners. I hadn’t really seen that.”
According to a review by The Lever, two Avelo Airlines planes and seven GlobalX planes are currently on the LADD list, per data on the charter airlines’ fleets maintained by Airfleets and Sweeney’s public LADD list reproduction.
At the behest of the private jet lobby, the FAA has recently moved to roll back other transparency requirements for private jets. Last year, in the months after Musk launched a crusade against Sweeney over the still up-and-running ElonJet, lawmakers inserted a provision into must-pass aviation policy legislation that established a new program to allow private jet owners to obscure their planes’ ownership information, information that was once publicly available. The FAA began to roll out that program in March.
The move followed expansions of the LADD list, as well as the launch of a new program to make it more difficult for planes to be tracked using ADS-B data.