The City That Brought Down an ICE Airline

Eight months ago, when I wrote for Mother Jones about Omni Air International, the charter airline doing Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s longest and cruelest flights, I had hoped it would spur the dozens of local-government pension funds invested with Omni’s private equity owner into improving conditions on its ICE flights, or ending them altogether. With immigration officials in maximum-cruelty mode and the Supreme Court rubber-stamping their every move, I figured the best way to ground the deportation planes was to hit them in the wallet.

The pension-fund revolt never materialized. But the strategy of leveraging local government to penalize ICE’s business collaborators bore out this week in a way I could not have predicted, when Omni’s parent company announced it had spun off and sold the charter airline, in a rushed sale forced by progressive members of Chicago’s city council. 

By that time, Omni hadn’t flown an ICE flight for months. There’s a fair chance the airline will go belly up soon, meaning they may never do an ICE flight ever again. And because Omni was the only large-jet charter airline willing to do ICE removal flights to Africa and Asia, it is no exaggeration to say the council members—known as alderpeople in Chicago—have already saved thousands of immigrants from being deported, and could ultimately save many more. 

“We hope that other cities will take it as a lesson: We don’t have to bow down [to] the fascist deportation machine. We certainly don’t have to let its perpetrators benefit from our local economies and infrastructure,” Alderman Andre Vasquez, one of the progressives who forced the sale, told the Prospect. “We have to continue to get creative about finding ways to fight back that are within our control.”

How did they do it? Their leverage came from an unlikely place, one of the worst privatization deals in history: the 2008 sale of Chicago’s parking meters to private equity. It’s a complicated story that I’ll explain below, but the bottom line is the council, backed by an informed public outraged by President Donald Trump’s continued assault on their city, found a way to split the billionaire class from the fascists, providing a blueprint that can be replicated in other communities. 

IN MY MOTHER JONES STORY, I DESCRIBED Omni’s decade-long virtual monopoly on long-range deportation flights, created by a willingness to allow migrant passengers on their planes to be shackled at the ankles, wrists, and waist for up to 48 hours. This allowed Omni to charge the federal government through the nose: $1.8 million for a single deportation trip to Asia in 2019, according to documents obtained by Quartz.

In one notorious case that made headlines in Trump’s first term, Somali deportees on an Omni flight were beaten so severely by ICE agents and ICE-contracted guards that two of the immigrants required surgery after the flight was forced to return to the United States. 

Even so, Omni and its publicly traded parent company, ATSG, which also operates Amazon’s Prime Air fleet, struggled financially. The day before the presidential election in 2024, it announced its sale to private equity firm Stonepeak Partners. The sale was finalized in April 2025.

After the sale, Omni’s ICE flight charters nearly quadrupled, according to years of flight data I analyzed for the Mother Jones story. Omni planes played a key role in ICE’s burgeoning third-country removal scheme, expelling immigrants to countries where they had no ties. And the trips themselves were getting longer due to added removal stops. One man told me he and dozens of other immigrants had been shackled for more than 73 hours while being deported to Laos and Vietnam, and flight data backed him up. Another group had been shackled for 82 hours. 

Read more from Gillian Brockell: ICE Air’s Sloppy, Dangerous Deportation Flights

After the story went live, I heard from several traumatized Omni flight attendants who had all recently quit. They described horrific conditions on some of these flights, with suicidal passengers tied in full-body straitjackets, children crying next to their shackled parents, and power-drunk guards who refused to follow their safety instructions. Their supervisors, they said, ignored their complaints, telling them, “Just make the client happy, we need the money.” 

I continued to keep track of Omni’s ICE flight data after the story was published. Stonepeak, ATSG, and Omni never responded to my requests for comment, but I knew at least one of their pension-fund investors had raised some alarms, so I wondered if I might be able to detect any changes in the length or frequency of their ICE flights. Initially, I did not. From February through mid-June, flight data shows Omni planes made a minimum of 76 removal stops, ten of which were confirmed third-country removals. Eleven of these trips lasted between 32 and 68 hours. 

Then, on June 17, hours after an Omni plane took off for a third-country removal trip to Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, Crain’s Chicago Business reported that progressive members of the city council were considering blocking Stonepeak’s purchase of the city’s parking meters because of its ownership of Omni. 

A word on those parking meters: Former mayor Richard M. Daley sold them in 2008 to make up for budget shortfalls, in a 75-year contract that undercounted their value. The investor group that bought them reportedly made back their money in only a decade and saddled Chicagoans with some of the highest parking rates in the country. 

Even worse, any time the city takes parking spaces out of service, even temporarily, like for a neighborhood block party or a construction project, it has to pay an exorbitant “true-up” fee to the owner to compensate for lost revenue. These fees have hampered the city’s efforts to add bike lanes and electric-vehicle spaces. And when former mayor Lori Lightfoot suspended parking tickets during the COVID-19 lockdown, the investor group sued and won millions.

The meters were put up for sale in 2024. Mayor Brandon Johnson attempted to buy them back in secret negotiations, ultimately deciding that the city could not afford it. Stonepeak was next in line.

At a city council finance committee meeting the week after the Crain’s story was published, when asked about Omni’s ICE flights, Stonepeak’s James Wyper cast doubt on the frequency and length of the flights I’d reported, while presenting no evidence to back up his claim. He said he’d asked Omni management about the reported abuses, which he referred to euphemistically as “the behaviors,” and had been reassured that none of “their people” were involved.

“I had a colleague who said we should roll out the red carpet for you. I don’t think you should be sitting here while you own Omni,” Alderperson Jessie Fuentes told him. Federal agents arrested Fuentes at a hospital last year, when she tried to visit an immigrant who’d been injured during an ICE arrest. 

Wyper told the council that while he thought ICE’s “activities” were “abhorrent,” due to contractual obligations, he was unable to stop the flights. 

But as he was speaking, the flights had already largely stopped. Flight data shows that since June 17, Omni has done only two ICE trips, one to Mexico on July 7 and one to three Southeast Asian countries on July 28. 

The vote on the deal was repeatedly delayed because progressives made clear the council didn’t have the votes to approve it. The old investor group threatened to sue the city again, but they held their ground, organizing community meetings and enlisting activists like Kat Abughazaleh, asking Chicagoans to pressure the rest of the council not to approve the Stonepeak deal as long as the firm still owned Omni. (Full disclosure: I spoke virtually at one of these meetings and at a committee hearing in early July.)

Then, on September 15, came the big news: A coalition of alderpeople had negotiated a new deal with Stonepeak. There were benefits for the city, like a reduction in true-up fees, a $75 million payment earmarked for pensions, and 5 percent profit sharing projected to net at least $376 million over the life of the contract. But it also forced the divestiture of Omni. 

Omni was sold to the newly created OAI Holdings LLC on September 28. The council approved the parking meters deal in a 46-3 vote the next day. 

Some observers have reacted to the deal with skepticism, suggesting the forced sale was performative and wouldn’t actually help immigrants in any meaningful way. Who cares if the city council had washed its hands of its connection to deportation flights? Wouldn’t the new owners just start them up again? 

First, let me repeat: The council’s four-month standoff likely stopped dozens of long-range ICE flights, and that matters, regardless of what happens next. But I also don’t think it’s a given that Omni goes back to business as usual. First off, they may not be able to in their weakened financial state; more importantly, every charter airline now knows the public is watching. 

Omni’s planes are getting older—even the New England Patriots team jets it operates—and many of them appear to break down a lot. Under the ATSG umbrella, they got aircraft maintenance and crew training at a discount from sister companies. Now they’ll have to stand up their own maintenance and training outfits or pay market rates to contractors. 

Plus, scores of pilots and flight attendants have reportedly quit in recent months, and a source with knowledge of Omni’s corporate office in Tulsa told me there were layoffs hitting every department on September 8. Even if they wanted to return to their previous ICE flight levels, they may not be able to with their current staff. 

And while we don’t know yet who is behind the holding company that bought Omni, it’s notable that Stonepeak was apparently unable to find another airline or private equity firm to buy it, at what must have been fire-sale prices. The increased public awareness of and disgust with ICE and removal flights may have made it too toxic an asset to acquire. 

Stonepeak is the biggest company to cut ties, but it isn’t the only one. Three of ICE’s charter carriers have stopped doing ICE flights in the past year, including Avelo Airlines, which became the target of a boycott campaign and experienced significant internal backlash, as I reported for the Prospect last November. ICE’s longtime ground services provider, Signature Aviation, has also sought to distance itself from ICE after HuffPost unmasked Bill Gates as a major investor. 

ICE may be flush with cash, but the list of private charter airlines willing to take it is short and shrinking. (See my ICE Air FAQ here for a current list.) The Department of Homeland Security has attempted to stand up its own “deportation fleet,” as I have been chronicling since February, but so far, it’s been a dark comedy of errors, with no actual removal flights from the Boeing planes they’ve purchased. Even if they do manage to get the operation off the ground, they don’t have enough planes to replace the charter fleets. Not even close. 

By connecting the dots between the airlines and their investors, and by looking for more ways to leverage local government’s monetary powers, maybe the public can ground ICE flights one plane at a time, up until the day they can be abolished altogether.