A loose group of advocates is urging the panel that oversees operations at Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport to issue a statement describing — and, some said, condemning — how federal immigration agents have repeatedly used Vermont’s largest air hub to transport people detained in the state and possibly facing deportation to other parts of the country.
Speaking at the Burlington Airport Commission’s monthly meeting Wednesday evening, two advocates also presented data they said showed federal immigration agents are flying far more people out of the airport, which is run by the City of Burlington, than is widely known.
Leif Taranta of Burlington and Brian Clifford of Essex said their findings, which they’ve compiled into a public chart online, suggest at least 450 people detained by federal law enforcement in immigration cases have been transferred through the Burlington airport since the start of January. That includes transfers by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
VTDigger has not independently verified Taranta and Clifford’s work, though a representative from the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, which is one of the state’s few networks offering pro bono legal aid to non-U.S. citizens, endorsed the advocates’ effort at Wednesday’s meeting.
“The airport, at a minimum, has a responsibility to let the public know what’s happening inside these walls, and on the tarmac,” Julie Macuga of Burlington, another advocate who spoke at the meeting, told the airport commissioners.
The panel did not develop a statement at its meeting, though the body’s chair, Tim George, said in an interview afterward that he and the other commissioners would continue to discuss the request, including what, specifically, his counterparts would be willing to say.
“I think we’ll have some conversations about that and see how we want to proceed,” he said.
Wednesday’s meeting comes as Vermont officials’ interactions with immigration authorities have drawn increased scrutiny following the high-profile arrests of Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist Mohsen Mahdawi and Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk. Both students were in the country legally but have been targeted by President Donald Trump’s administration for deportation. Mahdawi is a Vermont resident, while Öztürk’s detention was challenged in federal court in Vermont.
Federal officials have shuffled detainees from other states into and out of Vermont, and used commercial flights out of the airport, which is in South Burlington, to facilitate deportations, VTDigger has reported. Those jailed in Vermont’s prisons include people with established lives in the state, like farmworkers. Vermont’s prisons have also held people from other New England states, including Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist working at Harvard University.
Öztürk was shuttled from Massachusetts, where she was arrested, to an ICE field office in St. Albans before being flown out of the Burlington airport early the following morning to Louisiana. She spent weeks in detention there before a judge in Vermont ordered her release. Meanwhile, agents attempted to fly Mahdawi out of the airport to Louisiana, as well, after he was arrested while attending a U.S. citizenship interview in Colchester, the student’s lawyers have said.
That a public body as minor as the airport commission — which is only advisory by design and consists of residents from Burlington, South Burlington and Winooski — was facing questions about the actions of federal immigration agents is evidence of just how focused public scrutiny of immigration enforcement in the state has become.
One commissioner, Helen Riehle, a former longtime state legislator from South Burlington, called the use of the airport for transporting ICE detainees “abhorrent.”
Still, it’s not clear there is much — if anything — the commission, or the staff who run the day-to-day operations at the airport, could do to impact how the federal government chooses to use the facility to transport detainees, said Nic Longo, the airport’s director. He said the airport administration generally is not privy to information about immigration operations there.
“We don’t know when these are happening,” he said, referring to when people are transferred through the airport by federal immigration agents. “We don’t get advised. We don’t get any communication.”
He added, too, that the airport could risk losing access to federal grants and other funding assurances by impeding or refusing to comply with immigration enforcement — a point U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy made publicly earlier this year. (That threat has since been temporarily blocked by a federal judge after a coalition of 20 states, including Vermont, sued to challenge its legality.)
There were several instances, Longo noted, in which ICE agents were parking their vehicles in areas where parking wasn’t allowed. The airport pushed back — in some cases, nearly towing the vehicles — and got the agents to park in spaces generally available to the public. The airport’s goal, he said, is to treat the agents as if they are any other law enforcement officials, or members of the public.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday about its operations at the airport.
Taranta, one of the activists, said the group collected data on those operations using U.S. Department of Justice press releases, the PACER system that tracks federal court cases, and a Vermont Department of Corrections website that provides access to a jail tracking system where people can find friends and family members in the state’s prisons. They also verified the data through news articles and direct observations at prisons and the Burlington airport, they said.
The activists said the data they collected shows as many as 500 immigration detainees have likely been moved through Vermont between Jan. 1 and July 1. About 460 were highly likely to have been transferred through the Burlington airport, the citizen researchers believe, with many of them booked on early morning flights.
“That’s a shocking number if true,” said Brett Stokes, an attorney at the Center for Justice Reform at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, in an interview Wednesday. Stokes said he would be inclined to trust it unless proven otherwise, but he doesn’t believe it’s a statistic the federal government is required to track.
Activists shared that they were concerned people are being moved through the state without access to legal representation.
A major concern expressed by those who spoke at the commission meeting was that people flown out of the airport — who were often unshackled, in plain clothes and accompanied by U.S. Marshals — did not have an opportunity to meet with an attorney before facing deportation proceedings outside of the state. The early hours of transport, which the activists have said their findings repeatedly show, also make it difficult for attorneys to connect with clients, they said.
“It’s become clear to us that the airport plays a large role in the region’s ICE operations and most people don’t know about this, including the airport commissions,” Taranta said in an interview. “I hope they’ll take some actions against it.”
