Immigrants have been racking up as much as $1,000 a day in fines if they disregard orders to deport, totaling more than $6 billion that the Trump administration now intends to collect.
Since Donald Trump returned to office, the Department of Homeland Security has issued roughly 21,500 fines, part of a pressure campaign to encourage millions of people to leave the country with a promise that the government would waive the fees against them.
In recent weeks, the government has threatened immigrants with lawsuits, debt collectors and massive tax bills if they don’t pay those penalties, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The new system, put in place by the Trump administration in June, means immigrants are not only at risk of arrest and forced removal from the U.S. but also crushing financial debt that is virtually impossible to escape. One immigration attorney told the WSJ that it amounts to “psychological warfare.”
DHS has issued past-due notices for unpaid fines with growing interest and threatened to garnish tax refunds, deploy private collection agencies and alert credit bureaus to delinquent payments owed by targeted immigrants, many of whom are low-wage workers, according to WSJ.
The agency has also suggested it could report unpaid fines to the IRS, which could then treat the balance as taxable income.
The message from Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “is clear: if you’re in the country illegally, leave now or face the consequences,” a senior DHS official said in a statement to The Independent.
Under rules introduced in June, DHS officers can send letters threatening fees on noncitizens over failure to deport, and all rights of appeal could be eliminated if they fail to reply within 15 days.
The process is permitted under a law passed by Congress in 1996 as part of a wider immigration package. But over the last three decades, threats of fees — which can now reach up to $998 a day — have rarely been enforced. Officers instead focused on removal, rather than adding another layer of punishment.
But that changed under Trump, largely because the process for sending out threatening fines with potentially financially disastrous results is much easier, according to the American Immigration Council, an immigration policy research group.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has vowed to recoup “funds owed to Americans.”
“As part of the effort to fulfill President Trump’s agenda, Treasury’s Debt Collection Service is actively working with ICE to secure payment for all civil fines and penalties owed by illegal aliens to the U.S. government,” Bessent said on social media.
According to TV ads and social media announcements from DHS, immigrants who choose to “self-deport” will “not have to pay these fines.”
Instead, immigrants are offered “financial assistance up to $1,000” and “a free flight home,” as well as “the potential opportunity to return to the United States the legal, right way,” according to the agency.
Immigrants can do so using the CBP Home app, formerly the CBP One app, a Joe Biden-era product that allowed more than 1 million immigrants to begin their immigration process before reaching the country. The Trump administration has revoked legal status for all immigrants who entered the country with that app.
A senior DHS official told The Independent that “iIlegal aliens should use the CBP Home app to fly home for free and receive $1,000 stipend, while preserving the option to return the legal, right way.”
“It’s an easy choice: leave voluntarily and receive [a] $1,000 check or stay and wait till you are fined $1,000 [a] day, arrested, and deported without a possibility to return legally,” the official said.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association has called that promise “a deeply misleading and unethical trick.”
Under current law, anyone living in the U.S. for more than six months without legal permission cannot return as an immigrant for at least three years. Immigrants who were in the country for more than a year could be blocked from reentering for at least 10 years.
Immigrants with a record of deportation also are more likely to face lengthy waiting periods, or outright denials, when applying for future visas.
Noem has claimed that more than 1.6 million immigrants have “left” the country within the first 200 days of the administration.
In May, a Honduran woman who has lived in the U.S. for two decades was hit with nearly $2 million in fines for failing to leave the country after receiving a removal order in 2005.
“I live with anxiety… I can’t sleep… I don’t feel,” the 41-year-old mother-of-three U.S. citizens told CBS News.
Another woman — a mother-of-four in New York who has been living in the U.S. for 25 years and trying to get her removal order tossed so she can get a green card — had considered self-deporting out of fear that the Treasury Department would repossess her house, according to WSJ.
She faces more than $2 million in overdue penalties, with growing daily interest. She could also be subject to administrative costs totaling at least 32 percent of her fine, or more than half a million dollars, according to DHS.
To carry out the president’s plans for mass deportations, the Trump administration has pushed to “de-legalize” millions of immigrants who were granted humanitarian protections and other protective orders to legally live and work in the country.
More than 1 million people are at risk of being removed from the U.S. after the administration revoked Temporary Protected Status for several countries.
Another 1 million immigrants who entered legally through the CBP One app also are at risk of being arrested and removed, while thousands of people with pending immigration cases are being ordered to court each week only to have those cases dismissed, and find federal agents waiting to arrest them on the other side of the courtroom doors.
Those reversals have radically expanded a pool of “undocumented” people to add to Trump’s deportation numbers.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia has spent the past several months on an involuntary tour of detention centers at home and abroad. Back in March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement picked up the Maryland dad and took him to immigration detention facilities in Louisiana and then Texas before the U.S. government flew him to the notorious Salvadoran megaprison CECOT—which Trump administration officials have admitted was a mistake.
Months after a federal judge ordered him returned to the U.S., he was brought back in June and immediately taken into criminal custody in Tennessee before he was once again ordered released, at which point he was swiftly put back into ICE custody and shuttled to a facility in Virginia. Over the course of a few months, Abrego Garcia has been in at least three immigration detention facilities, one criminal facility, and a foreign gulag entirely unauthorized to receive U.S. detainees, all while the government has failed at every attempt to establish a clear legal basis for his detention. It is effectively ferrying him from one type of custody to another only when it skirts close to being in open contempt of court.
According to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, he was offered a plea deal for the thin trafficking charge federal prosecutors are pursuing against him with the promise that he would then be deported to Costa Rica; if he refused, federal authorities would instead send him to Uganda, a country he’s never been to. That’s exactly what Trump officials then moved to do before the same federal judge ruled that he could not be deported until at least early October while she considered the legality of their deportation efforts; in the interim, Abrego García is renewing his application for asylum. This is the first time in a decade of covering immigration that I can recall the explicit use of a removal location as a cudgel to gain compliance, especially in a separate criminal matter.
It’s easy to lump this odyssey in with the rest of the Trump-era immigration enforcement spectacle, but I’d argue that it is more of an avatar for the collapse of various systems into an all-encompassing expression of government power. Lawyers, journalists, and researchers have long used the term crimmigration to refer to the interplay between the criminal and civil immigration systems—how a criminal charge can trigger immigration consequences, for example. Still, due process generally demands some independence between the processes; except where explicitly laid out in law, you shouldn’t be able to bundle them together, in the same way that it would be obviously improper to, say, threaten someone with a tax investigation unless they plead guilty to unrelated charges.
Yet since the beginning of Abrego Garcia’s ordeal, the government has been trying to make his case about essentially whatever will stick, flattening the immigration and criminal aspects into one sustained character attack. It attempted to justify his deportation by tarring him as a gang member, an accusation that was based on comically flimsy evidence and which the government never tried to escalate to proving in court. Per internal Department of Justice whistleblower emails, officials desperately cast about for scraps of evidence to paint him as a hardened MS-13 leader and basically struck out.
After a federal judge ordered that he be brought back, the Justice Department devoted significant resources to retroactively drumming up charges over a three-year-old incident that police didn’t act on at the time, in which the government’s main witness, unlike Abergo Garcia, is a convicted felon. It is so flimsy that his lawyers are pursuing the rare defense of vindictive prosecution, pointing out the obvious fact that the criminal charge was ginned up as punishment and PR in itself.
It’s not that the specific contours of the legal cases are immaterial or that we shouldn’t pay attention to the arguments and evidence that the administration is trotting out (or, as the case may be, attempting to manufacture). These things all create precedent and they signal what the administration is willing to do and how judges can or will exercise their power. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the specifics of the immigration and criminal cases are effectively beyond the point, and this is all really about bringing the awesome weight of the government down to bear on a designated enemy.
The administration is attempting to create a situation where Abrego Garcia cannot actually win, even if he does ultimately succeed in his immigration and criminal cases. His life has become untenable despite the fact that the administration has, despite dedicating significant resources to the search, failed to produce any conclusive evidence that he is a public danger or a criminal or really anything but the normal “Maryland man” descriptor that they’ve taken such issue with. This is an effort to demonstrate to everyone the Trump administration might consider an enemy that it has both the will and capacity to destroy their lives by a thousand cuts.
Abrego Garcia is perhaps the most acute example because he sits at the intersection of an array of vulnerabilities: he is a noncitizen without clear-cut legal status, is not wealthy, has had criminal justice contact in the past, and is a Latino man, a demographic that right-wing figures have spent years trying to paint as inherently dangerous. Each of these characteristics provides a certain amount of surface area for the government to hook onto in order to punish him for the offense of making them look bad through the self-admitted error of deporting him illegally.
This is unforgivable for reasons that go beyond ego or malice; as Trump and officials like Stephen Miller move to tighten their authoritarian grip in areas of political opposition, they’re relying partly on might but also partly on a sense of infallibility and inevitability. To put in court documents that they erred in removing this one man to one of the most hellish places on Earth is, in their view, to call the entire legitimacy of their enterprise into question, and that cannot stand.
It is more useful to look at Abrego Garcia’s case as the ultimate extrapolation of this strategy, which is being deployed to various extents against administration opponents like, for example, Federal Reserve board governor Lisa Cook. Trump is attempting to fire her ostensibly over allegations of mortgage fraud, though the administration itself is barely even pretending that this is anything but the easiest and quickest entry point they could find to come after an ideological opponent, or at least a potential obstacle. If Cook had had some hypothetical immigration issue, the administration would almost certainly have latched onto that instead. It’s all a means to an end.
Benjamin Guerrero-Cruz’s family was stunned and heartbroken when the 18-year-old was grabbed by immigration agents while walking his dog in Van Nuys just days before he was set to start his senior year at Reseda Charter High School.
This week, his family was caught off-guard once again when they learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had transferred him to Arizona without notifying any relatives, according to the office of U.S. Rep. Luz Rivas (D-North Hollywood), which spoke to his family and reviewed ICE detention records.
Guerrero-Cruz was moved out of the Adelanto Detention Facility in San Bernardino County late Monday night and taken to a holding facility in Arizona in the middle of the desert, according to the congresswoman’s office.
On Tuesday night, he was scheduled to be transferred to Louisiana, a major hub for deportation flights, but at the last minute he was taken off the plane and sent back to Adelanto, where he is currently being held.
“Benjamin and his family deserve answers behind ICE’s inconsistent and chaotic decision-making process, including why Benjamin was initially transferred to Arizona, why he was slated to be transferred to Louisiana afterward, and why his family wasn’t notified of his whereabouts by ICE throughout this process,” Rivas said in a statement.
On Tuesday, Rivas introduced a bill that would require ICE to notify an immediate family member of a detainee within 24 hours of a detainee’s transfer. Currently, ICE is required to notify a family member only in the case of a detainee’s death.
“Benjamin’s story of being detained and sent across state lines without warning or notification is like many other detainees in Los Angeles and across the country,” Rivas said. “Many immigrant families in my district do not know the whereabouts of their loved ones after they are detained by ICE.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The agency previously stated that Guerrero-Cruz was awaiting deportation to Chile after overstaying his visa, which required him to depart the United States on March 15, 2023.
Guerrero-Cruz was arrested Aug. 8 and held in downtown L.A. for a week, during which time he was briefly taken on an unexplained trip to a detention center in Santa Ana before being transferred to Adelanto on Aug. 15, according to a former teacher who visited him in custody.
His experience of being pingponged around different facilities is common among those being detained in what the Trump administration is billing as the largest deportation effort in American history.
This trend is also reflected in ICE’s flight data. The agency conducted 2,022 domestic transfer flights from May through July — representing a 90% increase from the same period last year, according to a widely cited database of flights created by immigrant rights advocate Tom Cartwright.
Cartwright posited in his July report that this uptick could be related to a “need to optimize bed space as detention numbers have ballooned from 39,152 on 29 December to 56,945 on 26 July.”
Jorge-Mario Cabrera, spokesperson for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights L.A., called the Trump administration’s detention policies cruel, saying it appears that they are detaining people for as long as possible and “moving them from place to place for no reason other than because they can.”
“The fact that these dumbfounding transfers in the middle of the night cause chaos, confusion, and minimizes access to legal representation does not seem to bother them one bit,” he said in a statement.
Susham M. Modi, an immigration attorney based in Houston, said he had witnessed an uptick in the frequency of transfers among those recently detained by ICE.
“[Detainees are] also being often transferred to where there’s less lawyers,” he said. “I’ve seen consults where they’ve been transferred to Oklahoma, where it is very hard to find an attorney that might do, for example, federal court litigation.”
Although families can use ICE’s Online Detainee Locator to search for loved ones, it isn’t always up to date, and some families do not know how to use it, Modi said. When detainees are transferred, they often can’t make outgoing calls from the detention facility until someone has deposited money into their account — another hurdle for keeping family members updated on their whereabouts, he added.
Federal agents reportedly demanded to see the IDs of members belonging to two private contractor crews hired to battle the fire, which some 400 individuals are working to contain. Firefighters who spoke to the Times did so based on the condition of anonymity because they fear retaliation by the federal government.
“You risked your life out here to save the community,” one firefighter said. “This is how they treat us.”
Two firefighters in Washington state were arrested on Wednesday while combating the largest wildfire in the state.
The Bear Gulch fire has consumed nearly 9,000 acres since it began on July 6.
“Why the two firefighters were arrested is unclear,” The Seattle Times said. “But a spokesperson for the Incident Management Team leading the firefighting response said the team was ‘aware of a Border Patrol operation on the fire,’ that it was not interfering with the firefighting response and referred reporters to the Border Patrol station in Port Angeles.”
Federal agents reportedly demanded to see the IDs of members belonging to two private contractor crews hired to battle the fire, which some 400 individuals are working to contain. Firefighters who spoke to the Times did so based on the condition of anonymity because they fear retaliation by the federal government.
“You risked your life out here to save the community,” one firefighter said. “This is how they treat us.”
While waiting for their supervisor to arrive on Wednesday morning, the crews were confronted by federal law enforcement around 9:30 a.m. One of the firefighters told the Times they were instructed not to take video as they were asked to line up and present their IDs.
The Times added:
In a FaceTime video call from the other firefighter to The Seattle Times, firefighters in their gear were seen sitting on logs in front of federal officers. Some firefighters were dismissed back to their vehicles.
One firefighter attempted to walk over to his company vehicle to get something to drink and appeared to have been called back by federal officers.
In images shared by firefighters from the scene, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicle is parked nearby. Officers wearing “Police” vests are seen arresting a firefighter, while another appears to be restrained.
According to one of the firefighters, they were denied the chance to say goodbye to the detained crew members.
“I asked them if his (family) can say goodbye to him because they’re family, and they’re just ripping them away,” the firefighter told the Times. “And this is what he said: ‘You need to get the (expletive) out of here. I’m gonna make you leave.’”
Since taking office again in January, President Donald Trump has implemented a crackdown on illegal and legal immigration. His administration has targeted farmhands, garment workers, international students, and other immigrants from various walks of life for deportation.
Homan Pledges to Remove Alleged Gang Member with ‘Significant Public Safety Threat’
Border Czar Tom Homan has vowed to deport Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an illegal immigrant with a documented criminal past, despite a U.S. District Judge’s recent order to keep him in the country.
Appearing on Fox News’ “Hannity,” Homan called Abrego Garcia a “significant public safety threat,” citing his alleged status as a gang member, a “designated terrorist,” and his past indictment for human trafficking and alien smuggling.
Homan’s statement comes after an Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge, Paula Xinis, temporarily halted the Trump administration’s attempt to deport Abrego Garcia to Uganda. Judge Xinis ordered that he remain in the U.S. until an evidentiary hearing could be held.
During the interview, Homan expressed confidence that Abrego Garcia would be deported, stating, “I’m giving you my word. He will be deported from this country. I got my teeth in this thing. I’m not letting it go.”
The case has been a point of contention between the Trump administration and some Democrats, including Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, who has previously advocated for Abrego Garcia.
Documents released by the Department of Justice in April showed evidence of Abrego Garcia’s alleged MS-13 ties dating back to 2019. Despite these allegations and past domestic abuse accusations from his wife, Abrego Garcia was brought back to the U.S. in June to face human smuggling charges.
Homan dismissed the possibility of Abrego Garcia’s asylum claim, arguing that he is “beyond the required one year” and that his case lacks the necessary evidence of persecution to qualify under asylum law.
He maintains that if the judge “rules on the law,” Abrego Garcia” is gone.”
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Kilmar Ábrego García, who was already wrongfully deported once, cannot be deported again until at least early October, according to multiple reports.
CNN reported that the US district judge Paula Xinis, who is presiding over the case, scheduled an evidentiary hearing for 6 October, and said that she intends to have Trump administration officials testify about the government’s efforts to re-deport Ábrego.
At the same hearing, Ábrego’s lawyers informed the court that he plans to seek asylum in the United States, according to the Associated Press.
Ábrego’s case has drawn national attention since he was wrongfully deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador in March.
Following widespread pressure, including from the supreme court, the Trump administration returned him to the US in June. Upon his return, however, he immediately faced criminal charges related to human smuggling, allegations that his lawyers have rejected as “preposterous”.
Ábrego, who is 30 years old and a Salvadorian native, was released from criminal custody in Tennessee on Friday while awaiting trial.
But over the weekend, the Trump administration announced new plans to deport him to Uganda.
Then on Monday, Ábrego was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) during a scheduled immigration check-in in Baltimore, which was one of the conditions of his release.
He is currently being held in a detention center in Virginia.
Ábrego’s legal team swiftly filed a lawsuit on Monday, challenging both his current detention and his potential deportation to Uganda. In court filings, they argued that the government is retaliating against Ábrego for challenging his deportation to El Salvador.
“The only reason he was taken into detention was to punish him,” said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, an attorney representing Ábrego, on Monday. “To punish him for exercising his constitutional rights.”
Later on Monday, Xinis issued a ruling temporarily barring the government from deporting Ábrego until at least Friday. On Wednesday, she extended her order until Ábrego’s current deportation challenge in court is resolved, according to ABC News.
It added that Xinis said she would issue a ruling within 30 days of the 6 October hearing, and also ordered that Ábrego must remain in custody within a 200-mile (320km) radius of the court in Maryland.
She also reportedly said she would not order Ábrego released from immigration custody, leaving that decision for an immigration judge.
Ábrego entered the US without authorization around 2011 as a teenager. According to court documents, he was fleeing gang violence.
In 2019, a federal court granted him protection from deportation to El Salvador. Despite that ruling, in March, he was mistakenly deported there by the Trump administration.
In court documents in April, the Trump administration admitted that Ábrego’s deportation had been due to an “administrative error”.
Since then, Trump administration officials have repeatedly accused him of being affiliated with the MS-13 gang, a claim Ábrego and his family have denied.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/27/kilmar-abrego-garcia-deportation-trump-asylum
The Trump administration deported seven migrants from third countries to Rwanda in August as part of an agreement, the African nation confirmed on Thursday.
Rwandan government spokeswoman Yolande Makolo said in a statement that the group arrived to the country in mid-August, ABC News reported.
They were “accommodated by an international organization,” Makolo added, and are being visited both by members of the International Organization for Migration and the Rwandan social services.
“Three of the individuals have expressed a desire to return to their home countries, while four wish to stay and build lives in Rwanda,” the spokeswoman added. They are also set to receive workforce training and healthcare. She provided no information of the migrants sent to the country.
Rwanda will take up to 250 migrants following an agreement signed in June.
Four African countries accepted receiving migrants from third countries from the U.S., the other ones being Eswatini, South Sudan and Uganda.
Uganda is the latest one to do so, with CBS News reporting earlier this month that it agreed to the deal as long as deportees don’t have criminal records. It is not clear how many migrants the country is willing to accept.
Overall, at least a dozen countries have already accepted or agreed to accept deportees from third nations so far in the second Trump administration.
Earlier this month the Miami Herald reported that more than three in ten migrants deported to third countries are Venezuelan. The outlet scanned through data obtained by the University of California’s Deportation Data Project. It showed that Venezuelans make up the largest share of deportees sent to countries where they were neither born nor were citizens.
Overall, close to 3,000 Venezuelans were deported to third countries during the first six months of the year, although the outlet clarified that the dataset is likely incomplete. Over two hundreds were infamously sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador, where many claimed to be subjected to numerous abuses before being released as part of a three-part agreement involving the U.S., Venezuela and the Central American country.
Most have been sent to Spanish-speaking countries including Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Spain. However, two were sent to Austria, one to Italy, one to Syria and one to Vanuatu, in the Pacific.
Overall, 7,900 such deportations were recorded by then, with Venezuelans representing 36.71% of the total. They are followed by Guatemalans (20%) and Hondurans (7.8%).
Immigration advocates gather like clockwork outside Seattle’s King County International Airport to witness deportation flights and spread word of where they are going and how many people are aboard. Until recently, they could keep track of the flights using publicly accessible websites.
But the monitors and others say airlines are now using dummy call signs for deportation flights and are blocking the planes’ tail numbers from tracking websites, even as the number of deportation flights hits record highs under President Donald Trump. The changes forced them to find other ways to follow the flights, including by sharing information with other groups and using data from an open-source exchange that tracks aircraft transmissions.
Their work helps people locate loved ones who are deported in the absence of information from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which rarely discloses flights. News organizations have used such flight tracking in reporting.
Tom Cartwright, a retired J.P. Morgan financial officer turned immigration advocate, tracked 1,214 deportation-related flights in July — the highest level since he started watching in January 2020. About 80% are operated by three airlines: GlobalX, Eastern Air Express and Avelo Airlines. They carry immigrants to other airports to be transferred to overseas flights or take them across the border, mostly to Central American countries and Mexico.
Cartwright tracked 5,962 flights from the start of Trump’s second term through July, a 41% increase of 1,721 over the same period in 2024. Those figures including information from major deportation airports but not smaller ones like King County International Airport, also known as Boeing Field. Cartwright’s figures include 68 military deportation flights since January — 18 in July alone. Most have gone to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The work became so demanding that Cartwright, 71, and his group, Witness at the Border, turned over the job this month to Human Rights First, which dubbed its project “ICE Flight Monitor.”
“His work brings essential transparency to U.S. government actions impacting thousands of lives and stands as a powerful example of citizen-driven accountability in defense of human rights and democracy,” Uzrz Zeya, Human Rights First’s chief executive officer, said.
The airlines did not respond to multiple email requests for comment. ICE is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which would not confirm any security measures it has taken.
La Resistencia, a Seattle-area nonprofit immigration rights group, has monitored 59 flights at Boeing Field and five at the Yakima airport in 2025, surpassing its 2024 total of 42.
Not all are deportation flights. Many are headed to or from immigration detention centers or to airports near the border. La Resistencia counted 1,023 immigrants brought in to go to the ICE detention center in Tacoma, Washington, and 2,279 flown out, often to states on the U.S.-Mexico border.
“ICE is doing everything in its power to make it as hard as possible to differentiate their contractors’ government activities from other commercial endeavors,” organizer Guadalupe Gonzalez told The Associated Press.
Airlines can legally block data
The Federal Aviation Administration allows carriers to block data like tail numbers from public flight tracking websites under the Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed program, or LADD, said Ian Petchenik, a spokesman for FlightRadar24.
“Tail numbers are like VIN numbers on cars,” Gonzalez said.
Planes with blocked tail numbers no longer appear on websites like FlightRadar24 or FlightAware. The tracker page identifies these them as “N/A – Not Available” as they move across the map and when they are on the tarmac. Destinations and arrival times aren’t listed.
Carriers have occasionally used LADD for things like presidential campaigns, but in March, FlightRadar24 received LADD notices for more than a dozen aircraft, Petchenik said. It was unusual to see that many aircraft across multiple airlines added to the blocking list, he said. The blocked planes were often used for ICE deportations and transfers, he said.
Of the 94 ICE Air contractor planes that La Resistencia was tracking nationwide, 40 have been unlisted, Gonzalez said.
Similar things happened with the call signs airlines use to identify flights in the air, Gonzalez said.
Airlines use a combination of letters in their company name and numbers to identify their planes. GlobalX uses GXA, for example. But in the past few months, the ICE carriers have changed their regular call signs, making it more difficult to locate their immigration activates, he said.
https://apnews.com/article/ice-deportation-immigration-flights-f61941d31adf43a6a01cccc720f3bb01
