DL Open Thread: Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Welcome To Avelo, ‘America’s Most Famous Deportation Airline’.  Apparently, also America’s most dangerous deportation airline:

In a memo to staff on October 30, Avelo Airlines’ head of flight operations Scott Hall painted a rosy, if defensive, picture of the company’s future. Avelo’s financial strategy was working, he said. The company had a big contract from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to do charter deportation flights, and despite some bumps, the future was bright. They had just hired more pilots and couldn’t buy aircraft fast enough to keep pace with demand.

Sure, shutting down their entire West Coast operation looked bad, but it was good, actually, a long-planned move toward efficiency that had nothing to do with the “outrage mob” boycotting Avelo for its association with ICE. In any case, Hall said, the boycott movement was fading.

The truth is much more bleak: Avelo’s ICE flights appear to be a fiasco, defined by the poor planning, cruel treatment, and serious safety lapses endemic to “ICE Air,” the network of charter carriers and military planes that transport shackled migrants to detention facilities and out of the country. Just this past week, a mid-flight emergency loss of cabin pressure left six people injured.

Plus, according to Hall himself, the longest government shutdown in history was hindering the very thing Avelo went to ICE for in the first place—cash flow.

There’s more.  Safety concerns?  ICE had none:

On this particular morning, according to an email sent to Avelo’s director of safety, an Avelo employee spotted what appeared to be a lithium-ion battery pack in one of these plastic bags, as it was being loaded into the cargo hold by a GEO Group security guard. Lithium-ion batteries are banned from checked bags by the Federal Aviation Administration, because of the risk of intense fire that the crew cannot reach.

According to the email, the Avelo employee “immediately froze the scene,” and contacted a supervisor. “The agreed action to take was to check all cargo for additional hazmat.” But when the employee informed ICE’s flight officer in charge, the officer “refused to assist and attempted to pressure the crew into departing.”

The ICE officer and the guard claimed to have already checked all the bags for hazmat, the email said, and later, the ICE agent claimed that “he needed a warrant to search the cargo.”

The employee searched the bags by himself, ultimately finding more than two dozen hazardous devices. A photo attached to the email shows half of them, one clearly labeled “WORKPRO LITHIUM-ION 20v 1.5Ah,” which is a battery pack used for power tools, suggesting its owner had been grabbed from a job site and held onto it. And that is a sizable battery—holding about ten times as much energy as an average cellphone.

About that admirable Avelo fleet of planes:

On the afternoon of October 26, an activist who goes by “JJ in DC” was tracking one of Avelo’s dedicated ICE planes—which have all been painted white to remove company branding—as it flew a scheduled ICE route from Mesa, Arizona, to Denver and then Las Vegas. It was supposed to continue on to the ICE detention hub of El Paso, but hours later, public flight databases showed it still on the ground in Las Vegas, indicating a mechanical issue.

After four hours, another Avelo ICE plane was dispatched to Las Vegas, but upon arrival, it also just sat there in a back corner of the airport primarily used for loading cargo. Could the second plane also be having a mechanical issue? he wondered.

The planning for Avelo’s ICE flights has been a disorganized mess, according to an Avelo employee who agreed to speak to me on condition of anonymity. Many of the flights have been delayed for maintenance or other logistical reasons, leaving shackled migrants stuck on board for hours, sometimes soiling themselves, the employee said. (Migrants have reported soiling themselves on ICE flights for years, because they say some ICE officers and contract guards won’t let them stand up to use the lavatory.)

I’m already up against ‘fair use’, but you need to read this.  If you take one of Avelo’s planes out of the NCC Airport, just remember that you are enabling the efforts of ICE, as is this company that depends on those dirty dollars to keep the company barely afloat.

Stuff I’m Hearing From Last Night’s County Council Meeting.  I wasn’t there, this is what I’ve been told:

Sean Tucker, who used to run the County Planning agency, and who now runs interference for companies seeking to run roughshod over any county limitations, wrote the amendments that Janet Kilpatrick introduced at the last minute.  Those amendments would have destroyed any attempt to regulate data centers. (Hey, she’s no longer accountable to the voters.  She deserves whatever considerations those pushing for this project shower her with.)

Tim Sheldon gave Kevin Caneco the finger.  Dog-bites-man and less impactful than having someone slash your opponent’s tires.  Perhaps Sheldon is mellowing in his dotage.

Can I just speak briefly about this ‘you can’t do anything retroactively’ argument? No?  I will anyway.  It’s bullshit.  That the County hadn’t addressed the issue of these data centers is because no one had even thought about addressing it until it suddenly became a reality.  The proponents spotted a loophole and rushed to take advantage.  The impact of this and perhaps other data centers will be profound.  Not one spade of dirt has been shoveled yet.  This is about closing a loophole that would impact every single resident of New Castle County.  ‘Retroactivity’ is merely the fig leaf seeking to justify doing nothing.  Because, ain’t nothing that’s happened yet.  Needless to say, good faith was not involved in the rush to push this forward.

Which reminds me:

State lawmakers from Mid-Atlantic states and parts of the Midwest are urging PJM Interconnection to make sure the financial burden of power-hungry data centers wanting to connect to the regional grid operator doesn’t fall on families.

Grid-operator stakeholders are expected to make a recommendation Wednesday to present to the board of directors. The ultimate decision will be key to how it will manage the rapidly rising electricity demands from data centers plugging into the grid.

“PJM is about to make one of the most consequential decisions of this decade,” said Maryland state Sen. Katie Fry Hester. “How will we integrate an unprecedented wave of new data centers into our regional grid?”

The grid serves more than 67 million ratepayers in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland and part or all of 10 other states, as well as Washington, D.C.

Fry Hester said if PJM doesn’t take action, most of that money from increased energy demand could be paid by the public, potentially amounting to an extra $70 a month for the average family. Besides high prices, customers could experience declining reliability and an increased risk of rolling blackouts.

Delaware state Sen. Stephanie Hansen said it has taken far too long for PJM to connect clean energy to the grid. She also criticized proposals that would allow data centers to jump ahead of projects already in the queue.

“We’re seeing proposals to allow data centers to pick and choose fossil resources that can cut in line ahead of clean energy projects that would bring economic benefits and help us meet our state renewable energy goals,” she said.

Governors from 11 of PJM’s 13 member states, including Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, met in Philadelphia earlier this year to demand more transparency and say in PJM’s decisions. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has threatened to leave the regional grid without it making major changes, adding that PJM has “months, not years” to make reforms that will keep costs down for consumers.

No sense befouling this thread with any non-Delaware items.

What do you want to talk about?