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mass deportations
Private Jet of Billionaire Trump Donor Used to Deport Palestinians From US to Occupied West Bank
“They dropped us off like animals on the side of the road,” said 24-year-old Maher Awad, who’d lived in the United States for nearly a decade and was taken from his girlfriend and newborn son in Michigan.
Feb 05, 2026
A private jet owned by a top donor for President Donald Trump was used to secretly deport Palestinians out of the United States to the occupied West Bank, where they have been separated from their families, according to an investigation published Thursday by the Guardian and the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972.
On January 22, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that a private jet containing eight Palestinian men touched down at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv before dumping them off at a checkpoint near an Israeli settlement, where they were released into the occupied territory.
Security sources familiar with the case described it as "highly unusual," as chartering a private jet to Israel costs about $300,000—vastly more than the commercial jet travel that the US government typically uses for deportations.
But the Guardian and +972 have learned that the jet, which carried another set of Palestinian deportees to be dropped in the West Bank on Monday, is owned by Trump's longtime business partner, the Florida real estate tycoon Gil Dezer.
Dezer and his father, the Israeli-American Michael Dezer, have collaborated with Trump on six different residential towers in Miami and have donated at least $1.3 million to Trump's presidential campaign, according to campaign filings.
The jet was found to have been chartered by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through the Florida-based company Journey Aviation. Before it dropped Palestinians off in Israel, the group Human Rights First determined that it had been used for at least four other "removal flights" to Kenya, Liberia, Guinea, and Eswatini.
US officials did not answer questions about how much money they paid to charter the flights, but aviation industry sources told the outlets that chartering the two flights to Israel would probably cost between $400,000 and $500,000.
Maher Awad, a 24-year-old Palestinian man who was deported, said the men were carried on Dever's plane with their arms and ankles shackled after being taken out of a notoriously squalid ICE detention hub in Phoenix, Arizona.
When they arrived at the checkpoint, he said, “they dropped us off like animals on the side of the road.” All he had to show Israeli authorities was his Michigan driver’s license.
The men went to a house near the checkpoint, owned by a university professor named Mohammad Kanaan.
Kanaan said the men stayed at his home for about two hours. During that time, he learned that many of them had been in ICE detention for so long that some of them were considered missing.
“Their families were so happy to hear their voices,” he said. “One mother started screaming and crying over the phone.”
According to the outlets, the flights were "part of a secretive and politically sensitive US government operation to deport Palestinians arrested by ICE to the Israeli-occupied West Bank."
The Trump administration has aggressively targeted Palestinians for deportation, stripping legal status from hundreds of people who have protested or otherwise expressed solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel's two-year genocide in Gaza.
972+ reported that several of the deported men have held green cards in the United States. Many had wives, children, and other family members living there.
Awad, who had lived in the US for nearly a decade, was taken away from his girlfriend and his newborn son in Michigan. “I grew up in America,” he said. “America was heaven for me."
“I was feeling safe and secure in the United States until ICE arrested me," he said.
The secret deportation program has shocked many immigration attorneys, who described it as highly unusual and potentially illegal for the US to deport Palestinians to the West Bank, where they face systemic persecution and violence from Israel's occupation.
In recent weeks, state-sanctioned Israeli settler violence has exploded. In the three days following the first deportation flight, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported that "at least 10 serious Israeli settler attacks were recorded" in the West Bank, resulting in "extensive property damage, arson attacks, injuries, and forcible displacement of Palestinian families."
“Aside from the many irregularities with the deportation of eight Palestinians on a private jet and no due process, this transfer also violates the principle of nonrefoulement, which prohibits the forcible return of individuals to a country where there are substantial grounds for believing that the person would be at risk of irreparable harm upon return, including persecution, torture, ill treatment, or other serious human rights violations,” Gissou Nia, director of the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council, told +972.
"The United States is bound by international treaties that explicitly prohibit this, including the Convention Against Torture,” she continued. “Therefore, the US violated this principle in sending Palestinian asylum seekers and Palestinians with other statuses back on a flight to Israel, where they face persecution."
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Somalis, Haitians, and Trump’s Crusade to Make America White Again
In the name of “defend[ing] your homeland” and “defend[ing] your culture,” his administration will arrest, detain, cage, traumatize, tear-gas, use children as bait, deny people their rights, deport, murder US citizens, and terrorize communities across the nation.
Feb 02, 2026
Not finished terrorizing Minnesota, the Trump administration is seeking to open a new front in their war against America. This time, the battlefield will be Ohio, and Haitians will be the scapegoat.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it would end Temporary Protection Status (TPS) for Haitians, with an effective termination date of February 3, 2026. According to a federal notice issued by DHS in November 2025, “Based on the Department's review, the Secretary [Kristi Noem] has determined that while the current situation in Haiti is concerning, the United States must prioritize its national interests and permitting Haitian nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to the US national interest.”
Per this federal notice, “there are Haitian nationals who are Temporary Protected Status recipients who have been the subject of administrative investigations for fraud, public safety, and national security.” No specifics are offered with regards the scope of this problem, or even the number of Haitians on TPS who have been charged or convicted of any crimes. Instead, they offer a few specific examples. This includes people like Wisteguens Jean Quely Charles, who importantly was not a TPS recipient.
Nevertheless, DHS argues that Charles’s “case underscores the broader risk posed by rising Haitian migration,” especially in the context of a “high-volume border environment” with poor vetting. They allege that the “inability of the previous [Biden] administration to reliably screen aliens from a country with limited law enforcement infrastructure and widespread gang activity presents a clear and growing threat to US public safety.”
The actions we take today will determine whether America embraces multiculturalism or becomes an ethnostate that treats diversity like a plague to be eradicated.
In short, DHS offers no concrete evidence that Haitians on TPS pose an actual threat to public safety or national security—only that they might pose a threat because their potential for being a threat was not properly assessed. Moreover, this potential cannot be properly assessed now because Haiti’s “lack of functional government authority” makes it too difficult to access “critical information” (e.g., criminal histories).
As per usual with the Trump administration, fearmongering replaces facts. In 2021, President Donald Trump claimed that all Haitians have AIDS—this is false (obviously). In 2024, he claimed that, “In Springfield, [Haitians] are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating—they are eating the pets of the people that live there.” There were no credible reports of this occurring.
Trump describes immigrants as dangerous criminals. Yet, studies have repeatedly shown that immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—commit far fewer crimes than US citizens. Haitian immigrants are no exceptions. Undocumented Haitian immigrants, for instance, have an incarceration rate that is 81% below US-born Americans.
The situation in Ohio is also no different. In Springfield, home to one of the state’s largest Haitian communities, “Haitians are more likely to be the victims of crime than they are to be the perpetrators in our community. Clark County jail data shows there are 199 inmates in our county jail this week. Two of them are Haitian. That’s 1% (as of Sept. 8).” The thousands of Haitians with TPS protection living in Ohio have made themselves indispensable to the state. As Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, remarks, “If you took Haitians away overnight, I will tell you that the business people there will tell you that’s going to be a big problem for the economy of the community.” In Springfield alone, Haitian immigrants have contributed to higher wage growth while reversing the city’s population decline.
Despite this, DHS will deliberately send Haitians back to a country that they themselves describe as being currently unsafe. So, the question is: why? The answer is because they are Black and foreign. This is also why his administration is so aggressively targeting Somalis.
For Trump, both Somalia and Haiti are “shithole countries”—“places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” At the 2026 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, Trump ranted: “The situation in Minnesota reminds us that the West cannot mass import foreign cultures, which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own. I mean, we’re taking people from Somalia, and Somalia is a failed—it’s not a nation.”
In Trump’s view, Somalia and Haiti are dirty and crime ridden because their people are dirty and prone to crime. Places and people are inextricably tied to him—bad people will always produce bad places; bad places are always the byproduct of bad people. If the US is failing, it’s because we have “imported” too many bad people. This is why, for Trump, almost every social problem from housing affordability to low wages to employment to high crime rates can be solved by mass deportations. From healthcare to election integrity, immigrants are the problem for his administration.
This sentiment is explicitly expressed by US Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller. He remarks, “This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” Mass migration for Miller is a cross-generational problem. In his view, if Somalis come to America, then they and their children will cause America to fail just like they caused Somalia to fail. For Miller and Trump, this is a problem of cultural and biological determinism. It is a problem of “bad genes” that determine behaviors like criminality, as well as “toxic” ideologies like diversity, equity, and inclusion and ‘hateful’ beliefs like Islam that impede American progress.
When Trump remarks that “illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our country,” the poison in question is the people themselves and the threat their mere presence represents. Put another way, for Trump, all immigrants from poor countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are akin to tumors in the body politic. Whether they are malignant or benign makes little difference, the safest and most effective response is to surgically remove (deport) them. Even if it turns out that those growths are helping the body politic, they are still foreign agents that should not be present. They are not part of the “very special culture” that built the West—“the precious inheritance that America and Europe have in common.” An inheritance that must be protected from “unchecked mass migration" and “endless foreign imports.” Whether it’s MAGA’s racism or MAHA’s anti-vaxxerism, the Trump administration will reject anything it arbitrarily deems a foreign toxin.
While the Trump administration has deployed federal agents across the nation, we should not be surprised that the “largest immigrant operation ever” has targeted Somalis, a community of predominantly Black, Muslim, and immigrant people. Whiteness and Blackness have always been direct polar opposites within the Western racial imaginary—the former signifying all that is good, the latter all that is bad. For Trump, it is whiteness that “abolished slavery; secured civil rights; defeated communism and fascism; and built the most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history.” Of course, none of this is true: Haiti was the first nation to end slavery, Black and other people of color fought for civil rights, and the Trump administration is a fascist regime.
None of these facts will stop the Trump administration’s crusade against “foreign invaders” spawned from “hellholes” who threaten “civilization erasure.” In the name of “defend[ing] your homeland” and “defend[ing] your culture,” his administration will arrest, detain, cage, traumatize, tear-gas, use children as bait, deny people their rights, deport, murder US citizens, and terrorize communities across the nation. No cost is too high in this Holy War to save the proverbial soul of America.
We are at a critical juncture. The actions we take today will determine whether America embraces multiculturalism or becomes an ethnostate that treats diversity like a plague to be eradicated. We must continue to protest nationwide against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Trump administration. We must continue to monitor and observe ICE’s tactics. We must push elected officials to fulfill their obligation to the people and use their authority to keep Trump in check. At a time when the Trump administration wants nothing more than to divide us, we must come together and resist.
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You Can’t Train Away ICE’s Terror
Investments toward a more trained immigration force will only uphold and legitimize mass deportation, family separation, and state terror.
Jan 21, 2026
Video evidence of the brutality of the Department of Homeland Security’s agencies, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations, alongside agencies within the Department of Justice such the Drug Enforcement Administration, has become all too familiar imagery in our everyday lives.
Witnessing actions of terror—from neighbors being beaten and forced into unmarked vehicles by masked agents, to children being kidnapped as they are released from school, to observers being murdered—has sparked demands for change. Reformist demands, such as increased training for federal immigration agents, move us farther from, not closer to, dismantling these systems.
Transformative Solutions Versus Reformist Reforms
Since its very recent inception in 2003, funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its agencies has ballooned. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received a budget of $27.8 billion in 2025, and other agencies whose on-the-ground presence support mass detention and deportation, such as Customs and Border Protection, have additionally seen increases alongside specific funding to the Department of Defense for border enforcement.
Transformative change demands have called for ending collaborations between local police and federal immigration agencies, ending 287(g) agreements, implementing and strengthening sanctuary laws, and the defunding and dismantling of ICE and similar agencies. Transformative models recognize the root causes and work to uproot harmful systems in order to invest in community-centered social programs.
A more trained mass deportation system is still a mass deportation system. A more trained agent of family separation is still an agent of family separation.
Reformist, yet system upholding, demands have also emerged, such as calls for improving hiring requirements for agents, increasing training for new hires, and crowd-management training in response to protests. Calls for more training for ICE and other immigration enforcement agencies means more investment in these systems and legitimizing the expansion of the role of the agent.
We saw a parallel of this direction a decade ago with increases in resourcing for local police. With the emergence of the Movement for Black Lives and community demands for transformative solutions to public safety, backlash and reformist demands in response to these calls led to strengthening the infrastructure of these systems of state terror. Thus, if this direction in response to state violence from immigration agencies is followed, transformative change will be severely restrained.
The Policing Parallel and Lessons Learned
After the murders of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice in 2014, and increases in public awareness of the pervasiveness of police killings and racial disparities that target Black people in interactions with police, reformist demands led to increased funding for policing and police training. We saw this trend of increased budgets repeat after the 2020 murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and other loved ones by police.
“Solutions” for the problems of policing proposed during this time included increasing community trust in police, improving public perceptions of police, and investing in community policing. These “solutions,” which are removed from historic context, only strengthen systems while placing blame on communities and delegitimizing criticism of systems and transformative demands.
One study examining 15 pre-attack indicator police trainings showed that police are trained to recognize reactions to interactions with police, such as anxiety and arousal, as threats to their safety and justifications for use of force. A 2023 conference of police training exposed “instructors promoting views and tactics that were wildly inappropriate, offensive, discriminatory, harassing, and, in some cases, likely illegal.”
Since 2013, alongside increases in police funding and training, murders by police have only increased year to year. Calls for more police training and increased funding only strengthen the infrastructure of the very systems that we need to dismantle.
The Urgent and Necessary Need to Delegitimize and Dismantle Agencies of State Terror
Everyday community members are being kidnapped, families are being separated, people are dying in immigration detention centers, and community members are being shot at and killed at the hands of DHS. The very existence of ICE requires these events of terror, and its agency collaborators are strengthened by them.
You can’t dismantle a system of harm by increasing its resourcing and legitimizing its existence. Removing the harm means uprooting the source of the harm, not reforming it. A more trained mass deportation system is still a mass deportation system. A more trained agent of family separation is still an agent of family separation. A more trained armed stated terror presence in communities is still armed state terror.
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