There’s a legal principle that’s supposed to be one of the most basic protections in American law: if you’re being unlawfully detained, you can file a habeas corpus petition in the federal district where you’re physically being held, and a judge has to rule on it. ICE has built an entire operational strategy around defeating that principle — not by winning in court, but by making sure detainees are never in one place long enough for a court to have jurisdiction over them.
“SHUFFLE FLIGHTS”: THE DOCUMENTED MECHANICS
A 9News investigation tracked this directly using flight data, detention records, and court filings. Reporters watched 24 detainees board a flight from Minneapolis bound for El Paso. The next day, using the same records, they identified one of those same detainees on a return flight back to Minneapolis — one of 32 detainees brought back that single day, every one of them under a federal court order requiring their return. Judges had reviewed hundreds of habeas petitions filed on behalf of Minnesota detainees transferred to Texas and repeatedly ordered ICE to “immediately return” them or “effectuate release forthwith.” 9News counted at least 288 detainees ordered returned to Minnesota by federal judges in early 2026 alone.
USC immigration law professor Neils Frenzen’s assessment: “I think what we’re seeing over the past year is just chaos.” Emma Winger of the American Immigration Council put the legal mechanism plainly: “ICE has tried to avoid habeas court jurisdiction by rapidly transferring people from one facility to another.” By spring, a federal judge in Minnesota had to issue a specific order barring ICE from removing detainees from the state within 72 hours of arrest, just to stop the cycle — a court literally having to order the government not to fly someone out of state before their own lawyer could file paperwork.
Advocates make the practical stakes explicit: shuffling detainees hundreds or thousands of miles from home doesn’t just delay court access — it severs them from the attorneys and family members who could actually help fight their case, at the exact moment that help matters most.
INTERNATIONAL REMOVAL FLIGHTS: THE PHYSICAL CONDITIONS
For international removals, the picture documented in Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s own formal oversight letter to DHS and ICE is genuinely alarming. ICE policy requires detainees be “fully restrained by the use of handcuffs, waist chains, and leg irons” during flights, with authority to escalate to “spit masks, mittens, leg braces, cargo straps,” or a device called “the WRAP” — a full-body restraint system that Van Hollen’s letter notes has reportedly contributed to at least a dozen deaths over the past decade through local law enforcement use. His letter documents multi-country removal flights that have “reportedly left some individuals shackled for as long as 50 hours.” A separate lawsuit alleges ICE placed several detainees on a military cargo plane in straitjackets for 16 hours without telling them their destination.
ProPublica’s investigation into the charter airlines running these flights, drawing on formal ICE Air incident reports, documents at least six accidents requiring evacuations between 2014 and 2019 — including one case where it took seven minutes for 115 shackled detainees to escape a smoke-filled jet after landing gear failure sparked a wing fire, with flight attendants making no emergency announcements at all. One flight attendant described a little girl collapsing mid-flight with a high fever while rows of migrants sat chained at the wrists and ankles around her.
THE MONEY, AND WHO’S COLLECTING IT
This entire apparatus is now a genuinely massive privatized industry. ICE is projected to spend $748 million this year on transportation and removal operations alone. Global Crossing Airlines signed a $64 million contract in 2024 and operated nearly half of ICE’s 13,446 total flights last year. GEO Group — the same company already documented in this newsletter’s coverage of the Delaney Hall hunger strike — runs the ground transport connecting these flights to detention facilities, using unmarked white buses to move detainees between planes and centers like the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. CBC’s reporting notes that both GEO Group and CoreCivic entered 2025 with underused, partly idle facilities following a difficult stretch for the private-prison sector — meaning this surge in flights and detentions arrived as a direct financial lifeline for companies that had been struggling, not simply as a security response to any documented emergency.
THE TRACKING TOOL BUILT TO FIGHT BACK
Advocates have started building public countermeasures. A new tracking dashboard called Habeas Flight Watch monitors domestic ICE “round-up” flights in real time specifically so attorneys can know when a client is likely to be transferred and file a timely habeas petition before jurisdiction is lost. Winger’s assessment of the tool captures exactly what it’s up against: it’s “very useful, given that ICE has tried to avoid habeas court jurisdiction by rapidly transferring people.” Even the tool’s creators acknowledge the scale problem — with 50 to 80 ICE flights happening daily, folding in every domestic shuffle flight plus every international removal flight would make the map too unwieldy to be useful at all.
WHY THIS IS A CONSTITUTIONAL STORY, NOT JUST AN OPERATIONAL ONE
Habeas corpus is old enough and foundational enough that it predates the Constitution itself — it’s one of the few individual rights explicitly protected in the Constitution’s original text, before the Bill of Rights was even added. A system deliberately engineered to move people faster than the courts that are supposed to check their detention can reach them isn’t a logistics quirk. It’s a workaround built specifically to make a constitutional protection functionally unavailable, running through a network of private contractors collecting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to make it happen, on planes where evacuation drills have already failed and restraint devices have already proven fatal elsewhere.