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Activists who monitor Burlington’s airport believe that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are no longer moving people detained by federal immigration authorities through the facility.
“It appears that it’s an accurate statement,” said Nic Longo, aviation director of the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport, of the activists’ observations.
Longo said he has never been notified about ICE’s operations at the airport. But, he said, the airport would likely have had some indication of such movement, typically through activists who he said have been at the airport almost daily.
“I can confirm that the advocates are here a lot, and I think they would see,” Longo said.
Activists noticed a change in August, they said, after they mounted a campaign documenting ICE agents moving detainees onto commercial flights through the airport. By mid-July, they told the Burlington airport commission that more than 450 people detained by ICE had been moved through the airport since January, and they claimed to have prevented ICE from flying three female detainees out of Vermont.
On July 25 and 31, they recorded two instances of ICE agents moving people detained by ICE through nonpublic side doors of the airport. At a subsequent airport commission meeting on Aug. 6, about 40 Vermonters demanded the airport make it more difficult for ICE to transfer detainees.
ICE did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Longo has repeatedly said he has no communication with ICE over its transport of detainees on commercial flights. But because the airport receives federal grant funding through the Federal Aviation Administration, he said, officials were obligated to cooperate with the federal government. Since the second Trump administration, language added to those grants states that airport officials cannot impede the efforts of federal deportations by ICE, Longo said.
But communication with the activists has caused the airport to make some changes, including increasing signage related to human trafficking and posting signs on non-security doors noting that those doors are not accessible to the unauthorized public, which could include ICE officials, Longo said.
“None of our security systems were ever breached,” Longo said. “The doors that I’m talking about are regular doors used for deliveries or employee access.”
The signage on those doors has changed to “authorized access only” or “no access,” Longo said, including a door that activists recorded ICE officials using to move people detained by ICE in July, he said.
“We’re always improving our security, so these are all normal things we’d do to increase it, and in this particular case, it came from these positive conversations” with advocates, Longo said.
Activists say they did not witness ICE moving detainees through the Burlington airport after they recorded the ICE transfer on July 31. Instead, Burlington activists, who viewed photos and videos taken from activists in other states, believe detainees have been transported in unmarked vehicles to airports in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, activists told VTDigger.
“But that doesn’t mean that they are gone for good,” said activist Leif Taranta, who collected Burlington airport data on the transfers. Across the region, they said, activists tracking flights at other airports had seen ICE withdraw when transports received scrutiny or pushback, only to return later.
“This regional pattern of transfers is significant because it shows ICE’s determination to operate in the shadows,” Taranta said. “By moving people from Massachusetts to Vermont and then back to Massachusetts, ICE is attempting to separate folks from their loved ones and lawyers and make it increasingly difficult to find them.”
The type of pushback mounted in Burlington has spread across New England as ICE has ping-ponged between New Hampshire’s Portsmouth International Airport and Massachusetts’ Laurence G. Hanscom Field, about 20 miles northwest of Boston. Activists allege that their work has complicated ICE’s work to move detainees, causing the agency to hopscotch across the region.
“Whenever regular people simply shine a light on what they are doing, they shift,” said Julie Macuga, a Burlington activist who has helped Taranta track ICE flights. “If every airport in the region had a few advocates, we could really subdue the region’s deportation machine.”
Regional hubs
The two airports in New Hampshire and Massachusetts are by far the largest hubs for flights ICE operates both in and out of New England, according to a September report by ICE Flight Monitor, a data-driven project housed at Human Rights First that tracks such flights through publicly available aviation data.
Between Jan. 20 and Aug. 31, there were 269 outbound ICE flights from Bedford, Massachusetts, where the Hanscom airport is located, and 65 out of Portsmouth, according to the report. There were only six ICE flights among four other airports in Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
There were no inbound or outbound ICE flights in Connecticut, Rhode Island or Vermont, according to the data. So far, ICE has moved detainees through the Burlington airport on commercial flights like American Airlines, according to activists and footage reviewed by VTDigger. According to an email from ICE Flight Monitor, the organization doesn’t have a method of tracking the movement of such flights.
The documented flights out of New England are part of 7,454 total U.S. immigration enforcement flights carried out so far under the second Trump administration, according to the September report. The flights include deportation flights and shuffling detainees domestically between detention centers and into deportation staging facilities such as those in Arizona, Louisiana and Texas.
The data has only been tracked since 2020. But the numbers indicate a 34 percent increase in ICE flights over the same time last year, according to the report. August had the highest monthly total ever recorded: 1,393 flights, or an average of 45 flights per day. At least 240, or about a fifth of those flights, were removal flights to Mexico.
“These findings make clear that the Trump administration’s current deportation campaign is both unprecedented and dangerous not only to the rights of those it targets, but also to our democracy,” the report reads.
Over the last two months, those flights likely included the removal of 69 people detained by ICE in Vermont, according to tracking by Burlington activists. Data they compiled through the Department of Correction’s jail tracker shows at least 37 people were removed from the Northwest State Correctional Facility in Swanton and the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington and transferred to flights out of Portsmouth between Aug. 16 and Sept. 2.
Between Sept. 6 and 13, ICE removed 32 more detainees from both facilities and put them on flights out of Hanscom, according to the data collected by the activists and reviewed by VTDigger.
That coincides with ICE’s change in airport use. After a peak of 17 flights out of Hanscom in June, ICE chartered only four flights out of the airport in July and zero in August, according to data collected by ICE Flight Monitor and shared with VTDigger.
Instead, ICE used the Portsmouth airport to move detained people out of New England. There were no flights there between March and June, but then ICE chartered eight flights out of Portsmouth in July and 13 in August before largely returning to Hanscom. In September, ICE hit its monthly record for 2025 in Hanscom, removing people on 25 flights by Sept. 29.
While the Hanscom Field Advisory Commission could not confirm why ICE shifted the flights, its members told WBUR it could have been related to publicity and protests about ICE transports there.
Then, activists showed up at Portsmouth too, according to reporting by New Hampshire Public Radio, tracking ICE flights outside the airfield’s chain-link fence since August. Volunteers counted 389 people who were boarded onto ICE flights at Portsmouth as of Sept. 4, according to the station.
Those flights ended on Sept. 5, according to an email from ICE Flight Monitor, when ICE’s hub apparently again became Hanscom. It was the day before the Trump administration launched Operation Patriot 2.0, an immigration crackdown in Massachusetts. That increase in enforcement was the reason ICE flights returned to Hanscom, an hour south of Portsmouth, according to reporting by The Concord Bridge.
“Massport is not notified if or when ICE flights operate at our airports, therefore we cannot confirm that any have taken place at Hanscom,” Jennifer Mehigan, a spokesperson at Massport, said in an email. Massport is an independent public agency that oversees Massachusetts’ three airports, including Hanscom, along with a shipping terminal and cruise port.
Ripple effects of more ICE activity
The return of ICE flights to Hanscom comes on the heels of a monthslong fight between Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and the federal government. In March, Wu was one of four Democratic mayors who testified before Congress in defense of city policies like the Trust Act, an ordinance approved by Boston’s City Council over a decade ago that limits the role city officials play in federal immigration enforcement.
In August, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to the city demanding it end the Trust Act. Weeks later, in early September, the Justice Department sued Boston over its sanctuary city policies, alleging they interfered with federal immigration enforcement. Bondi called the city and its mayor “among the worst sanctuary offenders in America.”
Half of New England was included on a Justice Department list published in August of states, cities and counties that allegedly impede federal immigration enforcement, including Vermont, Connecticut and Rhode Island, along with Boston. New York State was also included, along with New York City and Rochester.
Data from Vermont’s Department of Corrections shows spikes in the number of people held by ICE in Vermont prisons for civil immigration proceedings during two immigration crackdowns by the Trump administration dubbed Operation Patriot.
During the first crackdown in May, ICE arrested nearly 1,500 people in Massachusetts. While that operation didn’t include Vermont, the state’s prisons often serve as detention facilities for people detained by ICE in the region. In May, 79 people were held in Vermont, more than all those held between February and April.
Then on Sept. 6, the Trump administration launched Operation Patriot 2.0, a second immigration crackdown in Massachusetts. By Sept. 17, 36 people were held by ICE in Vermont prisons, up from 30 in both June and July and 25 in August, according to state data.
‘Preventing the disappearance of our neighbors’
Now, the Hanscom Field Advisory Commission, a watchdog body with no real enforcement arm and that liaisons between the airfield and local communities, wants ICE out permanently. After ICE returned, commissioners drafted a letter to the leadership of ICE and Massport, along with legislators, town select boards and the Massport Community Advisory Commission demanding more information about ICE flights.
“It’s not just the ICE flights, but it’s the entire operation of ICE,” said commissioner Christopher Eliot during a Sept. 16 Zoom meeting. “It doesn’t make me feel safer. It makes me feel like this is an invasion.”
“This whole thing is offensive to the majority of people in this region,” Eliot said.
Last Tuesday, the commission’s monthly Zoom meeting that usually lasts an hour went twice as long while commissioners and the public discussed the language of the letter.
The letter sent on Sept. 17 and reviewed by VTDigger said that in order for the commission to carry out its charge of reviewing activities at Hanscom Field, they needed advance information on any and all ICE activity at the airfield, including the date, time and type of aircraft used to carry out ICE flights. The letter said they understood that ICE flights had departed from and landed at Hanscom for several months in 2025, but such activity had halted earlier this summer.
However, commissioners came to understand, they wrote, “that ICE flights again resumed on September 5” and are “continuing daily,” the letter stated.
But the commission’s oversight is limited. Airports like Burlington and Hanscom have repeatedly stated that because they receive federal funding they’re not allowed to discriminate against who uses their airport, including ICE officials and people detained by ICE. On the September Zoom call, Amber Goodspeed, manager of aviation administration for Hanscom, reminded commissioners that there wasn’t much she could do.
“ICE is not required to, and ICE does not tell us when they’re coming,” Goodspeed said. “We’re happy to get your opinion and appreciate it, but we’re not allowed to discriminate.”
Longo said the same about his role in Burlington. He disputed a notion raised by critics who described airports as “complacent” for allowing ICE to move detainees through their public terminals.
“We’re not complacent, we’re following the law,” Longo said. “In my professional capacity there’s nothing that I can do but follow the law.”
A response from Christopher Willenborg, director of Hanscom under Massport, on September 24, reiterated Goodspeed’s statement that Massport did not receive advance notice of ICE flights and asked the commission to reach out to ICE directly.
Such a letter has been drafted, said Margaret Coppe, chair of the commission, and will go before the commission for approval during its Oct. 21 meeting. Coppe said that letter will be sent directly to James Covington, the spokesperson for ICE in Boston. She’s hoping that shedding light on the issue through meetings and letters will help inform the public.
“I don’t know if (the commission) would say that (ICE activities) are illegal or immoral, but I personally feel that way,” Coppe said. She said their work was keeping up the pressure on the airport and ICE.
Burlington activists say the pushback by people like airport commissioners, while largely toothless when it comes to legal enforcement, can make a tangible difference.
“The fact that ICE keeps changing their flight patterns in response to public scrutiny and outcry shows that everyday civilians can actually make a huge difference in preventing the disappearance of our neighbors,” said Taranta, the Burlington activist.
Ethan Weinstein contributed reporting.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Christopher Eliot’s last name.
