‘We had no idea where we were going’: Deportees pass through MSP

2 hours ago

KVRR Staff,

Nn251112 0220 2 1536x1024 — More than a dozen ICE Detainees are taken onto a plane in shackles Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025 at MinneapolisÐSaint Paul International Airport. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. (Minnesota Reformer) — When Marco Azogue climbed the stairs onto a plane parked on the tarmac of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, shackled at the wrists and ankles, he assumed the plane was taking him to his home country of Ecuador.

None of the agents or plane staff spoke Spanish. They didn’t answer him when he asked where they were going, or whether they would give him his belongings — his wallet and phone, which he hadn’t seen in days.

“We had no idea where we were going — they didn’t give us an explanation for where they were taking us,” Azogue said in Spanish in an interview with the Reformer.

The plane, it turned out, was headed for Louisiana. Agents loaded Azogue and other immigrants into a van, which drove for several hours into the countryside. Azojue would spend several days in an immigrant detention center in Little Pines, Louisiana, before being ushered onto another plane, this time bound for Ecuador.

Azogue was swept up in the mass deportation effort ushered in by the election of Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress, which has poured money into efforts to beef up the infrastructure needed to expel immigrants by the hundreds of thousands.

The activity is everywhere, if you know where to look: Minnesota will soon be home to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility at the St. Paul Downtown Airport, MPR reported recently. The Trump administration is considering reopening a closed private prison in Appleton as an immigrant detention center. The sheriff’s offices in eight Minnesota counties have agreed to assist ICE in deportation activities.

Travelers passing through MSP walk and drive by immigrants like Azogue weekly as aviation companies hired by the Department of Homeland Security carry out deportations from the state’s largest airport. Deportation flights were traceable for years using popular tracking websites, but the federal government has recently taken steps to obscure the flight information from the public.

Most deportation flights are carried out by private charter planes, according to ProPublica. Flight attendants working them told ProPublica they were not allowed to speak to detainees or provide them with food or water.

On the morning of Nov. 12, three unmarked white vans pulled into a back entrance to the airport. They drove across the tarmac, where a plane operated by Key Lime Air was waiting.

The vans pulled into a semicircle surrounding the stairs leading to the plane door. Then agents patted down around 20 immigrants before they climbed one-by-one — slowly, shackled — up the steps and into the plane.

A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Airports Commission, which oversees MSP, said federal law prevents MSP from restricting access to public or private aircraft operators.

“The Metropolitan Airports Commission does not coordinate or get any advance notification of general aviation or non-commercial flight operations at MSP Airport, which would include government owned or operated aircraft,” the spokesperson said.

Nick Benson, a photographer and longtime planespotter, has observed deportation flights since before President Donald Trump’s second term. But the frequency of deportation flights seems to be increasing, he said, and he’s concerned by efforts to obscure the movement of the flights from the public.

Benson uses open source information to locate incoming and outgoing deportation flights, and shares his photos and observations online.

“I think it’s important for people in the Twin Cities to realize that all of this stuff isn’t just something that happens in Chicago or Portland or somewhere else — that it’s happening here too…. I think it’s historic, and it’s worth knowing and documenting that it happens,” Benson said.

Judges have found that Trump’s immigration authorities have violated the due process rights of detainees. Civil rights lawyers charge that the administration has turned to formerly off-limits methods for arresting people: using tax data, targeting school grounds and churches and arresting people as they exit court appointments.

Benson said he’s observed deportation flights out of MSP on planes owned by Key Lime Air, also known as Denver Air Connection; Eastern Air Express; and, up until a few months ago, GlobalX. The airlines use space and services from Signature Aviation, which runs a private aircraft terminal at MSP. None of the companies responded to Reformer requests for comment.

“The airline companies, they are not only complicit, but they are responsible. They are making an active choice to pick profits from the federal government over human lives,” said Drew Harmon, chair of Minnesota 50501, a progressive grassroots group organized in response to the second Trump term.

Azogue, one of the deportees who passed through MSP, was arrested at the federal courthouse at Fort Snelling after a hearing in his asylum case, he said.

He was under the impression that he would have a chance to appeal his case in a future hearing. He has no criminal record. When he exited the courtroom, agents arrested him.

“We show up for court trustingly, thinking we’re doing everything right, but what we don’t know is that when we get there, it’s like a trick,” Azogue said in Spanish.

He landed in Guayaquil, Ecuador, hours from the mountain town where his family lives. When he landed, he had $40, no way to contact his family, and no access to the small savings he’d built while cleaning commercial buildings overnight in Minneapolis. He bought a bus ticket with the cash and borrowed a phone from the woman sitting next to him so he could let his family know he was on his way.

(Story written by Madison McVan – Minnesota Reformer)