Avelo Airlines cuts ties with ICE, ends deportation flights - al.com

Avelo Airlines, the only commercial carrier believed to have been operating full deportation flights on a regular basis for the Trump administration, is ending its relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and will no longer charter those deportations.

The budget carrier signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security in April 2025 to operate ICE flights out of Arizona, drawing immediate protests and calls to boycott.

At the time, the airline acknowledged the decision may be controversial but said it was expected to support company expansion and job protection. However, after less than a year since inking the deal, Avelo has admitted that the program became too costly and complex to continue.

CEO Andrew Levy acknowledged the backlash in an email to employees late Tuesday.

“We moved a portion of our fleet into a government program which promised more financial stability but placed us in the center of a political controversy,” Levy wrote in the email, obtained by CNBC.

“The program provided short-term benefits but ultimately did not deliver enough consistent and predictable revenue to overcome its operational complexity and costs.” (aph)

KEEP PROTESTING AND KEEP MOBILIZING. IT WORKS. IT IS NOT HOPELESS AND IT WORKS.

what they dont tell you is that if you get the right ratio of weed and caffeine you can essentially synthesize adderall within your own body. what they also dont tell you though is that the ratio is different every time so it’s really hit or miss

I spoke with a friend in Minneapolis a few days ago. She confirmed a lot of what is described below.

Please share

Minneapolis Minnesota

The following text is being shared, and the writer is asking for it to be spread far and wide. It’s a much longer and more detailed description of what’s going on. The good, the bad, the ugly.

“Friends outside MN, you need to know what is happening here. Everyone knows that ICE shot and killed a woman here on Wednesday. But that’s not the only thing that’s going on:

- ICE agents are cruising areas with immigrant-owned businesses, and kidnapping patrons and employees alike. Yesterday they abducted two US citizen employees at a suburban Target, one who was begging them to allow him to go get his passport to show them.

- ICE is going door to door in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, asking residents where their immigrant neighbors live. Read that again. If it sounds like something out of your high school history textbook, that’s because it is.

- ICE is targeting schools and school buses. They pepper sprayed teenagers and abducted two school staff members at the high school up the street from me on Weds. Police are literally escorting school buses to ensure children can get to school and home safely. The Minneapolis Public Schools have moved to virtual learning for the next 4 weeks because it’s unsafe for children or teachers to physically come to school.

- They are targeting hospitals and clinics. Patients are scared and are canceling their appointments or just not showing up. Kids are missing their checkups and vaccines, folks aren’t getting their cancer care, etc.

- They are smashing windows in cars and homes.

- ICE is increasingly picking up Native Americans—again, targeting folks based on skin color alone.

- They are arresting and beating legal observers. A friend of a friend had her arm broken yesterday. Folks are showing up at local hospitals, brought in in ICE custody, with severe injuries that are absolutely inconsistent with mechanism of injury reported by ICE. (Think: patient appears to have been beaten unconscious, while ICE agent says he slipped and fell.)

I can’t emphasize enough that these ICE agents do not have warrants. There are 2,000+ agents here and they are simply hunting for anyone that’s not white. It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen or a green card holder, they will kidnap you first and ask questions later.

But the community is fighting back.

- Protests are happening every day.

- Community groups have been leading know-your-rights sessions for months, often to packed venues.

- Whistles are being distributed by the thousands, carried on keychains and worn on coat zippers, always at the ready to be blown in warning if ICE is spotted.

- Drivers are following ICE vehicles, blaring their horns in warning.

- Businesses are locking their doors even while open to keep employees and customers safe. As I type this, I’m standing guard at the locked door of our neighborhood burrito joint while I wait for my takeout order, so the employees can focus on their jobs. The place is packed with neighbors supporting this small business.

- Anti-ICE signs are posted everywhere. The community is making it crystal clear that ICE is not welcome here.

- Parents and neighbors are standing guard outside schools, organizing carpools, and escorting kids to and from school on foot.

- Parents of kids in Spanish-immersion daycare (there are a LOT of these daycares here!) are keeping their kids home so the teachers don’t have to take the risk of coming to work.

- Churches and community groups are holding fundraisers to buy and deliver groceries to families who don’t feel safe leaving home.

- Mutual aid money is going out to folks who can’t make rent because they can’t work or because a breadwinner was abducted, or who need a warm place to stay after their home’s windows were smashed.

THAT is what is happening here. This fight is ongoing and it’s horrifying to watch. But we are not backing down. To my friends in other cities and states, don’t think for a minute that this won’t happen in your town. It will. Be ready. Learn from us, as we have learned from Portland and Chicago and New York. Fight back. Don’t let us get to the last line of Martin Niemoller’s poem.”

Here are the 2024 vaccine recommendation schedules. They’ve already been wiped from the cdc site. Save them and share widely, especially to your friends with kids.

Hi!!! One of my parents got meningitis when I was a kid.

They were in the hospital for nearly a month, the rest of us were all placed in medical quarantine, there were several points we thought they were gonna die, and even though they survived, it was a SUPER close call and they lost about two years of memories from the ensuing brain damage.

Like… a two-uear-long cookie-cutter pocket of thoughts and memories went missing right out of their brain. It’s an inflammation of the brain that cooks it alive.

I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THERE WAS A VACCINE.

I WILL BE GETTING IT.

if sex work was legal the workers could unionize

I am fully serious about this btw. not "pro sex work" as in "there are no issues whatsoever within the industry", but "pro sex work" as in "these are jobs and the workers should be a) allowed to work and b) protected from their customers by the law"

people responding to this with stuff like "but that would just put sex workers in the same exploited position as uber drivers, cleaners, migrant workers, etc" and yes! good point! reform all of it! keep going!

my corner store guy is a 50 year old man who's my best friend in the world and recently he was like "you're too pretty to be single I have some nephews you should meet. very handsome!" and I was like "a niece might be more up my alley" and he just got more excited and said "ah even better! I was overselling my nephews but my nieces are very beautiful"

OP the tags!!

i understand why folks turn off reblogs on a post but part of me always feels so betrayed by unrebloggable posts on my dash. like oh okay shops closed? just when i get to the door

Christians love doing stuff like this and making such a person the face of their religion then turn around and get mad when they're (correctly) seen as insufferable.

Some of the same people upset a Muslim man is poised to be the mayor of New York. But sure, they give AF about supposed "religious discrimination".

Let my Black behind have thrown a fit like this and I'm sure the same crowd supporting this girl would be telling me to sit my DEI ass down.

hey so i read part of the student's essay and i want to add a few things:

• it was a 0 out of 25 points. that's not even a huge deal.
• she only wrote 650 words.
• the girl didn't do the actual assignment; she just wrote what she felt like and submitted it.
• the class was a PSYCHOLOGY course yet her essay was about her religious beliefs and provided no citations or psychological basis. she simply insisted her argument was true because the bible supposedly says so.
• her entire essay is a mindless rant about how strict gender roles must be upheld and trans people are "demonic"
• her writing—and i cannot stress this enough—is on par with that of a child who doesn't want to do an assignment. it's so bad i genuinely thought i was reading a satire article.
• the student is a fucking college JUNIOR writing like a 10-year-old. she is also a psychology MAJOR who thinks everything in the bible is literal and that her religion is the only source anyone needs. this is someone who intends to go into mental health care. she is dangerously bigoted and ignorant, and her professor saw this and was punished for grading accordingly.

here's a line from her essay:

"Women naturally want to do womanly things because God created us with those womanly desires in our hearts. The same goes for men. God created men in the image of His courage and strength, and He created women in the image of His beauty."

here's her teacher's reasoning for the grade:

“[I am] not deducting points because you have certain beliefs" but rather because the paper "does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class and is at times offensive."

the girl is a hate-filled bigot. she is a white christian girl who is now being championed by fox news and turning point usa while her professor sits on fucking forced leave. this is disgusting.

important edit: i have just learned the professor is trans. this hateful brat is actively trying to destroy a trans person's life.

Yeah, this was a organised campaign to try and get a trans person (not even a professor) fired.

There was also a extremely suspicious amount of negative ratings about the teacher on the same day and the following ones, very much organised

But wait, there's more!

A Coordinated Campaign to Drive Trans People Out of Public Life

This article gives an overview of the whole affair. The teacher in question is trans, but also recently won an award for teaching excellence.

Oury Jalloh was burned alive in a German police cell while his hands and feet were cuffed to a bed. the cops claimed he had set himself on fire but offered no evidence. No one was convicted. It took 2 more violent deaths in the same police building (Hans-Jürgen Rose, died from internal injuries from blunt force impacts, Mario Bichtemann died from a skull fracture), before one cop had to pay a fine. No cop faced real consequences.

15-year-old Jerryson Noor was shot and killed by police in the Netherlands after being accused of trying to steal a bicycle. We was running from police and clearly posed no threat.

Independent forensic tests and later expert analysis commissioned by Jalloh’s family suggest it would have been very difficult for someone bound to ignite the mattress on their own and that fire accelerants such as petrol may have been involved.

A 2019 autopsy commissioned by the family also found fractures (broken rib, broken nose, skull base fracture) indicative of serious injuries before the fire — a point the courts did not allow as decisive evidence. (DW)

Between 2020 and 2022, thirteen EU countries reported a total of 488 deaths occurring in custody or during police operations. Despite international calls for transparent reporting on such fatalities, most European countries still do not meet UN standards for investigating these deaths, leaving persistent gaps in accountability and oversight. Inconsistencies and inadequacies in data availability further underscore the challenges in maintaining adequate transparency in law enforcement practices.

not to mention that the coastguard in europe are primarily a border patrol force and routinely watch migrants drown to death without intervening.

the migration data portal estimates at least 1700 died in the mediterranean in 2024 alone

This screencap is actually convincing me that the pokemon world might be hell to live in. Imagine if dog people who let their fugly beasts do whatever they want got access to 60kg dogs that will eat anything made out metal (and are immune to food poisoning) and would wreck any car that ran them over.

"Oh Bauxy isn't bothering anything" "Ma'am your Aron named Bauxite is eating a stop sign. Bauxy is gonna get someone killed."

Imagine coming out of a convenience store only to see that your bike got eaten by an Aron who is now pissing hot solder on the tyres, all the while it's owner named Nickeal or some shit is just at his rotomphone watching KlingToks and not paying any attention.

i think the most upsetting thing about american-flavor puritanism is how fucking patronizing it is. it's 2026 but the whole world still has to deal with a cultural hegemony grown from the gnarled vestiges of victorian-era paternalism. tax-paying adults with passports and the right to vote are treated like wayward children because of the antiquated idea that authorities must protect the weak minds of the unwashed masses from depravity and corruption. the average american can send a fellow citizen to the chair, but they can't piss in a ditch without being declared an outlaw. american entertainment media is saturated with sex, but you can't talk about it online without getting your account suspended. it's such blatant censorship at a universal scale, but because sexual content is framed as inherently dangerous, this restriction on basic adult autonomy, this blanket denial of moral and intellectual adulthood, can be reframed as protection, an expression of care, a moral duty. "won't someone think of the children!" I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN! I AM A GROWN MAN!

thank god that the video game that features slow motion animations of graphic gunshot wounds and is rated 18+ has a profanity filter in single player offline mode. thank you for protecting this 33 year old mind from the corrupting influence that is a horse named apple slut

thinking about the medieval style au... and jake as daves page/squire?? theyd have such a ridiculous dynamic im sure

Another thing about light pollution and adjacent things is. They threatened my area with rolling blackouts last winter. Now this was of course largely because the AI datacenters are hogging all the electricity, but in the notifications about it they always specified that that residential areas would be the blacked out areas. Not offices. Not businesses. If you're at home and freezing, well, you can just go loiter in a McDonald's I guess. Never mind that this is extremely difficult for disabled people and often not allowed for pets.

Well, as winter turned into spring, I started biking home from work. A long, circuitous route that took me through residential areas, and past offices and businesses. Offices and businesses that were closed for the day. And yet their signs were still lit up. The lights were still on inside. There were TVs playing in empty breakrooms. All the computers in the school district offices stayed on, their monitors not even going to sleep, all night. Paused to take a break in an empty strip mall once and when I leaned against the glass of a restaurant I could hear the music still playing inside.

Like. There's something deeply rotten about the priorities here. These places that are so flagrantly wasting electricity will never be subject to the rolling blackouts that could freeze you out of your home. Not even at night, when no one is there, when they don't need their lights on. Their waste is prioritized over normal people's life.