Zoe Berg

At 9:09 a.m. on Monday, local time, a Boeing 737-800 took off from El Paso International Airport in Texas. Operating as Avelo Airlines Flight 48, the flight’s destination was La Aurora International Airport in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

Earlier Monday morning, the plane had flown to El Paso from Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport in Arizona, departing from a piece of tarmac used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. ICE Air Operations is headquartered in Mesa, near several ICE detention facilities.

El Paso served as an intermediate stop before the plane headed to Guatemala and then flew directly back to Mesa, landing at 5:20 p.m. local time, according to the public flight tracker FlightAware, which records exact departure and arrival times. The aircraft did not use any passenger terminal facilities in El Paso and Guatemala City, instead opting to park in areas not meant for regular commercial service, according to airport diagrams released by the two countries’ aviation authorities.

Before Monday, Avelo — the largest carrier serving Tweed New Haven Airport — had conducted dozens of flights for ICE since the airline began a controversial partnership with the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, a week earlier.

But none of those flights left American airspace. Publicly available flight data from ADS-B Exchange, a crowdsourced flight tracking website that uses data from thousands of receivers operated by individual aviation enthusiasts around the world, suggests that Monday’s Avelo Airlines Flight 48 may have been the first international deportation flight conducted by Avelo since the company’s work with ICE began last week.

The News could not confirm whether the plane carried any immigrants being deported. Documents pertaining to passenger information are tightly controlled by both DHS and the Federal Aviation Administration.

In response to inquiries sent by the News last week and on Tuesday morning about the status of this aircraft, Avelo spokesperson Courtney Goff told the News that DHS is responsible for providing flight information. Goff declined to answer questions about Monday’s flight to Guatemala.

“I don’t think they would be flying to places like Guatemala empty. It could well have had people on from Phoenix and then picked up people from El Paso as well, to have a full plane,” Tom Cartwright, a volunteer flight analyst and advocate for immigrants’ rights, speculated in a phone interview with the News. Phoenix is 14 miles west of Mesa.

According to a route map from FlightAware, Avelo has not operated a flight to Guatemala City, Guatemala’s capital, in the past four years at least. Avelo’s only scheduled international flights are to Mexico, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, per the airline’s website.

In February, the Trump administration brokered an agreement with Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo for the Central American country to accept deported migrants, even those not holding Guatemalan citizenship. Approximately 60 deportation flights landed in Guatemala in the first two months of President Donald Trump’s current term — more flights than any other country received during that period.

El Paso, the one stop that the Avelo plane took on Monday between Mesa and Guatemala City, saw the highest number of deportations from an ICE facility since the beginning of fiscal year 2025. El Paso is home to the El Paso Service Processing Center, an ICE facility that holds hundreds of detainees.

While the flight to Guatemala had been operated under the Avelo Airlines name, according to FlightAware, the actual callsign used over air traffic control was “Tyson,” as heard on air traffic control broadcasts.

A callsign is used to identify a plane to air traffic control over the radio and typically consists of a word paired with a number, so that airlines can reuse the same word for different flights. Callsigns that have used the word “Tyson” were previously used by GlobalX Air in deportation flights to El Salvador in May. “Tyson 1” had also been used as a callsign by Trump’s private Boeing 757 jet. There is no established consensus about why the label “Tyson” would be used.

Avelo’s initial decision to operate deportation flights was announced in an April 3 internal email — obtained and first publicly reported by the News — from Avelo CEO Andrew Levy, who cited poor performance at Tweed New Haven Airport as one of the contributing factors for the decision.

Two Avelo aircraft were taken out of passenger service from New Haven and Wilmington, Del., and flown to Dothan Regional Airport in Alabama in the past month, apparently for external repainting. The two aircraft concluded commercial service mere hours before flying to Dothan, still bearing an Avelo paint scheme and Avelo logos.

The aircraft spent at least a week on the ground in Dothan before beginning deportation operations out of Mesa — this time with a completely white paint job, according to publicly available security camera footage showing a plane on Monday morning at the El Paso airport at the same time and place as the plane soon to make Avelo Flight 48 to Guatemala.

The same Avelo aircraft used for Monday’s international flight had already been observed flying to and from Alexandria International Airport in Louisiana, near both Central and South Louisiana ICE Processing Centers — where prominent detainees such as international students Mahmoud Khalil and, until May 9, Rumeysa Öztürk have been held.

“ICE field offices coordinate with ICE Air Operations, headquartered in Mesa, Arizona, to arrange removal travel and domestic transfers, which are conducted using both commercial airlines and ICE Air charter aircraft,” an ICE spokesperson, Fernando Xavyer Burgos-Ortiz, told the News on Friday.

When asked by the News whether Avelo flights were being used to support deportations, ICE denied any direct coordination with Avelo, instead pointing to CSI Aviation, for which Avelo is a subcarrier under its contract with ICE. CSI has not responded to the News’ request for comment.

“People are appalled,” Matthew Boulay, a representative from the Coalition to Stop Avelo, said in a phone interview with the News after the first domestic deportation flights began on Monday, May 12. Boulay called the deportations “illegal” and “inhumane.”

But until Monday, Avelo appears not to have engaged in any international deportation flights on behalf of ICE, instead appearing to ferry detainees between facilities within the United States.

According to ADS-B Exchange tracking data, Avelo flights on the two aircraft have been undertaken to locations such as Denver; Las Vegas; Harlingen, Texas; Yakima, Washington and Salt Lake City, all close to ICE facilities.

“Those are very typical stops for ICE,” Cartwright said.

Avelo has been met with widespread condemnation from Democratic politicians in Connecticut for its contract with the Department of Homeland Security to aid in the Trump administration’s  sweeping deportation plans. Last month, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, State Rep. Juan Candelaria and three New Haven alders spoke out against the decision at a protest attended by hundreds at Tweed Airport. Tweed is Avelo’s most profitable and most serviced airport.

And on Wednesday of last week, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker expressed his “deep concern and disappointment” in a call to the News, saying that Avelo’s ICE flights “do not reflect the values of our city.”

Before the April announcement, the aircraft conducting Monday’s flight to Guatemala was used for regular service from Tweed. The last commercial flight operated by this aircraft was Avelo Airlines Flight 786 on May 5, a round-trip flight from New Haven to Charleston, South Carolina.