Charter Flights: The Return of Mass Deportation?
Image by Leonhard Lenz
BY William Walters and Travis Van Isacker
January 2025
When you hear the words “charter flight” you may well think of holidays. But charters serve other ends besides industrialized tourism. One of these is deportation. In the form of ICE Air, the charter flight has long been a technology of expulsion in the US. Since the late 1990s the charter flight has also become a prized weapon in the immigration enforcement arsenal of European governments, and more recently the European Union’s own border agency, Frontex. Flying under such euphemisms as ‘repatriation flight’ or ‘joint return operation’, these charters enable governments to create their own routes of deportation which, like the migration routes they seek to counter, criss-cross the world’s frontiers of wealth and poverty.
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The majority of people deported by western states do not leave on charters. Most are removed on scheduled flights, often under escort. Governments turn to charters when they seek to scale up deportations, or especially when they anticipate disruption from those targeted for removal. Charters are different from scheduled flights in that there are no regular passengers on board, only deportees who are vastly outnumbered by the security personnel to keep them in their seats, sometimes by a ratio of three to one. There will also be immigration officials, medics and aircrew, but with no travelling public to bear witness – and only a small number of flights include human rights monitors – the risk of violence is much greater.
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Let’s open the blackbox of the deportation charter, a form of expulsion that is not widely understood. Why do deportation charters matter?
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The power of the plane
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Charters show us that deportation is much more than a legal process of removing people from a country where they have no right to stay to another where they supposedly belong. A look at charters reveals how deportation flows along well defined routes. Governments often vilify people smugglers, yet behave like them in at least one respect: they create and maintain reliable and predictable routes for moving people across land, sea and air, and across borders. In this essay we offer a glimpse at these routes.
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Whereas a great deal of unauthorized mobility takes place over land and sea, deportation from western states puts planes , skies and airports in the spotlight. Activists are conscious of the significance of aviation when featuring the plane as a symbol of violence and domination on their banners (Figure 1), or when targeting particular airlines and airports to block deportations. Yet while scholars rightly take the refugee boat and its deadly seascape very seriously, they have paid little attention to the mediating role of aviation, whether in deportation or in migration politics more generally. Our focus on the charter flight is one step towards righting this neglect of the power of aviation.
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The return of mass deportation?
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Charters also matter because they represent a shift in the way western governments conduct deportation and how this violent act is imagined and visualized in the media. Charters represent a new form of deportation, one that combines individualized and massified elements. To underscore this point let us briefly consider deportation historically. The way in which western countries practiced deportation underwent a significant change in the aftermath of WWII. Under new international human rights laws and norms, deportation would be detached from the genocidal horrors of mass displacement and given a more palatable appearance: reconfigured as a limited tool of immigration policy - forceful but humane.
At the same time, in law and official discourse at least, it would largely cease to be a punishment exercised on groups, and rationalized in terms of ethnicity, race, religion and ideology. Instead, it would be conducted on a case by case basis with reference to immigration law and considerations of public safety and largely confined in its scope to the non-citizen. In this way there would be a certain individualization of deportation, at least at the level of its laws and administrative procedures, if not always in practice (Walters 2002: 277).
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Is this still the case? Long before scholars discovered ‘mobilities’ as a theme, Walter Benjamin was thinking about transportation and how it shaped modern social experience. In his unfinished Arcades Project he offered a hypothesis that we could call the constitutive power of transport infrastructures. ‘The historical signature of the railroad’, he wrote, ‘may be found in the fact that it represents the first means of transport – and, until the big ocean liners, also the last – to form masses’ (Benjamin 1999: 602).
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Benjamin was thinking, no doubt, about vehicles and travelling publics, not slave ships or the killing machines that railways would become once connected to death camps and gulags in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. After all, Benjamin died in 1940 before the railway’s murderous potential would become fully apparent. Be that as it may, this matter of the constitutive power of transportation begs the question: does the charter flight signal a return to mass deportation?
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Rather than answer yes or no we interpret the charter operation as a hybrid form combining individualized and massified elements. After all, each detainee on board has been individually determined to be in violation of immigration law or criminal law (though many targeted for charter flights are unable to receive legal advice before removal). Yet there are several features of the charter flight that convey the impression of a mass deportation, not least the dispatching of as many as 200 people to the same destination in the same vehicle.
For example, for much of its time in office, the UK’s last Conservative government would use social media to announce the imminent departure of particular charter flights. It would boast how many people ‘with no right to remain’ were to be flown to, say, Nigeria or Albania in the coming days. In this way the charter plane operates as what Stuart Hall might have called a ‘floating signifier’. The image of these deportees gathered together on the same plane with the same country of destination feeds into xenophobic discourses in which particular national and racialized identities represent an immigration problem. The charter flight responds to immigration panics with the act of group expulsion - in fact if not in law.
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Let’s zoom in on the United Kingdom’s use of charter flights. The UK started using charters systematically in 2000 despite widespread criticism of this secretive and violent mode of deportation. Labour’s recent return to office has not seen the charter abandoned. Quite the contrary. While Labour quickly scrapped the Conservatives’ plan to send migrants to Rwanda, it promised a ‘large surge’ in return flights and quickly established new routes. Brazil, for example, has been targeted for the first time by the new government, with more than 600 people, including women and children, removed in just two months on the UK’s largest ever deportation charter flights. Governments come and go but the charter flight, like the wider regime it materializes, remains a constant feature in the dismal landscape of migration control.
Image by Ella Baron, The Guardian
Flights or Operations?
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Government officials, press releases and media reports speak publicly of charter flights. However, the flight itself is only the more visible feature of a much more extensive infrastructure of deportation. Documents obtained through freedom of information reveal that in their internal discussions UK authorities speak instead of operations. For example, flights to Afghanistan are called Operation Dickens while Operation Aardvark regularly removes people to Albania. Operation is actually a useful concept. First, it gestures towards the complex network of actors, sites, routes, funds, paperwork and agreements that have to be coordinated to create these deportation routes.
As with any logistical exercise, the deportation charter needs a reliable supply which includes deportees, security personnel to escort them, and planes to carry them. In the lead up to a flight, migrants will be moved in dedicated buses from prisons, immigration detention centres, and police stations across the UK to the airport. Indeed, for some deportees the hours spent confined on a bus may rival their time on the plane. All of this is coordinated by private security firms like Mitie which hold long-term contracts to manage the UK’s detention and deportation services. This web of suppliers is deeply entrenched. When Labour cancelled the Rwanda scheme, the contractors did not lose out. Existing bookings and caseworkers were reassigned to new routes such as East Timor and Vietnam.
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Operation is also a useful term because it hints at the adversarial character of the deportation flight. It turns out there are usually many empty seats on a charter. In one extreme case, a flight originally scheduled to expel fifty people to Jamaica took off with only three on board. Unlike a holiday charter, most people do not want to fly. Indeed, they will do everything in their power to avoid the plane. Resistance might take the form of last minute legal appeals which, if they succeed, can sometimes buy time for the appellant to avoid deportation altogether. It might also take the very embodied form of self-harm so that they cannot be deemed “fit to fly.”
These patterns of resistance in turn force immigration authorities to modify their practices. Faced with the extent of successful last minute appeals, the Home Office has changed the appeals process, making it more challenging for people on charter flights than on regular flights. Faced with the embarrassing scenario of empty seats they have created a new category: the “reserve” who, like a stand by passenger, is there to fill a last minute vacancy. If deportation can be likened to a machine, it is one that requires a constant work of repair and upgrading to its parts.
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Changing Routes
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Charter flights create deportation routes. Where are these routes? How do they change over time? Figure 2 shows all known destinations of charter flights from the UK between 2010-23. Note that official information about charter flights in the UK is patchy and sporadic. Officials tweet out boastful and misleading data about the people they have put on each flight – for example, their combined time in prison – but are far less forthcoming about the charter programme as a whole. Consequently, to create this chart we had to aggregate and analyze data from numerous freedom of information requests – including our own – which were posted on the public platform WhatDoTheyKnow.com.
Image by William Walters and Travis Van Isacker
We liken this chart to a geological core sample. It is possible to tell a story from its layers, in this case a story about shifting plans, logics, priorities and events in the UK’s recent history with migrants and refugees. For example, the black lines represent deportation flights to Afghanistan. This route opened in 2003. According to the investigative group Corporate Watch, this route was highly symbolic in foreign policy terms given the role the UK had played in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. The then Home Secretary had announced in 2003 that “Asylum seekers... should get back home and recreate their countries that we freed from tyranny, whether it be Kosovo or now Afghanistan”. These regular flights were hence an assertion that Afghanistan was now a safe country.
Or consider the multi-coloured lines in the period 2018-2022. Here we see a fundamental reorientation of the charter operation taking shape: the destinations are no longer former British colonies or territories of military intervention but countries in the EU or at its edges. In this period the charter program is pressed into service to hurriedly remove migrants to countries like France and Germany as the Brexit deadline loomed, thus signalling the government’s determination to combat people arriving in “small boats”. After Brexit, EU countries like Poland, Lithuania and Romania became targets for deportation charters for the first time. Finally, it’s worth noting that by 2023 charter operations had become almost entirely focused on just one country: Albania. With a solid readmission agreement secured with the Albanian government, and a flight leaving every week, in the final years of the Conservative regime the Albanian route became a sort of pipeline, allowing government ministers to play to media stories over “Albanian crime gangs” while ensuring “drumbeat” social media content about their decisiveness over immigration enforcement.
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The UK’s routes of deportation will no doubt shift again in ways we cannot yet predict. But whether looking at the UK today or countries like the US where a massive and alarming escalation of deportation is on the political agenda, it seems unlikely the deportation charter is about to disappear
References:
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press.
Walters, William. 2002. ‘Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens’, Citizenship Studies 6(3): 265-2
William Walters works on secrecy, security, migration and politics at Carleton University. He has recently published State Secrecy and Security: Rethinking the Covert Imaginary (Routledge 2021), and the co-edited volumes Viapolitics: Borders, Migration and the Power of Locomotion (Duke University Press 2022) and Handbook on Governmentality (Edward Elgar 2023).
Travis Van Isacker is Senior Research Associate at the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures as the University of Bristol, UK. His current research is on the transformation of border infrastructures through new digital technologies. Previously he was Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Brighton, UK where he completed his PhD on the eviction and destructions of migrants' homes in Calais, France.
