Two northeast Ohio airports serve as ICE deportation flight hubs

FAA proposed $65,000 fine against Eastern Air Express in July

The Youngstown-Warren regional airport sits in Vienna, Ohio, a few miles from the Pennsylvania state line—a small, quiet facility that handles no commercial flights. On a recent weekday morning, a 50-seat Air Wisconsin Bombardier CRJ200 landed there after a 75-minute flight from Milwaukee and taxied to a stop next to an Eastern Air Express Boeing 737 that had arrived the night before from Alexandria, Louisiana. Together, the two contracted aircraft can carry about 300 passengers at a time, and Youngstown-Warren has become a key hub for federal deportation operations across the Great Lakes region.

The Youngstown-Warren facility recorded 398 “shuffle” flights—ICE-contracted flights between U.S. airports—and direct deportation flights in 2025, The Guardian reported. In 2026, ICE Flight Monitor has recorded about 300 flights from each of the two northeast Ohio airports, a volume that places them ahead of most major metropolitan areas for ICE shuttle activity. Only seven other U.S. airports have seen more deportation shuttle flights than the two combined this year.

The typical pattern begins with immigrants held at jails across the region being bused to the airports in late morning. They are then boarded onto planes—usually an Air Wisconsin or Eastern Air Express aircraft—and flown to Alexandria, Louisiana, where ICE operates a network of detention facilities from which many are transferred overseas. Some flights from northeast Ohio have taken immigrants directly to a small airport outside Tapachula, Mexico, near the Guatemala border.

Safety concerns surfaced after a September 28, 2026, incident at Akron-Canton regional airport, when an Eastern Air Express plane struck the left horizontal stabilizer of another Eastern Air Express aircraft parked on the field. Lisa Dalpiaz, a representative for the Akron-Canton airport, said no injuries were reported and that “other airfield operations were not impacted.” The Ohio State Highway Patrol is conducting the incident investigation, she said; one plane has since left, and the other is undergoing maintenance with the airport’s fixed-base operator.

Eastern Air Express, a Kansas City-headquartered subsidiary of Eastern Air Holdings, has faced prior regulatory action. In July 2026, the Federal Aviation Administration proposed a $65,000 fine against the carrier for allowing 26 employees, including pilots, to perform safety-sensitive functions while not subject to required random drug and alcohol testing. An FAA spokesperson said “the process remains open.” Eastern Air Express, which operates 19 aircraft, did not respond to The Guardian’s questions about whether it plans its own investigation of the September 28 collision.

The National Transportation Safety Board is not investigating the Akron-Canton incident. A spokesperson for the NTSB said the agency “is not investigating that event” because of the absence of “substantial damage or serious injuries.” The NTSB did, however, open an investigation into a separate incident involving a commercial airliner in San Francisco on October 6, 2026. Airlines are required to report incidents such as wing collisions to the NTSB, but The Guardian found no record of the Akron-Canton event on the agency’s website.

The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not directly respond to questions about whether the agencies plan to review safety requirements for contracting airlines in light of the September 28 incident. In January 2026, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey demanded that Eastern Air Express and GlobalX, another carrier contracted for deportation flights, end those operations. As recently as the week before The Guardian’s report, an Air Wisconsin plane contracted by ICE that took off from the Youngstown-Warren area landed at Hanscom Field in Massachusetts.

The flights have also imposed a financial burden on the small airports. In February 2026, landing-fee waivers for government operations were extended to cover contractors working on ICE’s behalf, eliminating fees the airports would otherwise have collected. Akron-Canton recorded 34 ICE flights over 27 days in August 2026, a rate that has been sustained since late April, against a backdrop of declining commercial passenger traffic at the regional facilities.

Erin Bracken-Sanchez, a U.S. Army veteran who served in Kuwait in the 1990s and is a member of the Buckeye Veterans Coalition, has come to Youngstown-Warren to monitor the activity. She said she was motivated by her family—two of her children are Hispanic—and by a broader sense of civic obligation. “We have to fight for the rights of others because if they’re going to come for them, you know who’s next; they could knock on our doors next,” she said. Bracken-Sanchez added that the airports are being used “to be more obscure, to be under the radar. Who’s here? No one’s here; no one knows.”

During a recent protest outside the Akron-Canton airport, Bracken-Sanchez said she watched a bus belonging to the Butler County Sheriff’s Department pass through to the runway—a bus she said was carrying Haitian nationals held in southwest Ohio. “I did not expect to go to the Akron-Canton airport, to the back gate where I used to go 27 years ago to the Ohio national guard, and watch them bring in buses of immigrants shackled to deport them out of the country,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense to me in America, the country that I fought for.”

Savi Arvey of ICE Flight Monitor said her organization has been concerned about the safety of detained passengers on charter flights and is following the Ohio incident closely. Last year, six deportation flights from Youngstown-Warren went directly to Honduras and Guatemala, with the most recent direct flight taking place in June 2026.