White House’s gleeful video shows chained deportees at Boeing Field
President Donald Trump, eager to send a message about his tough actions against undocumented immigrants, had the White House post a video on X [aka Twitter] Tuesday of a group of deportees boarding a flight in chains.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement video, shot at Boeing Field two weeks ago, shows the deportees being thoroughly frisked. ICE officers then laid out chains on the ground, lined up as if for a chain gang, before the men were individually chained hand and foot.
Officers wearing jackets with “Police ERO” on the back, standing for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, watched as the bound detainees trudged up the steps of the aircraft.
“It’s part of the theatrics,” said Maru Mora Villalpando, a volunteer with La Resistencia (The Resistance), a group working to end detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants that monitors the weekly flights out of Boeing Field.
“Instead of being ashamed that people are treated this way,” she said, the administration promotes such chain gang images to equate immigrants and criminals in the minds of the public.
“It’s a civil system treated as a criminal one,” Mora Villalpando said. “But if they were criminals they would have lawyers, which they don’t.”
Such flights out of Boeing Field have been a regular occurrence in recent years, conducted in exactly the same fashion, chains and all, during the administration of President Joe Biden, as well as during the first Trump administration.
What’s different is President Trump’s desire, as part of his crackdown on undocumented immigrants, to boast of the process and show off its dehumanizing aspects.
The White House even gleefully labeled its post “ASMR,” an acronym used on social media — it stands for autonomous sensory meridian response — to describe a “pleasant tingling sensation” triggered by certain sounds featured in thousands of YouTube videos.
Elon Musk, the president’s billionaire adviser and owner of the social media platform X, posted the video with the comment: “Haha wow,” with emojis of a troll and a gold medal.
These deportation flights out of Boeing Field occur weekly, typically on a Tuesday, with planes arriving from other states to bring undocumented immigrants to the Northwest ICE Processing Center, the detention facility in Tacoma, while others board the departing jet to fly to other destinations for deportation.
All of these flights are monitored by La Resistencia volunteers in a room provided by the county-run airport, where they can view the activity on two screens and count the people getting on and off to keep a tally of how many are being transported.
Mora Villalpando checked the videos the group has compiled from past weeks and was able to identify the ICE video as a flight on Tuesday, Feb. 4.
The latest deportation flight from Boeing Field was Tuesday morning, Feb. 18.
The La Resistencia volunteers counted two detainees getting off that GlobalX charter plane when it arrived and 22 who boarded before it took off shortly after 11 a.m.
The jet then headed for El Paso, Texas, according to flight data from Flightradar24, a flight tracking company. From there, the deportees may be sent back to their countries of origin.
The plane used Tuesday, the same one as in the video, is an Airbus A320 commercial jet, formerly owned by Alaska Airlines and sold to GlobalX. The plane was repainted white except for the tail rudder, which still clearly sports the Alaska livery.
Though the existence of these flights has been widely reported locally, this is the first time people can get a close-up view of how ICE treats the detainees.
In 2019, King County Executive Dow Constantine signed an order seeking to ban such flights, and the aviation companies servicing the charter flights backed out of doing so.
But President Biden’s Justice Department continued a Trump administration lawsuit to overturn the order and won in court.
With Constantine’s order voided, Signature Aviation, one of the companies that services private planes at Boeing Field, agreed to take on the deportation flights, and they resumed in May 2023.
Cargo planes based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Pierce County have also been used in recent deportation flights under the Trump administration, the Tacoma News Tribune reported.
Recently there has been an uptick of people arriving on the GlobalX flights for detention at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, which had been operating significantly under capacity since the pandemic.
ICE spokesperson David Yost confirmed that nothing was unusual about the flight depicted in the video. He said he’s seen the same process now across three administrations — from Trump to Biden and now Trump again — and that the chains are “standard law enforcement security procedures.”