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Immigrant rights advocates are sounding alarms over a Plano-based company using a lease at Love Field to facilitate U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flights.
On Monday, Rev. Mara Richards Bim published an article on potential ICE activity at Love Field in the Baptist News. Activist groups, including El Movimiento and the Democratic Socialists of America, have tracked flights entering and leaving a “backdoor” hangar out of view of commercial passengers since at least early May. Reported destinations include major ICE detention hubs and airports in Mexico known to receive deportation flights.
The facility activists say is being used as a staging ground for detainee “shuffle” flights and deportations is owned and operated by Atlantic Aviation, a $10 billion company headquartered in Plano with a presence at over 105 locations across North America. Shuffle flights are transfer flights operated by ICE Air Operations to move immigrant detainees between detention centers, holding facilities and deportation staging areas. Photos and videos posted to social media appear to show groups of shackled individuals being loaded onto chartered airplanes in front of Atlantic’s Love Field hangar.
‘Akin to human trafficking’
Bim serves as an advocacy fellow at Royal Lane Baptist Church and said she first heard about the flights two weeks ago when activists contacted her. She is also a member of The Clergy League for Emergency Action and Response (DFW CLEAR), an interfaith coalition that has vocally opposed ICE activity in the area.
Before organizing against now-abandoned plans to create an ICE detention center in Hutchins, Bim traveled to the Twin Cities during the January ICE surge and was one of the clergy members who disrupted operations at Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport. She said the protest was organized, in part, to disrupt ICE flights to Texas and called the operation at Love Field “akin to human trafficking.” She also criticized the city for profiting from it.
“How has the city of Dallas Aviation Board allowed this? And their statement that they issued is a whole bunch of nothing,” she said. “They should be protecting the interests of Dallas citizens.”
In a statement on behalf of the city of Dallas, a Love Field spokesperson said ICE is transporting individuals “at major airports across the country.”
“Like these other airports, Dallas Love Field does not manage or oversee federal immigration enforcement operations, nor does the airport have authority over federal decisions regarding the movement of individuals in federal custody,” the statement reads. “The airport remains committed to operating in a safe and lawful manner while serving the region’s transportation needs. We understand that immigration-related issues can be deeply personal and concerning for many members of the Dallas community.”
Organizations like Human Rights First have tracked flight patterns involving immigration enforcement during the Trump administration’s immigration offensive. Through April 2026, there have been 7,110 flights within or out of the U.S. involving immigration enforcement, according to the organization’s last available monthly report. Human Rights First logged 4,980 of those as domestic shuffle flights carrying ICE detainees between detention centers, with the remaining 2,130 related to or explicitly for deportations. Love Field is one of the major airports listed as a venue for the flights in the report.
When asked for comment, Atlantic Aviation representatives pointed the Observer to the Love Field statement. The company’s website features a dedicated page advertising its facilities for World Cup business, including a countdown to the tournament, which some international fans have expressed concern about attending due to ICE activity.
Bim said, given what she’s seen across the country, ICE’s presence at Love Field isn’t shocking.
“I am surprised — I had no idea that there was this backdoor area to the airport,” she said. “I grew up here. That’s surprising as well; it’s this backdoor, surreptitious way of doing it.
“But it goes along with the whole way they’re operating with masks and without showing their IDs. If everything were above board, there would be no reason for them to cover their faces, and there would be no reason to use the back doors of airports.”
The backdoor
Atlantic Aviation is what’s known as a fixed base operator (FBO). FBOs use leased facilities at airports to provide hangar space, refueling services, maintenance and other logistical support for private and charter planes. The company arrived at Love Field in September 2022 after acquiring Textar, the previous operator of the space.
Organizers call the Atlantic hangar a “backdoor” because it is extremely difficult to view from commercial terminals and can virtually only be accessed from Shoreview Road. The street straddles Bachman Lake and sits nearly a mile from Love Field’s main passenger entrance.
“It’s out of the eyes of the public and the passengers for Delta, Southwest, United, everything else that flies out of there,” said Lanie Olmo, an activist with the Democratic Socialists of America involved in monitoring and recording the flights.
So where does ICE come in? Atlantic Aviation works with DHS-affiliated charter airlines to provide services at Love Field, organizers said. Using tail numbers and flight tracking services, Olmo said the activists have tracked Wisconsin Airlines and Eastern Airlines flights arriving at Love Field at least five days a week, with two or more flights sometimes arriving in a single day. Wisconsin Airlines was recently purchased by CSI Aviation, the main provider of charter flights for ICE operations that currently holds well over $1 billion in contracts with DHS, while Eastern Airlines also has well-reported involvement with DHS operations.
Signature Aviation, another FBO that provides services for DHS-affiliated charter flights, was recently denounced in an open letter by Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey. In the letter, Healey said that “a significant majority of people detained by ICE in Massachusetts over the past year have no criminal convictions or charges.”
“You are the charter companies’ point of contact, you ensure that the planes are fueled up, your personnel open the gates to allow ICE’s vehicles into the airport, and you escort ICE’s vehicles with detainees to the tarmac and into the deportation planes,” the letter reads. “It is not Hyperbole to say if Signature Aviation stopped supporting ICE’s flights, ICE would not be able to operate out of Hanscom Field.”
The activists have not reported flights facilitated by any FBOs other than Atlantic Aviation at Love Field since the beginning of May. Atlantic Aviation was recently reported to be the subject of a $10 billion deal between KKR and Co., and Apollo Global Management. The companies did not return requests for comment.
Olmo said the flights out of Love Field and other airports have historically been an “open secret” and part of routine immigration procedures. What has changed, she said, is the number of flights taking place as the Trump administration continues its unprecedented immigration enforcement crackdown.
Compared with the 7,110 flights reported by Human Rights First through April 2026, only 2,809 flights were recorded in 2025 through that timeframe. And compared to the first year of the Biden administration in 2021, when 1,523 flights were reported through April, it’s more than a 350% increase.
Olmo said the flights at Love Field mostly arrive from El Paso, where ICE has a processing center. Other points of origin include areas with military bases, such as San Diego and Killeen, as well as occasional flights from other hubs, such as Arizona.
From the perimeter of Love Field, she and other activists record video and take photos of what appear to be individuals being offloaded from buses before being boarded onto planes at Atlantic Aviation’s Love Field hangar, although she said that hasn’t always been possible of late.
“What we’ve noticed in the last few weeks is that they’ve started potentially blocking the views to the plane when they’re doing these things,” she said. “On the first day that we noticed it, I was there documenting, and the two other planes that they were using were Eastern or Air Wisconsin… But that then begs the question, why are they using these other companies or other people’s private planes to help block their activities?”
The lease?
The city, for its part, also doesn’t seem keen to shine light on its relationship with Atlantic Aviation.
In the statement to the Observer, a city spokesperson said the city has a lease with an entity known as MLT Development for Atlantic’s Love Field property. An approved Dallas City Council resolution extending the lease from March 2021 shows that an original agreement was authorized by the council in 1998 as a 30-year lease with MLT Development.
“The City has not had a direct lease with either Textar or Atlantic Aviation,” the spokesperson said.
And while that may be true in a strictly legal sense, Texas business registrations tell a different picture in reality.
A quick Google search shows an MLT Development Company based at 3232 Love Field Drive — the space currently occupied by Atlantic Aviation’s hangar — as “permanently closed.” Indeed, Texas Secretary of State filings list the only MLT Development Company registered in a ZIP code near Love Field as having a forfeited business registration.
However, there is an MLT Development Co. currently registered to do business in Texas. In fact, the filing lists its mailing address as Atlantic Aviation’s corporate headquarters in West Plano, and both companies share the same registered agent: CT Corporation System, a downtown Dallas-based corporate compliance firm. When called to verify its relationship with both companies, a CT employee said to request information by letter or through a process server. The new MLT Development Company registered with the state less than two weeks after Atlantic announced its arrival at Love Field in. 2022.
When the Observer called Atlantic’s Love Field office, an individual in management said, verbatim, “Essentially, we are MLT. We do business as Atlantic.”
Representatives for Love Field told the Observer to file an open records request for information on MLT Development’s rent obligations to the city. The last time the lease was extended by 31 years with council authorization in March 2021, preceding Atlantic Aviation’s acquisition and well before reported ICE activity, staff estimated the city’s projected revenue from the agreement at nearly $54 million, according to a city website filing.
With the city appearing to be legally bound by a lease with MLT Development (and, it appears, Atlantic Aviation by extension), this wouldn’t be the first time Dallas has been forced to facilitate immigration enforcement. In April, Dallas Chief of Police Daniel Comeaux announced the department would change its policies on cooperation with federal immigration enforcement after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to withhold tens of millions in public safety funding if DPD did not cooperate with ICE.
Spokespersons for Love Field did not return the Observer’s follow-up request for comments on MLT’s seeming lack of independence from Atlantic Aviation. They also did not comment on whether city staff negotiating a June 2025 lease addendum — authored close to three years after MLT Development re-registered at the same address as Atlantic Aviation’s corporate HQ— knew about the apparent changes at the company when putting forth the agreement for council approval.
‘What Love Field should be about’
The people loaded onto the flights could possibly come from another detention facility, Olmo said, or the Dallas field office, where agents have reportedly been given a quota of 75 daily arrests. Their destinations mostly include major ICE processing and detention hubs such as Alexandria, Louisiana, and Harlingen in the Rio Grande Valley.
These flights are known as shuffle trips, and immigration attorneys have warned that they may be used in retaliation or to move detainees to areas where they are not guaranteed a speedy trial, such as Texas, which has one of the longest backlogs of immigration cases in the U.S.
Occasionally, organizers said they have tracked deportation flights from Love Field to airports in Villahermosa and Tapachula in southern Mexico, both of which are common destinations for removals and far from the border. The flights appear to be flown by GlobalX, another charter airliner owned by CSI that The New York Times has described as “ICE’s go-to charter airline for deportations.”
John Putnam, one of the main activists tracking the flights and an organizer for El Movimiento, said he was “pissed” that an airport owned by his city government was being used to facilitate detainee shuffles and deportation flights.
“This is your property, and these are your residents,” Putnam said. “You should be protecting them, and you should be making sure that ICE isn’t doing anything illegal.”
Especially concerned about reports of individuals claiming U.S. citizenship being deported, he said, adding that the city should investigate what happens at Atlantic Aviation’s Love Field hangar.
Putnam also said Love Field should represent something other than another chapter in the administration’s controversial immigration crackdown, and while he acknowledged that the city not have many options, he just wants ICE out of Dallas’ airport.
“Travel should be a joyful thing,” Putnam said. “Planes are cool; I don’t love the environmental impact of planes, but it is super cool. It’s this amazing human feat of engineering that we get these giant hunks of metal in the air and go all over the world…”
“That’s what travel should be about. That’s what Love Field should be about,” he said. “Love Field should not be about harming Dallas residents.”
