ICE denies it organized charter flights to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport

ICE denies it organized charter flights to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport

BY ERIC MARK STAFF WRITER Dec 28, 2021 Updated 7 hrs ago

Questions arose Monday about which government agency organized charter flights filled with minors that landed at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport four times this month.

Jim Gallagher, president of Aviation Technologies Inc., the airport’s fixed-base operator, said Sunday the flights were listed as “ICE flights” by private charter companies.

“ICE” stands for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

However, ICE spokeswoman Mary Houtmann said Monday the agency did not organize flights that landed at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton on Dec. 11, 17 and 25.

“These are not our flights,” Houtmann wrote in an email.

The flights might have been organized by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, she wrote.

Attempts to verify that with Health and Human Services on Monday were unsuccessful.

Gallagher stuck by his assertion that he was informed the flights were “ICE flights.”

“The airline that contacts us sends us paperwork,” Gallagher said. “The paper trail doesn’t lie.”

Gallagher said his company provided service for previous ICE flights, but prior to this month all of those flights involved prisoner transport.

The charter flights that originated in Texas and landed at the airport in December were filled with children who did not speak English, accompanied by adult chaperones and translators rather than guards, Gallagher said.

“We had never seen an ICE flight that wasn’t deporting people rather than bringing them further into the country,” he said.

Another wrinkle arose when a charter flight scheduled to land Dec. 30 that had originally been listed as an ICE flight was changed to a passenger charter service, Gallagher said.

A plane from the same company — World Atlantic Airlines — landed at the airport on Christmas Day and dropped off minors and chaperones who boarded buses bound for an undisclosed location, Gallagher said.

Gallagher provided a partial answer to a question frequently asked as news of the charter flights spread via social media: Where were the children taken after boarding buses at the airport?

The flight on Dec. 11 landed at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton after it was diverted from a New York airport, Gallagher said.

Passengers from that flight boarded buses bound for Brooklyn, New York, he said.

However, Gallagher said he did not know the final destination of passengers who landed on the Dec. 17 flight, or on two flights that landed Dec. 25.

After all of the charter flights, passengers disembarked and boarded buses, Gallagher said.

Gallagher disputed reports posted to social media that some passengers on the Christmas flights were adults.

Those flights were filled with teenagers accompanied by adult chaperones, Gallagher said.

The earlier flights, on Dec. 11 and Dec. 17, included younger children and chaperones, he said.

Airport board reaction
The airport is directed by a bi-county board that includes Lackawanna County commissioners Chris Chermak, Jerry Notarianni and Debi Domenick, as well as Luzerne County Council members Tim McGinley and LeeAnn McDermott and acting county Manager Romilda Crocamo.

McGinley, Crocamo, Notarianni and Chermak said they were not informed of the charter flights in advance.

The board does not normally get involved in day-to-day operations of the airport, Crocamo and McGinley said.

Notarianni called it “more of a federal issue than it is a local issue.”

Chermak said the federal government should have notified local officials of the flights and of where the passengers will ultimately end up.

“That’s not fair to the residents of our counties that they’re sneaking these people in,” Chermak said. “We don’t know who they are. We don’t know if they’re vaccinated (against COVID-19). We don’t know anything.”