Opponents of a budget airline that has run deportation flights for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for much of the last year celebrated on January 8 when they learned that the company, Avelo Airlines, would be ending its work with ICE on January 27.
Avelo, which is headquartered in Houston, Texas, had recently faced financial trouble on the consumer side of the business, and cited finances as its sole reason for entering into its deportation flights contract with ICE last April. When immigrant rights activists in New Haven, Connecticut—Avelo’s New England hub, from which it flies to twenty-five destinations, mostly in the Southeast and Puerto Rico—learned that Avelo was going to begin chartering deportation flights out of Mesa Gateway Airport in Arizona the next month, they leapt into action. On April 7, the New Haven Immigrants Coalition published an online petition urging people to boycott Avelo and call their state representatives to ask that they prevent the company from receiving tax breaks.
The petition was signed by more than 40,000 people, and garnered attention nationwide. Activists began protesting outside of Tweed New Haven Airport, and as video of the rallies picked up views online, activists in other cities took up the fight as well.
Across the country, Matthew Boulay, the Salem, Oregon-based director of the Coalition to Stop Avelo, says he soon saw an opportunity for organizers across different cities to work together. “My contribution,” he says, “was to see that all these groups around the country were fighting Avelo each in their own way, and I said, ‘Let’s talk to each other. Keep doing what you’re doing, but let’s coordinate.’”
In various cities, Boulay says, activist groups coordinated a monthly protest, as well as tracking deportation flight take-offs to confirm when Avelo’s planes used for deportation—painted white, with no markings except a tail number—appeared at their local airports for civilian flights. He describes the effort as non-hierarchical—“very flat, very organic,” he says. “I think that’s why it worked.”
Of the more than fifty destinations to which Avelo was operating flights when the campaign began, Boulay says, organizers mounted boycott campaigns in roughly forty-five, and the remaining cities also had activists on the ground with whom he was in contact. He describes it as a “sustained, multipronged campaign.” In addition to urging the public to boycott Avelo, organizers filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the company’s contract with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE; attended their local airport board meetings; and researched the subsidies Avelo was receiving in various states.
In several cities, the boycott effort gained noticeable traction. New Haven area residents who had previously flown with Avelo out of Tweed began flying instead on other carriers out of Bradley International Airport, a regional airport an hour away in Hartford County, even though these flights were less convenient and often more expensive. On April 15, 2025, a week after Avelo’s contract was announced, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong called for an end to the state’s jet fuel subsidy for Avelo as well as other airlines, writing in a statement that the company clearly intended to “take state support and make money off other people’s suffering.” New Hampshire State Representative Seth Miller paid for a billboard advertisement near Tweed that showed a pair of hands in restraints, with the caption, “Vacations? Deportations? Avelo Airlines flies both. Don’t fly Avelo!”
On April 8, 2025, Tong emailed Avelo CEO Andrew Levy expressing concern about the forms of physical restraint ICE detainees were facing while aboard deportation flights. The next day, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA expressed grave concern about detainees being restrained with handcuffs, leg irons, and waist chains, which it said could lead to a dangerous situation in the event of an emergency. In response, Levy suggested that Tong file a Freedom of Information Act request with DHS for the contract—a response Tong said was “totally unacceptable.”
By July 2025, Avelo had begun cancelling consumer flight routes, starting with its entire West Coast operation, where it had been flying out of eleven smaller airports across five states. In its announcement of the closures, Avelo cited the need to consolidate its business in the Eastern part of the United States.
Earlier this month, after nearly a year of resistance from consumers nationwide, Avelo announced it would stop carrying out deportation flights. In an internal memo, Levy wrote, “We moved a portion of our fleet into a government program which promised more financial stability but placed us in the center of a political controversy. The program provided short-term benefits but ultimately did not deliver enough consistent and predictable revenue to overcome its operational complexity and costs.” In an email to The Progressive after Avelo announced its decision, a company spokeswoman claimed that the airline actually carried more passengers in 2025 than in 2024. According to the company, Avelo currently flies to twenty-five destinations from New Haven, and to thirty-five destinations overall—a significant reduction from the more than fifty pre-boycott.
Umme Hoque, a Texas-based campaigner with an immigrant defense project called the Defend and Recruit network, tells The Progressive that in the course of her work on the Avelo boycott project, she saw people around the country step up to take whatever action they could against the company. Hoque, who helped organize a national week of action against Avelo from May 27 to June 5, says that some travelers who participated in the boycott had access to easy alternatives, like other airlines that flew to the same destinations, but others did not. “I think that’s one of the really inspiring things we’re seeing,” she says, “is for people who are finding it just a little inconvenient, and they’re still willing to do it to make a point.”
At a January 8 rally in New Haven to celebrate the boycott campaign’s victory, the Reverend Scott Marks, director of a community organizing group called New Haven Rising, cast doubt on Avelo’s narrative around its choice to end the deportation flights. “Acknowledging the victory, we give thanks today for the power of our collective voices,” Marks said. “Let us be clear. Change did not happen by chance. Avelo Airlines did not simply pivot their strategy. They retreated because tens of thousands of us stood together to prove that family separation is a toxic asset.”
“There is power in our dollar,” Tabitha Sookdeo, the executive director of CT Students for a Dream, said at the rally, “because people said that we will not accept seeing human beings flown out of our communities in chains.” Sookdeo referenced the death of Minnesota resident Renée Nicole Macklin Good, who had been fatally shot by an ICE agent the day prior.
“It is part of the same system,” Sookdeo said. “A system that uses violence and then asks us to look away. We gather in grief and in resistance because this violence is not inevitable. It is a choice and choices can be challenged. Avelo’s decision shows us something important. When people refuse to normalize harm, when we withdraw our money, our support and our silence, institutions are forced to respond. This is what accountability looks like.”
Boulay says the significance of the boycott campaign’s success goes beyond Avelo.
“In this era of all of us being under attack, it’s so important to have a victory—to show we can beat back this administration and its partners who are profiting off of Trump’s terrible policies,” he says. “It’s both symbolic and substantive.”