This is an adapted excerpt from the April 29 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
Earlier this month, dozens of people gathered at an airport in New Haven, Connecticut, to protest a small budget airline called Avelo. The company, which markets itself as a consumer airline for the general public, recently signed a contract with the Trump administration for the use of its planes, flight attendants and everything else for deportation flights.
If there is an airport where Avelo flies, chances are there has been a protest there this month — maybe even more than one.
Since then, the protests against Avelo Airlines at the New Haven airport have become a regular thing, and they have been getting bigger over time. Connecticut’s senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal, joined the protesters for one of them.
But this isn’t just happening in New Haven. These protests are taking place all over the country. This past weekend, we saw protests in Santa Rosa, California. Throughout the month, there have been protests at airports in Rochester, New York; Wilmington, Delaware; Burbank, California; and Daytona Beach, Florida. If there is an airport where Avelo flies, chances are there has been a protest there this month — maybe even more than one. One online petition calling for a boycott of Avelo has more than 36,000 signatures so far.
When it comes to the principle of the matter here — when it comes to the Trump administration’s mass deportation program and locking people up indefinitely in a foreign prison without any opportunity to contest the allegations against them — it is one thing to engage with this as a member of the public. When it comes to the public, you can see from the polling, the protests and the signs people are holding on street corners, that they are repulsed by what Trump is doing and the way he is treating immigrants and the way he is handling deportations. Among the public, there is a big national backlash against that.
But it is another thing to be a private, for-profit, public-facing company trying to get consumers to purchase your product while you are also participating in that — with the same planes you want people to pay to fly on.
This has come to a head not only at these protests, but also in a very particular way in Connecticut. Avelo has its largest base in New Haven, and the airline recently expanded to a second airport there after getting a sweet tax deal from the state government. But now, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong has written to Avelo and told the company, “The State of Connecticut has an obligation now … to consider the viability of our choice to support Avelo.”
“We are owed answers on Avelo’s Homeland Security contract to determine whether Avelo’s business practices can remain compatible with such state support,” Tong wrote.
In addition to requesting a copy of Avelo’s contract with the Trump administration, Tong demanded answers to a number of questions, including, “Can Avelo confirm that it will never operate flights while non-violent passengers are in shackles, handcuffs, waist chains and/or leg irons and unable to safely evacuate in the event of an emergency?”
It is clear all they intend to do is take state support and make money off other people’s suffering.
Avelo responded by not answering any of those questions. Instead, the airline told Connecticut’s attorney general that he has a “fundamental misunderstanding” of the situation and advised him that if he wants a copy of its contract with the Trump administration, he is welcome to file a Freedom of Information Act request with the government.
The airline did, however, add this: “Avelo remains committed to public safety and the rule of law, as evidenced by our public, continuous, and persistent compliance with all federal regulations governing commercial air travel in the United States.”
In a statement, Tong called Avelo’s letter “insulting and condescending to the people of Connecticut who have invested in and committed millions of dollars to Avelo’s success.”
“What’s more, telling the Office of the Attorney General to pound sand and to ask the Department of Homeland Security for a copy of their contract through FOIA is a callous back-of-the-hand that shows they really don’t care what we think,” Tong wrote. “It is clear all they intend to do is take state support and make money off other people’s suffering.”