ICE deportation charter airlines owe $46,513 in unpaid landing fees at Ohio's Akron-Canton Airport as flight activity surges

Three air charter companies operating U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flights out of Akron-Canton Regional Airport have accumulated $46,513 in unpaid landing fees, according to invoices released by the airport, with $33,927 past due for landings in May, June, and July. Eastern Airlines owes $41,900 for 136 landings by three variants of the Boeing 737. Global X owes $2,657 for 13 landings in July and August by two Airbus variants. Air Wisconsin, added to the rotation in July, owes $921 for 18 landings by a Bombardier CRJ200. The combined unpaid amount represents roughly 4% of the airport's total 2025 landing-fee revenue of $1.1 million. Airport vice president Lisa Dalpiaz said none of the three carriers has communicated with the airport regarding the overdue invoices.

Through September 17, a total of 167 landings had been recorded since ICE relocated deportation flights to Akron-Canton from Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport, which partially closed its longest runway for repairs. Aircraft typically arrive in the evening, often from a detention and deportation center in Alexandria, Louisiana, and occasionally directly from Tapachula, Mexico. The aircraft are serviced at the tarmac of Avflight, a Michigan-based fixed-base operator located at the northwest corner of the airport on West Airport Drive.

On the morning of September 9 — described as one of the most active days in at least six weeks — three prison buses and transport vans from the Corrections Center of Northwest Ohio and Butler County Jail arrived to load an Eastern Air Express Boeing 737, which made a brief stop in Indianapolis before continuing to Alexandria, Louisiana. A Global X jet had departed for Alexandria from the same facility three hours earlier. The Labor Day week saw unusually heavy activity, beginning with a Global X Airbus A320 arriving from Alexandria on September 5 and returning within two hours, a departure from the standard pattern of evening arrivals and next-morning departures. Transport vehicles observed have included those operated by private prison company CoreCivic, an unmarked Butler County bus, and Ford Transit vans from Mahoning County, along with U.S. government vehicles. The Ohio Immigrant Alliance reported that 448 people were booked into four publicly owned county jails on behalf of ICE between July 27 and August 31, with Butler County accounting for more than two-thirds of all detentions. Emails to ICE media relations and to Eastern Airlines, Global X, and Air Wisconsin have gone unanswered. Avflight senior vice president Joe Meszaros stated in a September 4 email that the company does not publicly disclose commercial, billing, contractual, or operational information regarding the aircraft it services.

This case illustrates a recurring exposure for regional airports that host government-contracted charter operations: the carriers flying the missions are not always the party bearing the financial or reputational risk, and public airport authorities can be left carrying unpaid landing fees while the contracting agency and its vendors decline comment. Landing-fee delinquency of this kind is typically a small share of an airport's total revenue, as the roughly 4% figure here shows, but it signals a collections and disclosure gap around flights that otherwise draw significant public scrutiny.

The segment works on a chain of separated commercial relationships — ICE contracts the charter operators, the operators land at municipal or regional airports, and a fixed-base operator like Avflight services the aircraft under its own confidentiality terms — so no single party is positioned to answer questions about billing or operational specifics. That structure lets each link decline to disclose information the others also will not provide.

What happens next likely turns on whether Akron-Canton pursues collection against Eastern Airlines, Global X, and Air Wisconsin, and whether ICE or the carriers respond to the outstanding invoices given the airport's account that none have communicated on the matter.