Jun. 15—An Albuquerque company is at the center of President Donald Trump's mass deportation push.

Earlier this year, CSI Aviation entered into a lucrative contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to provide "relocation" flights.

The flights are not leaving from Albuquerque — or other locations in New Mexico — and appear to be primarily conducted by private airlines that subcontract with CSI Aviation, causing the arrangement to largely fly under the radar locally.

Mass deportations were one of the promises President Donald Trump campaigned on, and last week Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that federal agencies would increase reviews of immigration records and "take immediate appropriate actions to crackdown on visa overstays."

The number of weekly U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flights has increased since February. But the Trump administration's average daily immigration removals were actually 1% lower than under former President Joe Biden, while average arrests were 2% higher, according to a May report from TRAC.

"We're seeing much fewer people entering the country and being put in detention centers that way," said Ian Philabaum, director of legal organizing for Innovation Law Lab, which regularly represents people detained by ICE in Estancia's Torrance County Detention Facility.

"Many people are not being let in, and the majority of new people that we've seen in the (Torrance County) detention center in the last couple months have been people that have been living in the United States for a long time and were picked up in ICE interior enforcement actions in New England, Jersey and Florida," he added.

In New Mexico over the last week, there has been a visible uptick in targeted ICE activities like the raid at a Lovington dairy, said Miles Tokunow with Santa Fe Dreamers Project, but not necessarily the mass deportations Trump campaigned on.

There have also been reports of immigrants being detained by ICE at regular check-ins across the country. But Tokunow has not seen that occur for any of his nonprofit's clients, who would typically report to an El Paso office for check-ins and are always accompanied by a legal representative.

CSI Aviation's contract with the federal government is set to pay $213.9 million after several modifications, but could end up being as large as $260 million, according to federal records. It is slated to expire in August, but could be extended.

The recent contract is hardly the first of its kind for CSI Aviation, which has landed about $1.6 billion in contracts from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, since 2005 under several different administrations.

To carry out the contract, CSI Aviation works with a network of subcontractors, including Houston-based Avelo Airlines and Global X Airlines, to provide deportation flights, according to a report from the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight.

Allen Weh, a former state Republican Party chairman who was the GOP's nominee for an open U.S. Senate seat in 2014, is CSI Aviation's founder and president.

Weh recently declined to comment about the new contract, referring such questions to ICE.

An ICE spokesman told the Journal the agency's air operations for deportation flights and domestic relocation are conducted using both commercial airlines and charter aircraft.

He also said ICE Air Operations maintains five primary locations for such flights around the country: Mesa, Arizona; San Antonio; Miami; Alexandria, Louisiana; and Brownsville, Texas.

While ICE does not release information about future deportation flights or schedules in advance, the agency typically conducts "daily" missions from those five cities, said ICE regional spokesman Fernando X. Burgos Ortiz.

"Removal missions are regularly conducted to countries in Central America, including Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, as well as to destinations in the Caribbean, South America, and, when necessary, to Europe, Asia, Africa and other parts of the world for special high-risk missions," Burgos Ortiz said in a statement.

However, he did not directly respond to questions about how many individuals have been deported under the agency's contract with CSI Aviation.

For those awaiting deportation flights in detention facilities, the timing is usually a mystery, according to Philabaum.

"Oftentimes, the last thing that a person will know about their deportation flight is that they have a deportation order, and they may not hear anything more about it until somebody wakes them up at 2 a.m. in their bunk and takes them to booking and books them out to be transferred to another facility, where eventually their deportation will be effectuated," Philabaum said.

That lack of information can undermine safety planning for those being deported back to a country where they fear for their life, Philabaum said, though he added migrants are usually even more distraught about living conditions and treatment while being detained.

Since the new CSI Aviation contract took effect in March, the number of weekly ICE deportation flights has increased to the highest level since Trump took office in January.

Specifically, there were 190 migrant removal flights in May, according to Tom Cartwright, an immigration advocate who tracks ICE flights.

He said that figure was the highest since September 2021, when the Biden administration returned thousands of Haitian migrants back to the Caribbean country.

More than half of the deportation flights in May were to three Central American countries — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, according to Cartwright's research.

While CSI Aviation has largely maintained a low profile in state politics, the company provided its private hangar adjacent to the Albuquerque International Sunport as the site of a Trump campaign rally last October.

That came after Albuquerque city officials rejected the Trump campaign's request to use the Albuquerque Convention Center for the event, citing planned repair work.

Weh, who was one of roughly 7,000 people who attended the rally, has made significant campaign contributions in recent years to Republican candidates, including $205,000 in four separate donations to Trump's political committee last year, according to Federal Election Commission data.

While much of CSI Aviation's business comes from federal contracts — the company describes itself as a "seasoned federal contractor" on its website — it also provides other services. That includes medical air transport for patients who need to be moved to higher-care hospitals in a multi-state area.