Missouri’s role in the Trump administration’s campaign to deport millions of immigrants has increased dramatically, up 200%.
But it’s not primarily through highly publicized incidents where immigrants have been taken into custody at their workplaces, in apartment parking lots or after check-ins at Kansas City’s immigration court.
It’s through Kansas City International Airport.
At least once, but sometimes multiple times a week, flights are leaving or arriving at KCI with detainees in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Handcuffs, waist chains and leg irons are used on many ICE flights.
Most of the flights are chartered with private companies through subcontractor agreements, collectively dubbed “ICE Air.”
Immigration-related flights in and out of Missouri, primarily through KCI, increased more than 200% in the first year of the Trump administration, according to data compiled by Human Rights First, which produces the ICE Flight Monitor report.
“Behind every data point, every flight, is a person — someone separated from family in the United States, transferred across the country in shackles, or deported to a place where they may face danger,” said Savi Arvey, director of research and analysis for refugee protection at Human Rights First, in a statement releasing data earlier this year.
The flights are Kansas City’s largely unseen — and critics say unregulated — role in the Trump administration’s growing efforts to deport immigrants, including a near tripling of arrests in Missouri, according to reporting by the Midwest Newsroom.
Kansas City Aviation Department spokesperson Jackson Overstreet noted that KCI is “a public-use airport subject to federal regulation. KCAD cannot legally restrict access to (KCI) for public or private aircraft operations, including aircraft chartered for federal government purposes.”
Nationwide, ICE Air flights reached record levels in March, according to Flight Monitor data released April 14.
There were 1,794 flights documented across the U.S. in March, marking a 122% increase from March 2025.
Midwest geography is key to Kansas City’s growing role in the flights.
The “heart of America” moniker is important to Kansas City’s branding. But it also means the area is strategically located as a connector for a growing network of county jails, detention centers and warehouses being used to gather immigrants for final removal from the country.
The latest Flight Monitor report tracked 130 ICE Air departures from KCI during 2025, the first year of the second Trump administration, and 33 departures during the first three months of 2026.
The report does not note how many people were on each flight, or their identities.
ICE Flight Monitor tracked 106 flights with Kansas City as the destination in 2025, and 21 such flights through March.
KCI’s runways are used for direct deportation flights, such as one that left on a recent Wednesday in April that was bound for the U.S.-Mexico border. Last-minute court filings allowed a local immigration attorney to have one man removed from the flight, providing more time to plead the case in immigration court.
But the most dramatic surge noted by the ICE Flight Monitor reporting is a 132% increase in domestic shuffle flights in the first year of the Trump administration.
Those flights involve transferring people around the U.S. from county jails and detention centers to staging sites for deportation.
Mapped, the flight paths crisscross the U.S. like an increasingly intricate web.
The road between Leavenworth and KCI
A former federal prison owned and operated by CoreCivic in Leavenworth, Kansas, reopened in March as an immigration detention center after a protracted legal battle with the city over its special use permit.
In early April, nearly 90 people were being held at the detention center, which has been renamed the Midwest Regional Reception Center.
CoreCivic plans to add about 40 immigrants a week to the center, which can hold about 1,000 people, said Michael Sharma-Crawford, a Kansas City immigration attorney.
Sharma-Crawford is a member of a community oversight committee to monitor the Leavenworth detention center.
The role of KCI in deportations and transfers of immigrants is anticipated to increase as Leavenworth reaches capacity.
For the western portion of the Midwest, Denver would be the closest large airport, Sharma-Crawford said.
“When you talk about the rural, middle of the country, there’s not a whole lot,” he said.
When immigration arrests occur in Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, the Dakotas and Nebraska, “all of it rolls into us,” he said.
Up to 73,000 people are in ICE custody nationwide daily.
ICE Flight Monitor documented 1,225 shuffle flights around the U.S. in March.
Immigration attorneys are concerned that increased shuffling of immigrants from one location to another will undercut their due process.
About 14% of detained immigrants receive the help of an attorney, according to the American Immigration Council.
“As soon as we are able to get a client, they are moved away from counsel without us knowing where they have been sent,” said Clare Murphy Shaw, executive director of the Asylum Clinic of Kansas City, a nonprofit that works with immigrant and refugee populations in the Midwest.
The government maintains a detainee locator to track immigrants in ICE custody. But the online system is frequently not up to date, leaving attorneys and families in the dark about the whereabouts of people.
The March Flight Monitor report also raises due-process concerns.
“These removals often do not comply with U.S. law, constitutional law, and international human rights and refugee law,” the report said.
The report alleges:
- People have been removed without their immigration case being decided by a judge.
- Asylum seekers have been expelled without their claims being screened.
- And people who have accepted a so-called voluntary departure have done so under coercion and threats by immigration agents, or after feeling pressured from abusive and prolonged detention conditions.
ProPublica has documented the concerns of flight attendants hired to work on chartered flights for ICE. Attendants cited a lack of training to ensure the safety of shackled immigrant passengers during an emergency.
The chartered flights nationally include a wide range of companies. A few cited in the report are Global Crossing Airlines, which is also known as GlobalX, Key Lime, Omni and Eastern Air Express.
Besides the chartered flights, U.S. military flights are also shown in the data. ICE also occasionally uses commercial airlines, which the report did not track.
In total, ICE Flight Monitor documented 2,253 deportation flights to 79 countries between Jan. 20, 2025, and Jan. 20, 2026.
The data marks a 46% increase from the last year of the Biden administration through the first of the second Trump administration.
The report also noted a 76% increase in the number of countries people are being deported to, compared to the last year of the Biden administration, including within sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
Guatemala and Honduras are the top removal countries, accounting for 41% of all removal flights.
Human Rights First argues the increases are worrisome because of the hidden nature of the flights, operating with “minimal transparency or public oversight.”
“People are being shuffled between detention centers away from their loved ones and legal counsel, deported to countries where they face danger, or sent to places where they have no connection, all without transparency or due process,” Arvey said in a statement releasing the March data.
Deportations from Kansas City are largely unseen, but not new
Kansas City’s airport has long been used for immigration enforcement, going back decades.
Enforcement and removal operations within the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Homeland Security Investigations and the umbrella agency, the Department of Homeland Security, all have offices in the area.
Most are located near KCI.
Previously, offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, INS, also operated near the airport.
INS predated the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which formed after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Some of the uptick in deportation-related flights is because the Trump administration added 35 airports to its ICE Air Operations in the last year. The number of charter companies used by the government also continues to grow.
The Flight Monitor report also tracked far smaller numbers of immigration-related departures and arrivals from the airport in Springfield, Missouri, and at least one flight at St. Louis Downtown Airport, just across the Mississippi River in Illinois.
In Kansas, it tracked flights in and out of airports in Topeka and Wichita. Omaha, Nebraska, is another Midwest airport included in the reporting.
The fact that Homeland Security and its predecessor agencies have long operated locally isn’t widely known, said Samantha Calderon, with Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation.
The group monitors immigration arrests and trains immigrants in their rights.
Calderon said the use of Kansas City’s airport is another layer to enforcement actions that isn’t readily visible, making conditions difficult to monitor, she said.
Another factor is which immigrants were targeted for removal by previous White House administrations.
Prior to Donald Trump’s second administration, most of the arrests of immigrants happened from jails and prisons, according to reporting by the Deportation Data Project.
Recent reporting by the Deportation Data Project documents a shift, with increasing numbers of immigrants who have no criminal conviction being targeted for removal from the country.
The number of deportations has increased fivefold over the first year of the Trump administration, the project reported in March.
The project also found that ICE arrests have more than quadrupled.
Arrests of people taken off the streets, including highly publicized sweeps in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles, increased by a factor of 11, according to the Deportation Data Project. Those arrests included “not only arrests in neighborhoods, but also immigration court and at ICE field offices during regular check-ins. Arrests not in jails or prisons at this order of magnitude are a new phenomenon.”
Although Kansas City hasn’t seen massive sweeps such as in Minneapolis, the region’s role in deportation is likely to continue growing through the Leavenworth detention center and through flights at the airport.
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
