#SethMiller, a notorious Bronx landlord, must pay $1,000 daily for seven years of tenant abuse, totaling $2 million. #MayorMamdani vows more action, with harsher penalties if violations aren't fixed by March 18. #TenantJustice #VanessaGibson⁠
⁠
The court order against #SethMiller marks a significant step in tenant justice. Mayor Mamdani and Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson praised tenants' r... https://instagr.am/p/DV6SVckCkoq/

Why Avelo Airlines isn’t in my flight plans and won’t be anytime soon

LAS VEGAS

The last two years, Avelo Airlines has provided a cheap, conveniently-scheduled option for short-haul flights from here to smaller California airports at the end of Black Hat–Santa Rosa in 2023, then Burbank last year. But this time, that startup carrier put itself out of consideration because of a new set of routes it flies that nobody should want to board.

In May, the Houston-based carrier began operating deportation flights for the Trump administration under a contract it signed with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in April. This is a deliberately cruel from of transportation, as ProPublica documented in an April report: Flight attendants for the charter airline Global Crossing Airlines reported that they were told not to provide more than the most basic medical care for detainees who were flown with their hands and feet in shackles, making any evacuation in an emergency difficult to impossible.

The union representing Avelo’s flight attendants raised the same concern in early April after Avelo inked its deal with ICE. “Having an entire flight of people handcuffed and shackled would hinder any evacuation and risk injury or death,” the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA’s statement read. “It also impedes our ability to respond to a medical emergency, fire on board, decompression, etc. We cannot do our jobs in these conditions.”

Whatever you feel about people who came to this country illegally, you should be able to recognize this treatment of them as an abuse of basic human rights. You should also know that the Trump administration’s obsession with mass deportation has led ICE to detain people with no criminal record whatsoever–including U.S. citizens.

Seth Miller, an aviation journalist who has occasionally loaned his expertise to my stories (also a poll worker like me, a woodworker like my brother, and since January, a Democratic representative in New Hampshire’s state house), decided to do something about that. He set up a site, AvelNo, and paid for two billboards near Avelo’s hub in New Haven, Conn., that ask travelers to stop flying Avelo until Avelo stops flying for ICE.

The airline responded by sending a cease-and-desist letter making the laughable allegation that the campaign, featuring a tweaked version of Avelo’s logo, infringed on Avelo’s trademarks and confused people. After Avelo persuaded the billboard operator to take down those signs, Miller filed a countersuit seeking a declaratory judgment upholding his First Amendment rights to criticize Avelo in those ways.

The airline has also offered insultingly shallow responses to inquiries by Connecticut Attorney General William Tong (D.) as it’s continued operating these deportation flights in planes painted in all white instead of its usual livery. I spotted one during a connection in Denver at the end of May and had to wonder about the condition of the human cargo inside that 737.

Last month, Avelo announced that it was exiting the West Coast entirely to focus on the East Coast–including a new route from Dulles to Tweed New Haven. But it doesn’t matter how many routes Avelo adds or how cheap its fares are, before fees to pick a seat and carry on or check a larger bag: That airline is dead to me until it stops treating the Trump administration’s human-rights abuses as a profit opportunity while trying to silence a fellow journalist for calling them out on it.

#AvelNo #Avelo #BlackHat #deportationFlights #humanRights #ice #ICEAir #immigration #las #LasVegas #massDeportation #SethMiller #TrumpAdministration