On Dec. 14, hours after the Georgetown University men’s basketball team defeated the Syracuse University Orange, a chartered GlobalX airplane with tail number N837VA took off from Syracuse, N.Y., and landed at Dulles International Airport (IAD) in Washington, D.C.
Three months later, on March 18, the same GlobalX aircraft flew from Richmond, Va. — roughly 30 minutes from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office where detained Georgetown postdoctoral researcher Badar Khan Suri was held that morning — to Alexandria, La., where an ICE database located him that evening.
Tom Cartwright, a retired banking executive who has tracked deportation flights since 2020, said Khan Suri’s description of the aircraft and flight data makes it likely he was aboard N837VA.
“That definitely sounds like an ICE flight,” Cartwright told The Hoya. “That’s highly, highly probable.”
Publicly available flight data suggests the Georgetown men’s basketball team used the same planes to travel for away games that ICE uses to transport detainees and deport migrants.
The data suggests that the team flew round-trip flights to and from eight away games between Dec. 12 and March 8 with GlobalX, otherwise known as Global Crossing Airlines — an airline that has become the single largest federal subcontractor of ICE deportation flights.
One or two days before each of these eight games, a GlobalX chartered aircraft flying as GlobalX Flight 4640 flew directly from Dulles to the away game location, spanning the United States from Providence, R.I., to Omaha, Neb.
Within five hours after the end of each game, GlobalX chartered planes flying as GlobalX Flight 4641 flew return flights back to Dulles.
A university spokesperson did not confirm or deny whether the men’s basketball team flew on GlobalX aircraft.
“Georgetown Athletics engages a third party company to broker its men’s basketball team travel,” the spokesperson wrote to The Hoya. “Georgetown does not directly select the planes or carriers used for this travel.”
Tracing Georgetown’s GlobalX Connection
The Hoya corroborated this information by cross-checking images from the team’s social media with publicly available flight logs for Washington, D.C.-area airports.
The team posted images of the men’s basketball team boarding or deplaning from chartered flights eight times throughout the season:
- Dec. 12, as the team traveled to Syracuse to play Syracuse University;
- Jan. 5, as the team traveled to Milwaukee to play Marquette University;
- Jan. 23, as the team traveled to Providence to play Providence College;
- Feb. 3, as the team traveled to Cincinnati to play Xavier University;
- Feb. 13, as the team traveled to Indianapolis to play Butler University;
- Feb. 23, as the team traveled to Omaha to play Creighton University;
- Feb. 25, as the team traveled to Hartford, Conn., to play the University of Connecticut; and
- March 7, as the team traveled to Chicago to play DePaul University.
According to publicly available flight logs, GlobalX flights operating as Flight 4640 were the only chartered flights to depart from any Washington, D.C.-area airport and arrive in each corresponding city on those dates.
The flight logs also reveal that in seven of those eight cases, GlobalX flights operating as Flight 4641 were the only chartered flights to arrive in any D.C.-area airport from each city between the end of the team’s games and their next game days. On March 8, Flight 4641 was one of two chartered flights traveling from Chicago to a Washington, D.C.-area airport.
Each flight operating as Flight 4640 departed from Dulles, while each running of Flight 4641 arrived at Dulles.
In addition, several photos the team posted on social media of their travel show players or coaches boarding a plane with neon blue and neon green wingtips. Multiple aviation experts confirmed to The Hoya that the planes depicted in these photos match GlobalX Airbus A320 planes.
GlobalX has publicly acknowledged that 12 college basketball teams flew on its planes during this year’s regular season.
A GlobalX spokesperson did not respond to a request for confirmation Georgetown’s basketball team was among them.
GlobalX as ICE Air
GlobalX’s fleet of 19 aircraft flew 74 percent of ICE’s 1,564 deportation flights in 2024, transporting detainees from the United States to locations across Latin America.
All six of the planes operating Flights 4640 or 4641 have flown routes between ICE operating airports and destinations in 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries since December.
The plane that operated Flight 4640 from Dulles to Syracuse on Dec. 12 was GlobalX aircraft N276GX. Four days after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the same plane left Alexandria, La., en route to Belo Horizonte, Brazil, carrying 88 migrants, some in chains. Turbine problems and broken air conditioning forced the flight to land in Manaus, Brazil, across the country from Belo Horizonte, sparking outrage in Brazil.
On March 15, plane N837VA, which operated Flight 4641 from Syracuse to Dulles on Dec. 14 and likely carried Khan Suri on March 18, was one of a convoy of three planes which flew from Harlingen, Texas, to Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and then on to San Salvador, El Salvador, carrying migrants who had been prepared for deportation without hearings.
Though a federal judge ordered the three planes to return to the United States, staying the migrants’ deportation, they continued flying in violation of his order.
The other planes that operated as Flight 4640 or Flight 4641 have also flown to airports in Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Brazil and Cuba — including the notorious U.S. air base in Guantanamo Bay, where N276GX flew April 3.
GlobalX has flown deportees since 2023, when it landed an emergency contract with CSI Aviation, the federal contractor for ICE Air — a subdivision of ICE that organizes the transfer and deportation of immigrants.
Cartwright said that because the federal government lacks its own air operations for deportations, GlobalX acts as a subcontractor for the federal government.
“ICE Air doesn’t own any planes,” Cartwright said. “They operate this way through charter companies, primarily.”
Spokespeople for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2023, GlobalX negotiated a new five-year contract with ICE Air, a contract expected to earn the company $65 million per year, according to the company’s second quarter earnings in fiscal year 2024. Simultaneously, the airline held a contract to transport college basketball teams between game locations during this year’s March Madness tournament.
According to Cartwright, GlobalX’s business model relies on rapidly switching between deportation flights and other private charters.
“Global Crossing could fly a flight that takes fans to the Masters tournament or to an NCAA tournament one day and two days later do a deportation flight or a flight with migrants that are in detention centers,” Cartwright said.
Georgetown men’s basketball contracts flights through sports travel service Anthony Travel, which coordinates all air transportation for men’s basketball games and tournaments and is known for “unique cost-saving vendor programs.”
Anthony Travel employees declined to respond to a request for comment.
Angelina Godoy, a professor at the University of Washington who has researched deportation flight contracting, said airlines can refurbish the interior of planes in as little as several hours, depending on whether its passengers are high-end clients or ICE detainees.
“My understanding is that many of these planes can be switched out in terms of level of luxury accommodations inside,” Godoy told The Hoya. “You have the plane itself, sort of the shell of the plane. But then you can remove the seats from it and put in wider, more comfortable seats with more luxurious cushions.”
“But then the same plane with the same tail number, the same shell of a plane, could also be equipped more bare-bones for just economy flights or deportation flights,” Godoy added.
Aboard GlobalX
When GlobalX aircrafts are used to deport individuals or transfer them between U.S. ICE facilities, ICE agents often place detainees in physical restraints, leading to intense travel conditions.
Godoy said being a detainee aboard an ICE flight places individuals in a particularly vulnerable position.
“There’s kind of no recourse for people in that situation,” Godoy said. “They’re just in an extreme situation of vulnerability.”
According to the ICE Air Operations Handbook, handcuffs, waist chains and leg irons must fully restrain detainees throughout the duration of their flight. Detainees cannot wear shoelaces or jewelry, cannot have a bag weighing more than 40 pounds and are provided only a sandwich and granola bar for flights less than 10 hours long.
Khan Suri detailed experiencing these conditions in a court filing his lawyers filed April 8. According to the complaint, ICE transported Khan Suri in shackles for the duration of his March 18 flight, and agents did not allow Khan Suri to close the door while using the bathroom.
Findings from an April 1 investigation into GlobalX flights from ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative journalism outlet, mirror these complaints. In interviews with ProPublica, GlobalX flight attendants described worrying about how to evacuate shackled passengers and described a disaster as “only a matter of time.”
Godoy said such restraints present a safety problem should the plane face an emergency.
“If folks are shackled at the arms or wrists and ankles, how would they get off the plane in any kind of emergency?” Godoy said. “They are able — as long as they’re able bodied — to walk or to shuffle in those chains. But that certainly wouldn’t be an easy way to get off the plane quickly in an emergency, so it raises all kinds of safety concerns.”
Godoy said that while athletes and university leadership are likely unaware of connections between GlobalX and ICE, the evidence is readily available.
“At some point it becomes too obvious to deny, when you see, for example, these published flights going to El Salvador in recent days, taking people with no criminal record and locking them up,” Godoy said.
“The pictures are there — it’s a GlobalX flight,” Godoy added. “At some point people have got to put two and two together.”
