ICE

Mike Luckvitch

Axios -  Avelo Airlines is cutting ties with ICE less than a year after inking a deal to carry out deportations for the agency.  Avelo appears to be the only commercial airline carrying out full aircraft deportation flights on a regular schedule for ICE, the AP noted last year...

Immigrant advocacy groups across the country have decried the relatively young budget airline's relationship with ICE.

Protests took place last year in cities where Avelo has bases, such as Wilmington, North Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee, and New Haven, Connecticut.

"Avelo used to call itself New Haven's hometown airline," Anne Watkins, an organizer with New Haven Immigrants Coalition, told the Yale Daily News last year.

"We have friends and neighbors who have been directly impacted by deportation and detention. We don't want a company that is profiting directly off of those activities to be here in New Haven."

The Hill    Vice President Vance delivered a vigorous defense on Thursday of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer who shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis, saying Renee Nicole Macklin Good was fueled by left-wing activists who are ultimately to blame for her death.

Vance offered little details as to how administration officials came to that conclusion, saying a Justice Department investigation was underway. But that didn’t stop him from characterizing the incident as “classic terrorism.”

The vice president spent considerable time at the White House blaming the media and asking it to tone down its coverage of Macklin Good’s killing, suggesting it was demonizing the ICE officer who killed the Minneapolis woman.  

But at the same time, he and other White House officials have repeatedly cast Macklin Good in a negative light, describing her as a domestic terrorist representing a lunatic fringe who deliberately sought to kill a law enforcement officer.

“What you see is what you get in this case,” Vance told reporters at a White House press briefing. “You have a woman who was trying to obstruct a legitimate law enforcement officer. Nobody debates that. You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that.”  

“I can believe that her death is a tragedy while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left, who has marshaled an entire movement, a lunatic fringe against our law enforcement officers,” he said. 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also dug in on her belief that Macklin Good was committing an act of “domestic terrorism” at the time of the shooting. 

Others are deeply skeptical that Americans will buy the administration’s “domestic terrorism” label.  

“I don’t think the country is going to look at the videos and think this was ‘domestic terrorism,’” said Mick Mulvaney, who served as President Trump’s chief of staff in his first administration...