Governor Maura Healey on Thursday asked the leaders of two private airlines conducting federal immigration detention flights in Massachusetts and elsewhere to get out of the deportation business.
In her plea, Healey cited the killing on Wednesday of Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a US citizen, by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis, and an announcement by Avelo Airlines that it would end charter flights for federal immigration detainees on Jan. 27.
Healey’s plea was in a letter addressed to the leaders of Eastern Airlines in Kansas City, Mo., and GlobalX in Miami. Both provide charter flight services for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
She said the Trump administration is using the flights to transport people to other states where their cases are heard far from their homes and families and obstruct their due process rights. Last month, Healey demanded ICE halt immigration flights from Hanscom Field, a state-run airport a short drive from the federal agency’s field office in Burlington.
“Flying these residents out of state — often within hours of arrest — is intentionally cruel and purposely obstructs the due process and legal representation they are entitled to," Healey said.
“By contracting with ICE to execute these flights, you are profiting off these anti-American tactics and facilitating the obstruction of due process.”
On Friday, a spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees ICE, questioned Healey’s opposition to the deportation flights.
“Healey should stop using her pulpit to smear ICE and bully private companies, and instead start working with the” Trump administration, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
The airlines didn’t respond to Globe requests for comment.
The Trump administration has previously defended the flights as an effective tool for carrying out the president’s deportation agenda.
Critics said the Trump administration uses domestic flights to move detainees rapidly from where they were arrested to remote ICE facilities in states like Texas and Louisiana, where judges are often more conservative and less likely to grant release.
Federal immigration officials have used Hanscom to transport detainees since at least 2014. Since the start of Trump’s second term, ICE-chartered planes have departed Hanscom 112 times and flown to 17 domestic airports as of Nov. 30, according to ICE Flight Monitor, part of the nonprofit Human Rights First.
Nationally, the group said, domestic ICE flights have more than doubled since 2024 and trips overseas have increased by 41 percent as Trump carried out more than 605,000 deportations.
A commission representing communities covered by Hanscom Field has been pressing ICE for flight information and demonstrators have been gathering outside the airport to protest the operations.
In November, the Hanscom Airfield Commission posed questions to ICE about its operations at the airport and invited a representative to attend its December meeting.
The agency provided a “meaningless” response to the questions and didn’t send a representative to the meeting, according to the commission.
On Dec. 27, the commission sent further questions to the ICE representative and invited him to attend a meeting on Jan. 20.
Hanscom Field is run by the Massachusetts Port Authority. The agency has said it cannot legally prohibit the flights and does not receive advance notice.
The online version of this story was updated to add comment from the US Department of Homeland Security.
Laura Crimaldi can be reached at laura.crimaldi@globe.com. Follow her @lauracrimaldi.