ICE Detainment and Deportation Capitol of America Hosts World Cup as City of Dallas and Atlantic Aviation Profit
Dallas-Fort Worth will host the most World Cup games in 2026 and expects nearly four million travelers while holding the distinction of being the detainment and deportation capitol of America. Dallas county leads the nation with 18,159 detainments since the second Trump administration began, according to ResistMap’s analysis of White House data.
Today North Texas hosted defending World Cup champions, Argentina, while the City of Dallas and Plano, TX based Atlantic Aviation FBO Inc. profits off of a multi-billion-dollar incarceration and deportation industry that separates families and has already claimed 50 lives this year.
America’s brutal campaign against immigrants collides with the World Cup at the Atlantic Aviation hangar at Love Field, a city owned airport where five days a week ICE Air flies charter planes filled with detained people to transport them between internment camps and stage for deportation. At least six times in April and May ICE Air flew direct deportation flights to Mexico and Honduras from Love Field.
As Atlantic Aviation colludes with ICE to separate families, they are also marketing their services to World Cup travelers, a campaign which included a World Cup countdown on their website and social media posts depicting diverse groups of people holding soccer balls and even a Mexican flag on the wall – a country they regularly deport to.
The City of Dallas expects nearly $54 million in profit from the incarceration and deportation of its own residents through a lease with Atlantic Aviation’s shady shell corporation, MLT Development, and business is booming! ICE flew 15 flights out of Love Field in 2024, 159 flights in 2025, and has already flown 137 flights this year as of June 20, 2026. Although the City of Dallas rejected a formal offer for the Dallas Police Department to collude with ICE through a multi-million-dollar 287(g) agreement, the City Council has not passed a single ordinance since Trump’s second term began to protect its residents from ICE, and recently DPD changed their general orders to allow local officers to collude with ICE anyways.
The real story, however, is not the setting or profits – although both are alarming – but the stories of hard-working families who came to America to build a life and better our communities. Government data from October 1 to November 15, 2025 found that 73% of detained people had no criminal conviction and only 5% had a violent criminal conviction. The numbers locally are nearly identical. Over 72% of the 5,200 people detained by the Dallas ICE Field Office from January 1 to March 10, 2026 had no criminal conviction. If ICE does not target “the worst of the worst,” as the Trump administration has claimed, then who are on these flights? ICE targets workers – breadwinners – in order to destabilize families and coerce family members to “voluntarily” leave or turn themselves in.
El Movimiento DFW, which trains legal observers to use their Constitutional rights to verify ICE sightings in the community, has observed that the hardest hit communities by ICE in North Texas are Pleasant Grove and Bachman Lake. The Bachman Lake neighborhood sits just on the other side of the small lake itself from Love Field. Verifiers notice that ICE largely operates in the morning hours, where they will wait to grab somebody on the short walk from the door of their home to their car; corner workers’ cars on their commute, bust in their windows, and snatch them; and raid job sites.
ICE also targets low-income apartments, lying to complexes by saying they must turn over their rent rolls without showing a judicial warrant. Recently verifiers in Tarrant County learned that ICE is coercing apartment complexes to turn over their rent rolls by threatening federal aid and tax incentives.
No Love for ICE Air is a campaign made up of North Texas residents, immigrant advocates, and faith leaders who hope to shine a light on how Atlantic Aviation and the City of Dallas are profiting off of ICE’s reign of terror in DFW. We simply ask that Atlantic Aviation end all ties with ICE Air and that the City of Dallas does whatever they legally can to pressure ICE Air out of Love Field.