ICE flight opponents seek help from Massport lawyers
Advocates made their case against Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions to airport officials in a closed-door meeting.
People opposing immigration enforcement flights at Hanscom Field have support from Gov. Maura Healey.
Late last month, advocates made their case against Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions to airport officials in a closed-door meeting.
“The people of Massachusetts object to these ICE flights,” Hanscom Field Advisory Commission member Christopher Eliot told colleagues just over a week before the session.
He hoped Massport would lend a hand.
Acton’s HFAC representative, Terri Ackerman, cautioned, “We’re not going to solve everything in one meeting.”
Massport runs Hanscom and assembled a legal team for the January 28 sit-down, said agency spokesperson Jennifer Mehigan. “The group raised their concerns about ICE flights at Hanscom, and our team listened,” she told The Acton Bridge.
Advocates “wanted to continue the conversation,” she said, “so I would expect future meetings.”
She declined to comment on a recent letter from Gov. Maura Healey demanding that ICE stop using Hanscom.
‘It must end’
ICE resumed routing detainees through Hanscom last year.
Massport officials have said they can’t bar authorities from using the airport. Aside from one case in September 2025, agency brass publicly maintain that they don’t know when ICE is coming.
Critics want Massport to at least help track trips, if not halt them entirely. They’ve flagged a range of legal tools, ranging from the constitutional “Anti-Commandeering Doctrine” to a decades-old “60-seat rule” for Hanscom flights.
Healey sent ICE her letter late last year. She wrote that trips from Hanscom purposefully separate detainees from loved ones and lawyers “without due process.”
Rep. Lori Trahan, whose district includes Acton, backed Healey in a statement to The Bridge, saying recent cases “raise serious questions about whether these transfers are designed to evade judicial oversight.”
Using Hanscom as part of that is “indefensible,” Trahan said, “and it must end.”
Asked what Massport should do, Trahan’s deputy chief of staff, Francis Grubar, said Trahan “believes the responsibility lies with ICE to end practices that raise serious civil rights concerns and to ensure accountability in its detention and transfer operations.”
ICE spokespersons didn’t answer Bridge questions, and Ackerman didn’t respond to a phone call about the Massport meeting.
