BENNER TOWNSHIP — Penn State’s airport has seen a dramatic surge in flights chartered by ICE to move people between detention centers in the United States.
While ICE has said such transfers are necessary for operational reasons such as bed space, immigration experts claim the practice is intended to cut detainees off from loved ones, wear them down, and make it harder to pursue legal challenges.
The State College Regional Airport is a roughly 40-minute drive from the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, the largest immigration detention facility in the Northeast. Since the beginning of the Trump administration, the facility’s average daily population has increased. Detainees and their advocates allege poor-quality food, inadequate healthcare, and inhumane conditions.
As part of its work to fulfill President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” ICE has dramatically expanded its Air network by growing its fleet of planes, strengthening partnerships with charter airlines, and widening its network of airports.
In 2025, the State College Regional Airport serviced just two ICE flights. Through July of this year, that number rose dramatically to 107, according to data from advocacy group Human Rights First.
Penn State owns both the State College Regional Airport and the Penn State Aviation Center. The former serves commercial flights, and the terminal is owned and operated by the Centre County Airport Authority. The latter is a fixed-base operator run by the university that serves private flights with fueling, hangar storage, and aircraft maintenance.
“There are no contracts between the airport and DHS/ICE. We do not have specific details about charter flights as we are limited by what the commercial charter company operating flights communicates to the airport,” said Wyatt DuBois, senior director of university public relations. “However, it appears there has been an increase in charter flights associated with DHS/ICE.”
ICE flights are handled like any chartered or corporate aircraft arriving at the airport, he told Spotlight PA in an email. Charter companies or brokers typically provide aircraft information and an estimated arrival time but not the name of the individual or entity arranging, or on board, the flight.
Like all airports that receive federal funding, the State College airport is required to comply with Federal Aviation Administration guidelines on accepting flights, DuBois told Spotlight PA in an email.
Aviation experts agreed with Penn State, telling Spotlight PA the airport can legally refuse flights only over indiscriminate safety concerns.
“If they have federal funding, they don’t have much of a leg to stand on legally to stop the flights from coming in,” said Frank Turney, a law professor at the University of Maryland and a solo aviation law practitioner for over 30 years.
When airports accept grants from the FAA, they are required by federal law to ensure “the airport will be available for public use on reasonable conditions and without unjust discrimination.” The only exception is if they’re unable to safely accept an aircraft.
Should an airport refuse ICE flights, the FAA can pursue several types of punishment, Turney said, ranging from fines to the freezing of federal funds in the pipeline. King County, Washington, was ordered by a federal court to accept deportation flights after it attempted to block them.
The FAA didn’t respond to several requests to comment for this story. ICE didn’t respond to multiple requests and then directed Spotlight PA to the Department of Homeland Security, which didn’t respond to questions by the newsroom’s deadline.
Meanwhile, Penn State has taken steps in recent months to get out of the airport business.
On Feb. 26, the university’s Board of Trustees unanimously voted to advance the transfer of the airport’s operating assets to the county authority. “Our fundamental mission as an institution of higher education is to provide a world-class education to our students,” Sara Thorndike, Penn State’s chief financial officer, said in a statement at the time. “Operation of the airport, while vital to the continued success of the university, does not directly support that core educational mission.”
Considering the current speed of negotiations, that transfer could take one to two years, a Centre County Airport Authority official said at a recent meeting.
At that same Aug. 27 meeting, about a dozen concerned residents gathered to oppose the flights.
One resident told the board during public comment that he was shocked to learn the airport had become a hub for ICE flights: “I would hope that you stop this, and I, just in good conscience, can’t be a resident here and let this happen.”
Authority Chair Chris Groshel told attendees that the airport authority is responsible only for the main terminal building and the parking lot.
“We don’t even know what’s going on,” Groshel said of ICE flights at the airport. “It’s not our area of control.”
‘ICE Air’ continues to grow
The number of people detained and deported under Trump has soared compared to his predecessor, with many arrests targeting people who do not have criminal convictions. DHS claims to have deported 675,000 people during Trump’s first year back in office.
ICE’s purse has also grown dramatically under the Trump administration. As of the end of June 2026, ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection had $152 billion in available funding. Some of that money is being used to expand ICE’s network of detention centers, though efforts to convert warehouses in Pennsylvania were later abandoned.
A pivotal part of the agency’s deportation infrastructure is ICE Air, which the agency says “facilitates the transfer and removal of aliens via commercial airlines and chartered flights.”
In July, ICE conducted 2,159 enforcement flights, including a record 329 removal flights to 37 countries, up 14% from the previous month and 59% from July 2025.
However, the vast majority of flights are domestic transfers or so-called “shuffle flights,” which move people to and between detention centers and deportation staging facilities across the United States. These shuffle flights reached a monthly record of 1,363 in July, a 75% year-over-year change, according to data from Human Rights First.
State College Regional Airport has been receiving ICE flights since at least 2025, Human Rights First’s data dashboard shows, but the number has dramatically risen. During the first seven months of this year, 107 ICE flights have flown into and out of State College — the 18th most flights of the 147 airports used for ICE enforcement, according to the nonprofit.
Routine ICE flights arrive at and depart from the airport three to four times a week. Most of those flights go to Alexandria, Louisiana, a main deportation staging facility.
Savi Arvey, director of policy, refugee, and immigrant rights at Human Rights First, said that the increase in domestic shuffle flights can be attributed to parallels in ICE arrests.
“Flights have just continued to increase month by month, and with the amount of funding — with the blank check that this administration has worked with Congress to give ICE the authority to carry out flights and other operations — I think we’re going to only see them increase,” Arvey said.
ICE has said these shuffle flights create bed space at crowded facilities and transport people with removal orders to deportation hubs, but immigration experts say the transfers are just another tool to isolate people who are detained and discourage them from fighting for release.
People detained by ICE can file petitions for habeas corpus, which require the government to justify why someone is being held. In most cases, those petitions must be filed in the federal district where the detainee is physically confined. Every transfer changes where that petition must be filed.
For those who can afford lawyers, no-notice shuffle flights give them little opportunity to contact their attorney. This, along with barriers to phone access while detained, makes it next to impossible for people to fight their cases, said Nancy Hiemstra, a professor at Stony Brook University who researches U.S. immigration enforcement policies.
“It is totally by design to deport people quickly,” Hiemstra said. “It means that a lot of mistakes will be made, but that is intentional. The Trump administration just wants to get people out.”
Fetaine Seddighzadeh, a special projects consultant at Human Rights First, echoed that argument. Being transported back and forth from facilities, and separated from legal representatives and support networks, discourages people who are detained, Seddighzadeh said.
People are given little to no notice when they’re selected to board a flight, Hiemstra said, calling this typical of the detention experience. For morning flights, they’re usually woken in the middle of the night, moved to a holding room with others, and kept in shackles. They are often crowded for hours in places with nowhere to lie down, sit, or use the bathroom.
“Often, the run-up to getting on to a flight is pretty awful,” Hiemstra said.
It’s common for people on flights to experience a range of abuses, such as not being given food or water for long periods of time, not being allowed to go to the bathroom, or being shackled at length, she added.
Depending on the destination of the flight, people can be in shackles for several hours, including while at the detention facility before boarding a bus to the airport, during the shuttle ride from the detention center to the airport, and the shuttle to their destination.
Spotlight PA previously spoke to a Berks County man detained by ICE for 45 days, who was flown from State College to Louisiana, then back again, with no information on where he was being taken. He was twice woken in the middle of the night and driven to the airport, fearing he would be deported to Mexico.
“They put a chain around us and tied it to our handcuffed hands, and they also handcuffed our feet throughout the whole transport process. Sometimes, when you stop and think about it, it feels inhumane,” Erasmo Zavala, who later won his release through the courts, said. “They treat you as if you really were some kind of criminal. But what kind of criminal dedicates himself to his family and mostly goes from work to home?”
Spotlight PA’s A.J. Rao contributed reporting.