Talk about a plane full of "thugs wearing black uniforms with gear and this and that"*...

The Trump administration flew immigrant detainees to Virginia this summer to facilitate the rapid deployment of Homeland Security tactical teams to quell protests in Washington, circumventing restrictions on the use of charter flights for employee travel, according to a current and a former U.S. official.

[...]

The transfers took place over the objections of ICE officials in the Washington field office, according to testimony at a Farmville town council meeting in August, and at a time when immigration jails elsewhere in the country had plenty of beds available because of a dramatic decrease in border crossings and in-country arrests.

“They needed to justify the movement of SRT,” said the DHS official, referring to the special response teams.

[...]

“During COVID-19, the agency has taken steps to protect detainees in its custody and promote social distancing whenever possible,” spokeswoman Danielle Bennett said in a separate statement. “This has resulted in the transfer of detainees from facilities with larger detention populations to facilities with fewer detainees. This was the reason for the transfers to Farmville.”

[...]

ICE statistics show the facilities the detainees came from were not near capacity on June 1, when the transfers were arranged. CCA Florence, a jail in Arizona with beds for roughly 550 detainees, was about 35 percent full that day, records show. The facility that appeared most crowded, Eloy Detention Center in Arizona, was about 70 percent full. Farmville was 57 percent full, according to ICE.

[...]

There is no other record this year of ICE transferring detainees from Phoenix to Virginia or Miami to Virginia, according to records compiled by Witness at the Border, an immigrant advocacy group that monitors ICE Air activity.

[...]

[A]n ICE attorney told a judge that one reason for the transfer was that “ICE has an air regulation whereby in order to move agents of ICE, they have to be moved from one location to another with detainees on the same airplane.”

[...]

The move was part of a wider deployment of Border Patrol agents, U.S. Marshals, ICE tactical teams and other federal forces in downtown Washington and around the White House. ICE teams stationed closer to the nation’s capital were already in place at the protests; the additional units were flown in as reinforcements, U.S. officials said.

[...]

The special response teams, based in several ICE field offices, are typically used to control riots in detention facilities, among other duties. They usually deploy locally, using ground transport. In cases where they have to fly, the teams normally use commercial airlines, which can be expensive and inconvenient because of the weapons and equipment the agents travel with.

The use of the teams was part of the Trump administration’s effort to “dominate” racial equity demonstrations nationwide.

[...]

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) did not request special-response teams to deal with protests in the nation’s capital, which were generally peaceful.

[...]

Last month, the director of Immigration Centers of America (ICA), the company that operates the Farmville detention center, said local ICE officials resisted the plan to transfer the 74 detainees into his facility because there wasn’t enough room to properly quarantine them at a county jail about 100 miles away that is normally reserved for that purpose.

[...]

Crawford said ICE officials told him that the arriving detainees were not sick. In an affidavit filed in connection with the lawsuit, which names Crawford, ICA, ICE and government officials as defendants, he said one detainee arrived with symptoms of covid-19 and tested positive. The rest of the group was then tested; 51 had the virus, according to the affidavit.

[...]

“We were assured before they came that these folks were healthy,” Crawford told the town council, according to a video recording of the meeting. “We were told that one of the facilities where the detainees were coming from had no instances of covid-19. In hindsight, we believe we’ve discovered information that that is not accurate. But that is what we were told at the time.”

[...]

“This transfer that took place on June 2 was ordered by ICE headquarters,” Jeffrey Crawford, the director, told Farmville’s town council on Aug. 12. “I do know that the local field office pushed back and attempted to refuse the transfer, and they were overridden by officials in Washington.”

[...]

The June 2 deployment to the District took place amid heightened concerns that immigration detention centers and prisons had become deadly incubators for covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. There had been 5,670 cases of the virus reported inside ICE facilities as of Thursday.

[...]

After the transfer, dozens of the new arrivals tested positive for the novel coronavirus, fueling an outbreak at the Farmville, Va., immigration jail that infected more than 300 inmates, one of whom died.

[...]

Typically on ICE Air flights, agency personnel and detainees sit in different sections of the plane. ICE has said no agents who traveled on the planes appear to have been infected.

  WaPo

Well, isn't that lucky.

*"Antifa Airlines"