Demonstrators denounce deportations at Richmond International Airport

More than 100 people gathered along Williamsburg Road and Airport Drive in eastern Henrico Saturday morning to hold signs that read STOP ICE FLIGHTS, HONK FOR DEMOCRACY and LOVE THY NEIGHBOR, NO EXCEPTIONS.

Some drivers passing by the busy intersection on the west side of the Richmond International Airport responded to the protesters by honking, waving, pumping their fists and thanking them. There were detractors, as well.

“For a long time, we have been concerned about the detention flights leaving, so we're happy to see that there's energy around it. We’re trying to see what we can do to stop it here,” said Mary Anne Pugh, who is with the group RVA Indivisible, one of the protest organizers that joined with a handful of other groups.

According to the Human Rights First ICE Deportation Tracker’s latest report, Richmond International Airport has played a key role in deportation shuffle flights to deportation hubs in Louisiana. The federal agency has not responded to requests for information about its operation at Richmond International Airport.

HRF counts Richmond International Airport as one of the five U.S. locations seeing more than 50% more shuffle deportation flights than the previous month, with 27 flights in August, 25 in July and 16 in June. From January to May 2026, there were either 12 or 13 ICE deportation flights each month at the airport.

The flights have been moved to a remote corner of the airport, out of view of the public. Concerned members of RVA Indivisible view flights being met with regularity by white prison school buses and vans unloading passengers that human rights groups note are often shackled for hours and days at a time.

Deportation Data Project figures show that ICE recorded 805 arrests in Virginia during the latest month for which state-level data were available, about 200 fewer than the previous month.

“I'm outraged, and I think when I look back on points in American history, like the internment of Japanese Americans, after World War II, and how embarrassed and ashamed we are of that now, I think we will look back on this era and feel the same way. Silence is complicity. So I want to do everything I can to raise my voice to speak out against it,” Pugh said.

Pugh said she was concerned about the many human rights violations detained people experience in the ICE deportation system.

“People are taken who have no criminal violation other than crossing the border illegally, but that's a misdemeanor, so I think, ‘Gee, what would be the maximum penalty I would want against a misdemeanor?’ They are being taken from family, and put in a prison camp with bad food, and no legal representation, and then maybe deported to a third world country, where they’ve never been, and don't speak the language. It's just unfathomable.”

Immigration violations vary; unlawful presence can be a civil violation, while improper entry and reentry after removal can constitute federal crimes.

'None of this is okay'

For protester, Susan Dolman Webb, the protest location was personal. She grew up in the area around the airport as her father worked for the Federal Aviation Administration.

“I don't want our airport to be complicit in these unlawful, illegal activities right now [where the deportees are] without due process,” Dolman Webb said. “The majority of people who are being swept up in this dragnet by ICE have committed no crime, except for having their documents canceled out, and a large part of that is because, for decades, we have not had bipartisan support in Congress for an immigration bill until the end of Biden administration, and Trump said, ‘No, don't ratify it, because I want it to be an election issue.’ Instead of solving problems, he's just wanting to use it for his own purposes. It's just wrong all the way around.”

Trump publicly opposed the bipartisan Senate border-security legislation negotiated in early 2024, and the measure failed to advance after most Senate Republicans opposed it. Trump said at the time that the legislation was insufficient to address illegal immigration; Democrats and some Republican supporters of the measure accused him of opposing it in part because passage could have diminished immigration as a campaign issue.

Two organizers of the Facebook group RVA ICE-SCREAM said the group collectively monitors federal immigration enforcement on its social media page marking locations and actions.

“Most of the time, when you see these incidents happening, it's because people are just getting gas at the field pump. We've had people tell us they even saw people with papers get taken, because they were trying to show papers and they got taken anyway. They might be detained and beaten before they can even grab their documents,” said Ashley, an RVA ICE-Scream organizers, who only gave her first name because she said she has been threatened by people opposed to her group.

(The Citizen could not independently verify those accounts.)

“The biggest thing I always say is ICE is trying to operate in darkness, and RVA ICE-Scream is kind of light. As soon as there's a light on what they're doing, they're moving away like cockroaches.”

The RVA ICE-Scream organizers described the shuffle-flight process as a way to move people quickly to detention centers in states such as Louisiana, where civil-rights organizations have documented allegations of medical neglect, overcrowding and other serious conditions.

Civil-rights organizations have documented allegations of medical neglect, overcrowding and other serious conditions at Louisiana immigration detention facilities.

“Because of the conditions, people mentally break down, they're signing, quote unquote, voluntary deportation papers, but it's not voluntary, it's under duress, because they're being psychologically tortured,” Ashley said. “This is part of that web of [ICE] trying to move people so that they cannot have access to their families or get their lawyer. Due process is one of the main things we’re concerned about,of [ICE] hiding people and torturing them until they, quote unquote, voluntarily deport. Or they're just deporting them faster than the legal system has time to actually handle it.”

RVA ICE-Scream organizers said they have collected accounts from Virginians who suffered serious injuries during encounters with ICE officers and subsequently were denied medical care. In some cases, the organizers said, detainees felt pressured to sign voluntary-departure paperwork in order to receive care. The Citizen has not independently verified those accounts.

“None of this is okay,” Ashley said.

Ashley viewed the deportations as a form of growing fascism that go against basic human rights.

“It's like what happened in Germany during World War II,” Ashley said. “This is awful, and they're trying to basically divide the lower class and the middle-class people from each other. They do not want people banding together to look at who's truly terrorizing us, which is billionaires. They're trying to just separate us.

“I think a lot of us learn our lessons from World War II. We know our history lessons, we know what our grandfathers fought for. We're not easily fooled by this propaganda. It's propaganda. We know that these are families. They're not going after the worst, the worst. They're going after families. They're going after parents. They're going after people who are going through the legal process to become citizens. And they're interrupting that process. They're interrupting the pipeline for citizenship.”

RVA ICE-Scream organizer Monique said people who voted for Trump also report ICE sightings.

“Because they were like, ‘Hey, he said that he was gonna do the worst, the worst. I saw ICE at a gas station, going after people who were working. They were just getting gas in their car. They had legal paperwork, and they're going after them.’”

Monique said some law-enforcement officers have submitted information to RVA ICE-Scream because they object to ICE's enforcement activities.

“We have police officers submitting pictures for us because they do not agree that this is what should be happening,” said Monique.

For a leader in the Latino community who did not give her name because she cannot speak on the record, seeing the protesters bring attention to the airport deportations gave her hopefulness in what has been a very painful time.

“I feel a little bit of hope that people are actually standing up for the most vulnerable, the people that I care about,” the leader said. “People have been impacted by detainment and deportations, it's the most insidious and devastating impact for the group that I'm seeing on a daily basis in terms of destroying families, mental health, economic impact, impact on children and on our humanity. I'm speaking generally around the detention, deportation, and also the dismantling of immigration system.

“Our diversity has been growing in Richmond for the last 30-plus years. People have been growing roots and creating community and bringing their vibrancy to our community. And whether we like it or not, immigrants are embedded in the fabric of our community. So if we're just going to extract them, that's going to shatter our community.”

Taylor Lewis Guthrie Hartman came out to protest with her congregation as pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Richmond. She is organizing with other congregations as a part of the Faithful Resistance Action Network which leads nonviolent resistance training for people of faith in the tradition of old school civil rights training together with the newcomer and immigrant community.

“All are created beloved in the image of God, and created an image of God,” Lewis Guthrie Hartman said. “People should not be treated as objects but rather as humans worthy of care and due process.”

Protesters seek to pressure elected officials, airport

“We need to find ways, whatever way we can, to slow down this deportation pipeline, whether it's stopping the building of the detention center in Hanover, which, Indivisible Central Virginia, was a leader in. That starts to put a plug in the pipeline. It slows it down. If we take control of Congress, then maybe some laws can be made to stop this, but in the meantime, but I think it's a game of whack-a-mole,” Pugh said.  

The proposed DHS purchase of a Hanover property for an ICE processing facility fell through in January.

As Arleen Hicks (a retired English as a Second Language teacher and a member of Hanover Indivisible) left the protest, she said she would be headed to the Caroline Detention Facility on Sunday for a singing and chanting protest on route 301 leading to the detention center along with signs alerting people that immigrants are detained there, as authorities took identifying signs down. She feels the public should know what occurs in the detention center and be uncomfortable with it.

“I know the fear [among immigrants] in the town of Ashland,” said Hicks who recounted efforts by churches and businesses to help refugee and immigrant families in need of food but too afraid to go to food banks as they live in fear of ICE’s violence. “That's why I'm here, because I understand the fear. I understand the illegality of what is going on, and we want to make people aware. I am a teacher. My job is to teach people.”

Hicks' objection to the entire ICE detention and deportation complex is also that people are detained, and shuffled around far from family and lawyers, so they don't have time to meet with their legal representative, if they have one.

“We know that dictators just detain people, Stalin, Hitler, Venezuela. People just disappear,” Hicks said.

Pastor Lewis Guthrie Hartman’s message to elected officials is to have courage and draw strength from the power they have.

And the Latino community leader also said there are things Virginia’s federal elected officials can do to pull back on ICE funding and deportation levels saying: “I don't believe that their hands are tied.”

“I don't know that everybody agrees on what should happen, whether it should be reform ICE or if it should be abolish ICE,” said RVA ICE-Scream leader Monique. “But what we all agree on is everybody is entitled to basic human dignity and legal due process. I think it's really important, because they try to paint those on different sides. This is not a liberal thing. This is not a conservative thing. This is just a human rights issue. “

Monique would like Virginia’s federal elected officials to visit the detainment centers in Farmville and Caroline.

“They should speak out more about the brutality when it happens and highlight it when it happens, because people really don't believe it's happening. They believe it's fake news,” Monique said. “Having elected officials be like, ‘We have verified this independently that this happened, and it's a disgrace,’ that would be amazing.”

Members of Indivisible said they plan to bring a petition to the Capital Region Airport Commission to try to stop the flights at the airport and at a minimum make a statement against the deportation flights.

Airport officials have repeatedly said that as a public-use airport, they cannot prohibit any flights that are legally authorized and that the commission has no role in scheduling, directing or making operational decisions about federal flights.

Dina Weinstein is the Citizen’s community vitality reporter and a Report for America corps member, covering housing, health and transportation. Support her work and articles like this one by making a contribution to the Citizen.