A budget airline that made a hub of Santa Rosa's Charles M. Schulz Airport is closing that hub and turning its attention to providing charter flights for deported migrants out of Arizona, under contract with the federal government.

Houston-based Avelo Airlines, which began life in 1987 as the classy sounding Casino Express Airlines, rebranded itself in 2021 and began ferrying passengers between Hollywood-Burbank Airport and Sonoma County, as well as other destinations in California and beyond. In 2024, they established their seventh base at Charles M. Schulz Airport in Sonoma County, with CEO Andrew Levy saying in a statement at the time, "We are very excited about the platform for growth the airport offers Avelo."

Now, as USA Today and others are reporting, Avelo has signed a contract with Homeland Security and ICE to operate charter flights out of Mesa Gateway Airport in Arizona, taking undocumented migrants south of the border.

"We realize this is a sensitive and complicated topic," Levy said, in an understatement. "After significant deliberations, we determined this charter flying will provide us with the stability to continue expanding our core scheduled passenger service and keep our more than 1,100 Crewmembers employed for years to come."

Expanding that core passenger service may be difficult, particularly if the political winds against Trump grow stronger. A petition drive has already launched in one of Avelo's remaining hub cities, New Haven, Connecticut, pushing for a boycott of Avelo "until they stop plans to profit off ICE flights that are tearing families and communities apart."

Sonoma County Supervisor Lynda Hopkins expressed her displeasure, telling the Press Democrat that the company's move would be a blow to the local economy, and, "They'll never get another dime from me."

As the Guardian reports, Avelo has been posting job ads in Mesa, Arizona, and the plan appears to be to fly three Boeing 737-800 aircraft in and out of the airport there, to destinations the government chooses. Presumably, Avelo's planes will also be traveling domestically to retrieve groups of deported migrants.

This appears to be the first time in a number of years that a commercial airline has contracted to do this work for ICE. As KTVU reports, via flight data analyst Tom Cartwright of the advocacy group Witness at the Border, that group isn't aware of any such flights by a commercial airline in the last five years.

Avelo will shut down flights out of Sonoma County's airport on May 1, and the Arizona flights are set to begin May 12.

It appears that the company intends to keep its hubs open in New Haven; Burbank; Orlando; Wilmington, Delaware; and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.

Photo by Timothy Powaleny/Wikimedia