A lot of the article is through the eyes of a flight attendant named nicknamed Lala. Attendants must be on flights due to FAA regulations but they don't have much to do. On ICE Air - they're not supposed to interact with the passengers.
Lala was accustomed to the hard realities of working charter flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She’d learned to obey instructions not to look the passengers in the eyes, not to greet them or ask about their well-being.
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Flight attendants received training in how to evacuate passengers but said they weren’t told how to usher out detainees whose hands and legs were bound by shackles.
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Neither the ICE Air handbook, nor FAA regulations, nor flight attendant training in Miami explained how to empty a plane full of people whose movements were, by design, so severely hampered. Shackled detainees didn’t even qualify as “able-bodied” enough to sit in exit rows.
To flight attendants, the restraints seemed at odds with the FAA’s “90-second rule,” a decades-old manufacturing standard that says an aircraft must be built for full evacuation in 90 seconds even with half the exits blocked.
Lala and others said no one told them how to evacuate passengers in chains. “Honestly, I don’t know what we would do,” she said.
There was a flight where a little girl had a medical emergency. She was on the plane with her parents.
The day the girl collapsed on Lala’s flight, the pilot turned the plane around and they crossed back into the United States. The flight landed in Arizona. Paramedics rushed on board and connected the girl to their own oxygen bottle. They began shuttling her off the plane. Her parents tried to join. But the guards stopped the father.
Shocked, Lala approached the ICE officer in charge. “This is not OK!” she yelled. The mom had seizures. The family needed to stay together. But the officer said it was impossible. Only one parent could go to the hospital. The other, as Lala understood it, “was going to get deported.”
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Lala eventually left because of the little girl and her family, because she couldn’t do the deportation flights anymore. Her GlobalX uniform hung in her closet for a time, a reminder of her career as a flight attendant. Recently, she said, she threw it away. She never learned whether the little girl lived or died. Lala just watched her mom follow her off the plane, then watched the dad return to his seat.
“I cried after that,” she said. She bought her own ticket home.
