“You don’t have to torture people. They’re not going anywhere—they’re on a plane.”
Just before her deportation flight to Hanoi, Melissa Tran’s wrists and ankles were shackled to a chain around her waist. It had been more than 10 hours since she’d been given any food or water; for the last seven, she had been sitting on a bus on the tarmac.She was told she wouldn’t arrive in Hanoi until Thursday. It was Monday night in Louisiana.
Though there was no company name or logo on the plane, she learned the airline was called Omni Air International. Information about Stonepeak’s April 2025 acquisition of Air Transport Services Group, Omni’s parent company, is scarce. Nowhere do they say that for years, Omni has been the only large-jet airline flying shackled passengers on long-haul ICE flights to Africa and Asia.
Omni’s flights are becoming increasingly inhumane. Of the 77 trips carried out between Stonepeak’s mid-April purchase and the end of 2025, 31 lasted between 24 and 50 hours. Migrants onboard spent all that time shackled. Shackled passengers are at risk of developing deadly blood clots in their legs.
An ICE document obtained by Quartz shows the agency paid Omni $33,500 an hour for a 2019 flight to Bangladesh, India, and Vietnam. With expenses, the trip cost $1.8 million, prompting a flight broker to complain Omni could charge high prices because other airlines “are discouraged by the potential of public backlash.”
Time for Omni to face public backlash of its own.