Just after 10.30am on a recent weekday morning, a Bombardier CRJ200 Air Wisconsin aircraft landed at Youngstown-Warren regional airport.

Having made the 75-minute flight from Milwaukee, the 50-seater came to a halt and its twin engines fired down next to another Air Wisconsin plane and a larger Eastern Air Express Boeing 737, planes that flew in the evening before from Alexandria, Louisiana.

Together, the planes – which combined can handle about 300 passengers at a time – and this austere, quiet airport a few miles from the Ohio-Pennsylvania state line, represent the cornerstone of the Trump administration’s Great Lakes deportation campaign.

Last year, the facility, which handles no commercial flights, saw 398 “shuffle” – ICE-contracted flights between US airports – and direct deportation flights.

With about 300 flights from this and the neighboring Akron-Canton regional airport respectively recorded so far this year by ICE Flights Monitor, an advocacy group, these small, often empty airports have seen more enforcement flights between US cities than many bigger metro areas.

In fact, only seven other US airports this year have seen more deportation shuffle flights than the two combined.

Turning these small airports into a key cog of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign has angered many.

“We have to fight for the rights of others because if they’re going to come for them, you know who’s next; they could knock on our doors next,” said Erin Bracken-Sanchez, a military veteran and resident of Massillon, Ohio, who has come to the Youngstown-Warren airport to monitor the activities of the planes contracted by ICE.

“They’re [using these regional airports] to be more obscure, to be under the radar. Who’s here? No one’s here; no one knows.”Away from towns and cities and largely out of the public’s eye, every day a network of contracted planes carries hundreds of immigrants caught up in Trump’s anti-immigration campaign between Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Massachusetts.

The deportation shuffle flights in north-east Ohio’s airports typically take place in late morning, with immigrants held at jails across the region being bused to the airport and boarded on to planes that typically fly on to Alexandria, Louisiana, where ICE operates a swathe of detention facilities that have been pilloried for human rights abuses. From there, immigrants are flown overseas.

Sometimes, detention flights from north-east Ohio have taken immigrants directly to a tiny airport outside the Mexican town of Tapachula that is situated close to the border with Guatemala. Now, flight safety among airlines contracted by the Trump administration has also come into focus.

On 28 September, a plane operated by Eastern Air Express, a Kansas City-headquartered company and one of ICE’s main contracting airlines, struck the left horizontal stabilizer of a parked aircraft belonging to the same company at the Akron-Canton regional airport.

“No injuries were reported, and other airfield operations were not impacted. [The airport’s] operations team responded immediately to the incident. Incident investigation is conducted by the Ohio state highway patrol,” said Lisa Dalpiaz, a representative for the Akron-Canton regional airport.

“One of the planes has left, and the other is undergoing maintenance at the FBO [fixed base operator].”The incident has worried advocacy groups.

“We’ve been very concerned on the safety of detained passengers on charter flights and followed the incident in Ohio,” said Savi Arvey of ICE Flight Monitor.

A subsidiary of Eastern Air Holdings, Eastern Air Express has recently been in the spotlight for failing safety standards.

In July, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) proposed a $65,000 fine for Eastern Air Express for allowing 26 employees including pilots to “perform safety-sensitive functions when they were not subject to required random drug and alcohol testing”. A representative of the FAA said, “the process remains open.”Emails sent by the Guardian to Eastern Air Express, which operates 19 aircraft, asking if the company plans to conduct its own investigation of the plane collision at Akron-Canton regional airport last month, were not responded to.

Airlines are supposed to report incidents such as wing collisions to the National Transportation Safety Board but there is no record of the incident on the agency’s website.

A spokesperson for the NTSB said it “is not investigating that event” due to the absence of “substantial damage or serious injuries”. However, the agency did exactly that with regard to an incident involving a commercial airliner in San Francisco on 6 October.

The Department of Homeland Security and ICE didn’t directly respond to questions from the Guardian asking if the agencies plan to review their safety requirements for contracting airlines, considering the 28 September incident.

In January, Maura Healey, the Massachusetts governor, demanded Eastern Air Express and GlobalX, another airline contracted by the Trump administration to ferry immigrants to deportation sites, end those flights. But as recently as last week, an Air Wisconsin plane contracted by ICE that took off from Youngstown-Canton regional airport landed at Massachusetts’ Hanscom Field.

All the while, the ICE deportation flights have placed an additional cost burden on these small Ohio airports that have been struggling for years.

Since last February, these and dozens of other airports around the country used by ICE have found themselves out potentially millions of dollars in landing fees that airlines typically pay to airports they use.

“As of February 2026, landing fee waivers for Government operations were extended to cover contractors working on their behalf, so no landing fees are owed to the airport,” said Dalpiaz, of the Akron-Canton airport.

In August, the month for which the most recent data is available, Akron-Canton airport saw 34 ICE flights over 27 days, a rate that has been sustained since late April. All this is happening at a time when these small regional airports are struggling with falling passenger numbers.

Back at Youngstown-Warren airport, pilots flying the Air Wisconsin plane that arrived from Milwaukee remained on the aircraft for several hours after landing. Nearby, ground crew set up a barrier under the left wing of the Eastern Air Express plane before walking off the tarmac and into the terminal.

For a moment, a man dressed in black appears on the roof of the terminal building to watch the Air Wisconsin plane taxi. Across four hours at the airport, no detainees are seen walking, though several of the plane’s window blinds are closed shut. Arvey said that last year, six deportation flights from Youngstown were flown directly to Honduras and Guatemala, with the most recent taking place in June 2026.

Bracken-Sanchez, who served in the US army in Kuwait in the 1990s and is a member of the Buckeye Veterans Coalition, said her motivation for monitoring the ICE flights is her family – two of her children are Hispanic.

While taking part in a protest outside the Akron-Canton airport recently, Bracken-Sanchez said she saw a bus belonging to the Butler county sheriff’s department in south-west Ohio, where dozens of Haitian nationals are being held, pass through on to the runway.

“I did not expect to go to the Akron-Canton airport, to the back gate where I used to go 27 years ago to the Ohio national guard, and watch them bring in buses of immigrants shackled to deport them out of the country,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense to me in America, the country that I fought for.”