ICE secretly deported eight shackled Palestinians from Phoenix to the occupied West Bank

On January 20, 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flew eight Palestinian men out of an ICE deportation hub in Phoenix, Arizona, shackled at the wrists and ankles for the entire journey, aboard a private jet bearing the emblem of Dezer Development - a real-estate company founded by Israeli-American developer Michael Dezer and now run by his son Gil Dezer, longtime business partners of Donald Trump who have donated more than $1.3 million to his presidential campaigns. After refueling stops in New Jersey, Ireland, and Bulgaria, the men arrived at Ben Gurion Airport the next morning and were driven by an armed Israeli police officer to a military checkpoint near the West Bank town of Ni'lin, where they were released. The aircraft was chartered by ICE through Journey Aviation, a Florida firm frequently used by federal agencies; industry estimates put the return flight's cost at $400,000 to $500,000.

The men - residents of West Bank towns including Bethlehem, Hebron, Silwad, Ramun, Bir Nabala, and Al-Ram - had built lives in the United States, several holding or having held green cards and many with American spouses and children. Some had been detained in ICE facilities for weeks; at least one was held for more than a year. According to accounts gathered by a joint +972 Magazine and Guardian investigation, ICE agents confiscated the men's Palestinian passports and phones and did not return them, and at least one detainee, Sameer Zeidan, was made to sign documents authorizing his deportation. Maher Awad, 24, said he objected to ICE agents and a judge but "they just forced me to go." Immigration attorneys and human-rights lawyers said deportations of Palestinians via Israel had been exceedingly rare, warned that the transfers may violate the principle of non-refoulement and the Convention against Torture, and described an "opaque system" of privately chartered removal flights operating "without any accountability." Israeli human-rights lawyer Michael Sfard called the route through Ben Gurion "an exceptional case." Per Haaretz, the operation followed "an unusual request from Washington to Israel" and was approved by the Shin Bet.

The State Department said only that it "coordinates closely with the Department of Homeland Security on efforts to repatriate illegal aliens," while a DHS spokesperson said that "if a judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them." ICE did not respond to questions, and the investigation found the same jet had conducted a nearly identical second flight days later. The Standing records this as a denial of due process in immigration enforcement and the targeting of a marginalized community: detainees removed in secret to a conflict zone, stripped of documents and signed-out under pressure, in a foreign-coordinated operation that bypassed the ordinary legal safeguards governing whom the state may deport and how.