Los Angeles, California - The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a new lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for information that could indicate how president-elect Donald Trump plans to carry out his threatened mass deportations.

The lawsuit – launched by the ACLU, ACLU Foundation of Southern California, and Mayer Brown LLP – aims to obtain details on current ICE Air Operations infrastructure. The records could provide critical insights into how the Trump administration might seek to expand flights in order to remove people without documentation from the country.

The information sought includes:

• All ICE contracts and records on air transportation, including deportation flights as well as domestic transfers
  
• Records on the ground transportation ICE uses to carry out removal flights
• Records on the airfields to which ICE has access
• Policies and procedures in place for staging the flights, including those with unaccompanied children

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"Over the past few decades, the institutional infrastructure behind these flights has shifted from a government-run operation by the U.S. Marshals Service on government planes, to a sprawling and opaque network of flights on privately-owned aircraft chartered by ICE Air," the lawsuit states.

"Despite the critical role these flights play in the removal system – in many instances, serving as the mechanism for deportation – ICE Air remains shrouded in secrecy."

The legal action came after ICE failed to respond to an ACLU SoCal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from August.

"Little is known about how President-elect Trump would carry out its mass deportation agenda, but what we do know is that this proposal has already instilled fear among immigrant communities," ACLU SoCal's Director of Immigrants' Rights Eva Bitran said in a press release.

"The public has a right to know how its taxpayer dollars could be used to fund deportation flights that would tear apart not only families, but also our communities," she added.

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In 2023 alone, more than 140,000 were deported from the US on planes chartered by ICE Air Operations, the ACLU noted.

Trump's repeated threats to ramp up deportations have sparked fears of a massive human rights crisis. On Monday, the president-elect confirmed he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military to carry out his anti-migrant scheme.