An activist group is highlighting the move by the NCAA to use a company that operates detention and deportation flights for ICE to also ferry basketball teams to and from the NCAA Tournament.
The “Don’t Fly with ICE” public awareness campaign organized by Arsenal PAC is bringing attention to the relationship between the Miami-based Global Crossing Airlines, also known as GlobalX, and the NCAA.
According to reporting by The Athletic, GlobalX has a $5 million annual contract to provide charter planes for teams competing in the men’s and women’s NCAA Tournaments, and last year, GlobalX provided four dedicated aircraft for NCAA Tournament teams.
This is the same GlobalX that, in 2024, announced a five-year deal with ICE Air valued at $65 million per year to serve as a subcontractor for ICE detention and deportation flights.
It’s not just the same company doing the flights for both that is the issue here; it’s that they use the same planes for the NCAA Tournament and for ICE Air.
Per the reporting from The Athletic, an Airbus A320 in the GlobalX fleet that carried San Diego State, Maryland, Kentucky and Auburn during the 2025 NCAA Tournament had been used in the days and weeks prior to March Madness to fly ICE Air detention and deportation routes.
The Athletic found one instance where the plane flew from El Paso to Honduras for ICE Air, then the next day, carried the San Diego State men’s basketball team to Dayton, Ohio, for the First Four.
The Hoya, the student newspaper at Georgetown University, reported that a GlobalX plane that had carried the school’s basketball team back from a game at Syracuse in December 2024 was used in March 2025 to fly detained Georgetown postdoctoral peace researcher Badar Khan Suri to an ICE detention center in Louisiana.
Suri, who was later ordered released, had committed the high crime of having written and spoken in support of Palestinian human rights, and having family ties to Gaza.
Flying him to an ICE gulag on the same plane that had brought the GU basketball team back from a game at Syracuse, that’s seriously messed up.
What’s going on here, then, is, one day, you have a basketball team flying to a game on a plane that the company touts on its website features gourmet snacks and spacious seats, with pillows, blankets and Fiji bottled water; and then, literally the next day, on the same plane, you have passengers, including children, who are required to be “fully restrained” with “handcuffs, waist chains, and leg irons,” in conditions “that you would see in a POW camp,” a former GlobalX pilot told The Athletic.
“The NCAA’s decision to fly student-athletes on planes that have deported their peers and shipped neighbors to remote detention sites violates the trust those students placed in their athletic institutions,” said Lourdes Tiglao, who has the job title chief of external affairs at Arsenal PAC.
“Whether the calculation was financial or logistical, the result is the same – by choosing GlobalX, the NCAA chose expedience over dignity and profit margins over players when vetted alternatives with better safety records and published ethics and human rights policies exist. Basketball demands excellence – it shouldn’t tolerate moral shortcuts,” Tiglao said.
UVA Athletics, with its men’s and women’s hoops teams both getting NCAA Tournament bids, is obviously on the list of schools that are going to need to be lining up charter flights in the coming days – to Philadelphia and Iowa City, respectively.
I reached out to the media-relations office at UVA Athletics today to learn more about how the athletics department handles its needs in terms of air travel, and the first response was a vague “no, we do not directly contract with GlobalX.”
I pressed the matter, because that response seemed parsed, and got back a second response clarifying more forcefully that “we have never used GlobaIX Airlines. UVA has contracted with multiple carriers, including Delta, Breeze, Republic and SkyWest, to name a few.”
That may not mean that our teams won’t be on one of those planes, though.
The NCAA sent out a memo to member schools last week warning ahead of March Madness that “significantly fewer charter aircraft are available due to several factors outside of NCAA control,” and a report from Front Office Sports detailed one of those “several factors” as being ICE.
“The logistical challenge of moving almost all participating teams for both tournaments within 12-72 hours beginning Sunday night is compounded by the busy spring break travel season, the national shortage of charter aircraft nationwide and the potential TSA impact of the partial government shutdown. While the NCAA (has) assured all participating teams they will get to where they need to go safely,” the memo stated.
In other words, member schools, in a pinch, can go to the NCAA for help in arranging a charter flight, and the NCAA uses this ICE Air company to fill its gaps.
Whether it’s one of our UVA teams or any of the others we see on TV the next three weekends, some of the kids playing in March Madness are going to have gotten to the venue on a luxury airplane that perhaps hours earlier was outfitted to fly people, literally in chains, even children, often without access to due process, to a dark site.
I know, stick to sports.
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Chris Graham
