Good news: the UVA Basketball team didn’t take an ICE Air flight back from the Sweet 16 on Sunday.
I checked flight data through FlightAware, and found out that the team flew back from Sacramento on Sunday morning on a flight chartered through Allegiant Air, a Las Vegas-based company.
Allegiant does not have any active contracts to provide detention and deportation flights for ICE.
The UVA women’s team flew back from the first weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament on a GlobalX Airlines charter, then flew out to Sacramento for the game on Saturday with TCU on another charter provided by GlobalX.
ICYMI: UVA Athletics and ICE Air
- UVA Basketball: We found another NCAA Tournament flight on an ICE Air plane
- UVA Basketball: We flew the women’s team to the Sweet 16 on ICE Air
- Turns out, UVA Football flew on GlobalX Airlines, which we know as ICE Air
GlobalX is a Miami-based charter company that has been flying detention and deportation flights for ICE Air since 2023, using the same Airbus planes that it provides to its elite clientele – celebrities, business titans and sports teams.
The planes are outfitted differently for the different passenger experiences.
One day, you have a celebrity, a billionaire and his cronies or a college 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.
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 uses GlobalX among several charter companies to ferry teams back and forth for its men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.
GlobalX was brought to my attention ahead of the first tipoff in the NCAA Tournament by Arsenal PAC, which launched a “Don’t Fly with ICE” public awareness campaign to highlight the ties between GlobalX Airlines and the NCAA.
Arsenal PAC had indicated to us that UVA Athletics was among the athletics departments in D1 that have used GlobalX for charter flights.
UVA Athletics at first denied that it had ever used a GlobalX charter, but we learned through a FOIA request that the department had, in fact, contracted GlobalX for a series of charter flights for the UVA Football team in 2023.
A day after we published that report, the women’s basketball team was on a GlobalX plane headed for the Left Coast.
At least we got them back on a plane not used to send people, including kids, to gulags.
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Chris Graham
