The ICE Air flight that the NCAA provided to the UVA Basketball team for its trip to Sacramento to the Sweet 16 on Wednesday wasn’t the first for our women’s team on one of these detention and deportation planes.
According to flight data, the women’s team flew back from Iowa from the first weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament on Monday on a GlobalX Airlines charter.
ICYMI: UVA Athletics and ICE Air
- 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 obviously outfitted quite 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; 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 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 last week by Arsenal PAC, which launched a “Don’t Fly with ICE” public awareness campaign to highlight the ties between GlobalX Airlines and the NCAA.
ICYMI
Arsenal PAC had indicated to us that UVA Athletics was among the athletics departments in D1 that have used GlobalX for charter flights.
When I first reached out to UVA Athletics as part of my fact-checking on the story, 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.”
I subsequently learned through a FOIA request that UVA Athletics had, in fact, contracted GlobalX for a series of charter flights for the UVA Football team in 2023.
I reported that on Tuesday; on Wednesday, we learned that the UVA women’s basketball team flew out west on a GlobalX Airlines charter to get to the Sweet 16.
As part of my post-publication fact-checking on that most recent story, I came across the record of another flight in which a GlobalX charter flew the women’s basketball team back from Eastern Iowa Airport to Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport on Monday, after the ’Hoos punched their ticket to the Sweet 16 with an 83-75 double-OT win over #2 seed Iowa.
ICYMI: UVA in the Sweet 16
- UVA Basketball: Well, Virginia, looks like we have a Sweet 16 team after all
- ‘Hoos in the Sweet 16: What UVA Basketball fans need to know about TCU
The March 17 flight from CHO to Cedar Rapids was on an Allegiant Air charter.
Per my research, Allegiant Air does not provide charters for ICE.
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Chris Graham
