This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 27 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
When Donald Trump returned to the White House, Avelo Airlines, a small commercial airline that mostly serves smaller airports across the U.S., stuck up its hand and announced that it would be contracting with the new administration to fly deportation flights.
Now, it’s one thing to see your government doing that — flying people off with no legal process to huge torture prisons in the middle of El Salvador — but it’s another thing to be offered the opportunity yourself to purchase a commercial flight on the very same plane that was just used to take people in chains and shackles without any due process at all.
Avelo Airlines’ decision to fly deportation flights for Trump while also offering commercial flights to Americans was always going to be a difficult mix, and people protested against the airline at a large number of airports where Avelo has tried to stay in business.
When Trump pressures them, the companies act for him, unless they’re also pressured by the people not to do that.
This summer, on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” we reported on Avelo’s decision to pull out of several airports in California, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
We also had the attorney general of Connecticut, William Tong, on the show. After his state gave Avelo all sorts of financial incentives to operate out of Connecticut airports, Tong wrote to the airline asking if it could confirm that it would not fly nonviolent non-criminals in shackles. He asked whether the company would fly a deportation flight in violation of a court order, since the Trump administration has apparently ordered some of the flights to stay in the air even when a judge has ordered them not to.
Avelo wouldn’t answer the attorney general’s questions, so the state cut off some of the subsidies the company was getting from Connecticut taxpayers. But the state’s residents kept picketing at the airports where Avelo was operating, and last week the airline announced that it would pull out of the airport in Hartford, Conn., too.
The Connecticut Airport Authority put out a statement saying it’s the company’s actions that are to blame, citing “Avelo’s own decision to run deportation flights for the US government and the backlash it has generated in the region.”
The backlash to Avelo hasn’t only taken the form of protests and pickets: Tens of thousands of Americans have signed pledges to never fly the airline as long as it’s flying deportation flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In Annapolis, Md., 13,000 petitions were delivered to the state government, specifically to Gov. Wes Moore, calling on the Democrat to cancel the state’s contract with Avelo and ban the airline from using Baltimore Washington International Airport as long as the company is also functioning as “ICE Air.”
This is why protesting against authoritarianism is so important. One, because it keeps you sane. Two, because when it comes to rights, it’s either use ’em or lose ’em. Any authoritarian worth his weird hairdo would love to extinguish your right to protest, free speech and free assembly. But it is harder to take those rights away when people regularly exercise them.
Strategically, protesting is also important action against authoritarianism because even though authoritarian leaders like to present themselves as strongmen who have all the power and can do anything they want, they actually — alone — do not have that much power at all.
It’s not within Trump’s power to remove a late-night comedian from the air for criticizing him; he needs the company that employs that comedian and the other companies involved in that business to act for him. When he pressures them, the companies will likely act for him, unless they’re also pressured by the people not to do that.
For his chaotic deportation spree, Trump tried at first to do it all with military planes. Then he moved on to contractors like Avelo, who were excited to make money from ICE and deportations. It’s their right to compete for those contracts, but then if they want to just spray some Febreze, unhook the shackles and try to sell the American flying public on also buying seats on those same planes for a vacation flight to Cancun, the people of this country are going to have something to say about that, too — which Avelo is now learning.
For every Avelo Airlines, for every Paul Weiss law firm, and any other law firm doing corrupt deals with Trump, for every corporation, like MSNBC’s current parent company, Comcast, that wants to pay for Trump to take a wrecking ball to the White House, they should know that there’s a cost in terms of their reputation with the American people when they do things against this country’s values, against the public interest, all because they want to please Trump, or buy him off, or profit from the authoritarian overthrow of our democracy.
Protesting may or may not move Trump, but it does constrain his power and help move the public-facing, consumer-facing entities that he’s enlisting for help.
