Business

Avelo Airlines Faces Backlash for Aiding Trump’s Deportation Campaign

Published

7 months ago

May 12, 2025

Avelo Airlines Faces Backlash for Aiding Trump’s Deportation Campaign

In the four years since its first flight, Avelo Airlines has gained loyal customers by serving smaller cities like New Haven, Conn., and Burbank, Calif.

Now, it has a new, very different line of business. It is running deportation flights for the Trump administration.

Despite weeks of protests from customers and elected officials, Avelo’s first flight for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement appears to have departed on Monday morning from Mesa, Ariz., according to data from the flight-tracking services FlightAware and Flightradar24.

According to FlightAware, the plane is expected to arrive in the early afternoon at Alexandria International Airport in Louisiana, one of five locations where ICE conducts regular flights. Avelo declined to comment on the flight and ICE did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The airline’s decision to support President Trump’s effort to accelerate deportations of immigrants is unusual and risky. ICE outsources many flights, but they are usually operated by little-known charter airlines. Commercial carriers typically avoid this kind of work so as not to wade into politics and upset customers or employees.

The risks for Avelo are perhaps even greater because a large proportion of its flights either land or take off from cities where most people are progressives or centrists who are much less likely to support Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. More than 90 percent of the airline’s flights arrived or departed from coastal states last year, according to Cirium, an aviation data firm. Nearly one in four flew to or from New Haven.

“This is really fraught, really risky,” said Alison Taylor, a professor at the New York University Stern School of Business who focuses on corporate ethics and responsibility. “The headlines and the general human aspect of this is not playing very well.”

But Avelo, which is backed by private investors and run by executives who came from larger airlines, is struggling financially.

The money the company stands to make from ICE flights is too good to pass up, the airline’s founder and chief executive, Andrew Levy, said last month in an internal email, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times. The flights, he said, would help to stabilize Avelo’s finances as the airline faced more competition, particularly in and near New Haven, which is home to Yale and where the airline operates more than a dozen flights a day.

“After extensive deliberations with our board of directors and our senior leaders, we concluded this new opportunity was too valuable not to pursue,” Mr. Levy wrote in the email on April 3, a day after Avelo signed the agreement with ICE.

While the military carries out some deportation flights, ICE relies heavily on private airlines. There is little public information about those flights, which ICE primarily arranges through a broker, CSI Aviation, said Tom Cartwright, a retired banking executive who has tracked the flights for years as a volunteer with Witness at the Border, an immigrants rights group. Most are operated by two small charter airlines, GlobalX Air and Eastern Air Express, he said.

GlobalX started operations in 2021 and conducts flights for the federal government, college basketball teams, casinos, tour operators and others. It has grown rapidly and brought in $220 million in revenue last year but is not yet profitable. This year, it has operated deportation flights to Brazil and El Salvador. Eastern Air Express is part of Eastern Airlines, a privately held company.

GlobalX and Eastern Airlines did not respond to requests for comment.

Contracts for such flights provide airlines consistent revenue, and the business is much less vulnerable to changes in economic conditions than conventional passenger flights. By Mr. Cartwright’s count, which is based on a variety of sources, ICE operated nearly 8,000 flights over the year that ended in April, most of them within the United States. CSI Aviation alone was awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in ICE contracts in recent years, according to federal data.

Avelo’s decision last month to join in on those flights was met with a swift backlash.

Within days of Mr. Levy’s internal announcement, the New Haven Immigrants Coalition, a collection of groups that support immigrants’ rights, started a campaign to pressure Avelo to drop the flights. An online petition started by the coalition has gained more than 37,000 signatures. Protests also sprouted up near airports in Connecticut, Delaware, California and Florida served by Avelo.

The Democratic governors of Connecticut and Delaware denounced Avelo, while lawmakers in Connecticut and New York released proposals to withdraw state support, including a tax break on jet fuel purchases, from companies that work with ICE.

William Tong, the Democratic attorney general of Connecticut, demanded answers of Mr. Levy, who deferred to the federal government. In a statement last month, Mr. Tong called Mr. Levy’s response “insulting and condescending.”

The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, a union that represents flight attendants at 20 airlines, including Avelo, raised concerns. The union noted that immigrants being deported by the Trump administration had been placed in restraints, which can make flight attendants’ jobs much more difficult.

“Having an entire flight of people handcuffed and shackled would hinder any evacuation and risk injury or death,” the union said in a statement. “It also impedes our ability to respond to a medical emergency, fire on board, decompression, etc. We cannot do our jobs in these conditions.”

Avelo said that under its deal with ICE, it would operate flights within the United States and abroad, using three Boeing 737-800 jets. To handle those flights, the airline opened a base at Mesa Gateway Airport and started hiring pilots, flight attendants and other staff.

In a statement, Mr. Levy, a former top executive at United Airlines and Allegiant Air, said the airline had not entered into the contract lightly.

“We realize this is a sensitive and complicated topic,” he said. “After significant deliberations, we determined this charter flying will provide us with the stability to continue expanding our core scheduled passenger service and keep our more than 1,100 crew members employed for years to come.”

The airline, which is based in Houston, said it had operated similar flights for the Biden administration. “When our country calls, our practice is to say yes,” it said in a separate statement.

In the email last month, Mr. Levy celebrated the fact that Avelo had nearly broken even in 2024, losing just $500,000 on $310 million in revenue. But the airline needs to raise more money from investors, he said. Performance this year has suffered as national consumer confidence has waned, and the airline is facing rising competition.

Avelo was seeking revenue that would be “immune from these issues,” Mr. Levy said in the email, and pursued charter flights, including for the federal government. To accommodate the ICE flights, the airline also scaled back its presence at an airport in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Avelo has raised more than $190 million, most of it in 2020 and 2022, according to PitchBook. Mr. Levy’s email said the airline hoped to secure new funding this summer.

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Business

California-based company recalls thousands of cases of salad dressing over ‘foreign objects’

Published

8 hours ago

December 19, 2025

Press Room

California-based company recalls thousands of cases of salad dressing over ‘foreign objects’

A California food manufacturer is recalling thousands of cases of salad dressing distributed to major retailers over potential contamination from “foreign objects.”

The company, Irvine-based Ventura Foods, recalled 3,556 cases of the dressing that could be contaminated by “black plastic planting material” in the granulated onion used, according to an alert issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Ventura Foods voluntarily initiated the recall of the product, which was sold at Costco, Publix and several other retailers across 27 states, according to the FDA.

None of the 42 locations where the product was sold were in California.

Ventura Foods said it issued the recall after one of its ingredient suppliers recalled a batch of onion granules that the company had used n some of its dressings.

“Upon receiving notice of the supplier’s recall, we acted with urgency to remove all potentially impacted product from the marketplace. This includes urging our customers, their distributors and retailers to review their inventory, segregate and stop the further sale and distribution of any products subject to the recall,” said company spokesperson Eniko Bolivar-Murphy in an emailed statement. “The safety of our products is and will always be our top priority.”

The FDA issued its initial recall alert in early November. Costco also alerted customers at that time, noting that customers could return the products to stores for a full refund. The affected products had sell-by dates between Oct. 17 and Nov. 9.

The company recalled the following types of salad dressing:

Creamy Poblano Avocado Ranch Dressing and Dip
Ventura Caesar Dressing
Pepper Mill Regal Caesar Dressing
Pepper Mill Creamy Caesar Dressing
Caesar Dressing served at Costco Service Deli
Caesar Dressing served at Costco Food Court
Hidden Valley, Buttermilk Ranch

Business

They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can’t find a job

Published

20 hours ago

December 19, 2025

Press Room

They graduated from Stanford. Due to AI, they can’t find a job

A Stanford software engineering degree used to be a golden ticket. Artificial intelligence has devalued it to bronze, recent graduates say.

The elite students are shocked by the lack of job offers as they finish studies at what is often ranked as the top university in America.

When they were freshmen, ChatGPT hadn’t yet been released upon the world. Today, AI can code better than most humans.

Top tech companies just don’t need as many fresh graduates.

“Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs” with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. “I think that’s crazy.”

While the rapidly advancing coding capabilities of generative AI have made experienced engineers more productive, they have also hobbled the job prospects of early-career software engineers.

Stanford students describe a suddenly skewed job market, where just a small slice of graduates — those considered “cracked engineers” who already have thick resumes building products and doing research — are getting the few good jobs, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps.

“There’s definitely a very dreary mood on campus,” said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. “People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it’s very hard for them to actually secure jobs.”

The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees.

Eylul Akgul graduated last year with a degree in computer science from Loyola Marymount University. She wasn’t getting offers, so she went home to Turkey and got some experience at a startup. In May, she returned to the U.S., and still, she was “ghosted” by hundreds of employers.

“The industry for programmers is getting very oversaturated,” Akgul said.

The engineers’ most significant competitor is getting stronger by the day. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it could only code for 30 seconds at a time. Today’s AI agents can code for hours, and do basic programming faster with fewer mistakes.

Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study.

It wasn’t just software engineers, but also customer service and accounting jobs that were highly exposed to competition from AI. The Stanford study estimated that entry-level hiring for AI-exposed jobs declined 13% relative to less-exposed jobs such as nursing.

In the Los Angeles region, another study estimated that close to 200,000 jobs are exposed. Around 40% of tasks done by call center workers, editors and personal finance experts could be automated and done by AI, according to an AI Exposure Index curated by resume builder MyPerfectResume.

Many tech startups and titans have not been shy about broadcasting that they are cutting back on hiring plans as AI allows them to do more programming with fewer people.

Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said that 70% to 90% of the code for some products at his company is written by his company’s AI, called Claude. In May, he predicted that AI’s capabilities will increase until close to 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs might be wiped out in five years.

A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need “two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents,” which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidović, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California.

“We don’t need the junior developers anymore,” said Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto-based AI startup. “The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there.”

To be sure, AI is still a long way from causing the extinction of software engineers. As AI handles structured, repetitive tasks, human engineers’ jobs are shifting toward oversight.

Today’s AIs are powerful but “jagged,” meaning they can excel at certain math problems yet still fail basic logic tests and aren’t consistent. One study found that AI tools made experienced developers 19% slower at work, as they spent more time reviewing code and fixing errors.

Students should focus on learning how to manage and check the work of AI as well as getting experience working with it, said John David N. Dionisio, a computer science professor at LMU.

Stanford students say they are arriving at the job market and finding a split in the road; capable AI engineers can find jobs, but basic, old-school computer science jobs are disappearing.

As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn’t have considered before. Some are creating their own startups. A large group of frustrated grads are deciding to continue their studies to beef up their resumes and add more skills needed to compete with AI.

“If you look at the enrollment numbers in the past two years, they’ve skyrocketed for people wanting to do a fifth-year master’s,” the Stanford graduate said. “It’s a whole other year, a whole other cycle to do recruiting. I would say, half of my friends are still on campus doing their fifth-year master’s.”

After four months of searching, LMU graduate Akgul finally landed a technical lead job at a software consultancy in Los Angeles. At her new job, she uses AI coding tools, but she feels like she has to do the work of three developers.

Universities and students will have to rethink their curricula and majors to ensure that their four years of study prepare them for a world with AI.

“That’s been a dramatic reversal from three years ago, when all of my undergraduate mentees found great jobs at the companies around us,” Stanford’s Liphardt said. “That has changed.”

Business

Disney+ to be part of a streaming bundle in Middle East

Published

1 day ago

December 18, 2025

Press Room

Disney+ to be part of a streaming bundle in Middle East

Walt Disney Co. is expanding its presence in the Middle East, inking a deal with Saudi media conglomerate MBC Group and UAE firm Anghami to form a streaming bundle.

The bundle will allow customers in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to access a trio of streaming services — Disney+; MBC Group’s Shahid, which carries Arabic originals, live sports and events; and Anghami’s OSN+, which carries Arabic productions as well as Hollywood content.

The trio bundle costs AED89.99 per month, which is the price of two of the streaming services.

“This deal reflects a shared ambition between Disney+, Shahid and the MBC Group to shape the future of entertainment in the Middle East, a region that is seeing dynamic growth in the sector,” Karl Holmes, senior vice president and general manager of Disney+ EMEA, said in a statement.

Disney has already indicated it plans to grow in the Middle East.

Earlier this year, the company announced it would be building a new theme park in Abu Dhabi in partnership with local firm Miral, which would provide the capital, construction resources and operational oversight. Under the terms of the agreement, Disney would oversee the parks’ design, license its intellectual property and provide “operational expertise,” as well as collect a royalty.

Disney executives said at the time that the decision to build in the Middle East was a way to reach new audiences who were too far from the company’s current hubs in the U.S., Europe and Asia.