Flight records Monday indicated that a New England Patriots team plane made a trip to and from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the infamous U.S. military base that’s now being used as a detention center for deportees and some other immigrants the Trump administration shuttled out of the country and to a notorious Salvadoran prison.
Two planes owned by the team are available for charter, and Patriots owner Robert Kraft has also used them for personal projects like aid missions. But it’s not clear what led to the Guantánamo Bay trip. A spokesperson for Kraft’s company told HuffPost that “there were no detainees on the plane,” but that the Patriots current charter operator does work with the Department of Defense to transport military personnel and others for “no financial gain.”
The Trump administration has used Guantánamo Bay to detain deportees from the United States, and also as a waypoint for some of the immigrants sent — without due process, criminal charges or other legal protections — to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a brutal Salvadoran mega-prison.
Charter flights are a key part of the administration’s “mass deportation” apparatus, and ProPublica recently reported on flight attendants for the charter company Global Crossing Airlines, used to “rock bands, sports teams and sun-seekers,” who’ve found themselves instead working deportation flights. Charter flights have been used for immigration enforcement by previous administrations as well.
The Patriots plane’s Guantánamo trip was flagged Monday by users on the social media site Bluesky, including the automated account GTMO Watch and the user JJ in DC. The Boston-based community news website UniversalHub also flagged the flights.
Flight records indicate that one of the two Patriots planes — both of which have Patriots imagery and team colors painted around the exterior of the plane — took off from Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport in Texas around 6 a.m. local time, and arrived at Guantánamo Bay a few hours later.
It spent four hours on the ground at the American military outpost in Cuba, then arrived at the Biggs Army Airfield on the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso after a five-hour return flight, the records indicated.
In a statement to HuffPost, a spokesperson for Kraft Sports + Entertainment, the Patriots’ parent company, acknowledged that its current charter company manager does use the Patriots plane “when chartering to the Department of Defense to move military personnel as well as other government agencies with no financial gain to the organization.”
The spokesperson, Anisha Chakrabarti, did not respond to more detailed follow-up questions, though she denied that the plane had been used to transport detainees under its current charter manager.
“The New England Patriots plane was not used for any kind of deportation flight and there were no detainees on the plane,” Chakrabarti wrote in an email. “Under our current charter manager, neither of the Patriots planes have ever been used for that purpose.”
“The team planes are operated by a professional charter company when they are not in use by the team,” Chakrabarti’s statement continued. “This company manages all logistics, bookings, and operations independently. The New England Patriots organization is not involved in, nor does it approve, sanction, or coordinate the uses of the aircrafts when they are chartered for non-team purposes. The charter company uses the Patriots planes as part of their inventory when chartering to the Department of Defense to move military personnel as well as other government agencies with no financial gain to the organization.”
Questions sent to various Trump administration agencies were not immediately returned.
Last year, the Patriots entered a long-term agreement with Omni Air International, a subsidiary of Air Transport Services Group, to handle two Boeing 767-300 passenger aircraft for team travel and other chartered flights — including “humanitarian and goodwill flights on behalf of the Kraft family, and as available for Omni’s other charter customers,” according to a press release.
Neither Omni Air nor Air Transport Services group immediately responded to questions Tuesday. Prior to the Omni Air agreement, the Patriots coordinated team and charter flights through another company, Eastern Airlines, though the parties were involved in a legal dispute in 2023.
Robert Kraft, whose Kraft Group LLC was a one-time $1 million donor to Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee, said last October that he was “very upset” by the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and that he hadn’t spoken to Trump since.
The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Kraft had reached out to Trump on behalf of Brad Karp, the chairman of the law firm Paul Weiss — which ultimately struck a deal with Trump to exchange corporate policy changes and pro bono work to avoid being targeted by the administration. The deal is part of a series of Trump attacks on law firms, in which he’s pressured them for political concessions in what Democratic legislators have called “an illegal shakedown of the legal profession.”
Kraft is a longtime client of Paul Weiss, the Journal reported. Kraft’s son, Josh Kraft, is currently running a campaign to unseat incumbent Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.
In 2022, a Patriots team plane was reportedly used for several deportation flights to Honduras.
Separately, Kraft and the Patriots organization have publicly acknowledged using the planes for special purposes like flying masks into Boston at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, delivering aid to Haiti, and flying school shooting survivors and loved ones of shooting casualties to the 2018 “March for Our Lives” rally.