Just before being put on board her deportation flight, Melissa Tran’s wrists and ankles were shackled to a chain around her waist. It had been more than 10 hours since she’d been given any food or water; for the last seven, she had been sitting on a bus on the tarmac.
There was no company name or logo on the Boeing 767, but she soon learned the airline was called Omni Air International. She’d never heard of it, nor of Stonepeak, the private equity firm that purchased Omni in April 2025, nor of its billionaire CEO, who was an immigrant himself. She had no idea that Omni’s ICE work had quadrupled since the sale or that its flights were getting longer and, because of that, crueler.
There were 10 female deportees clustered in coach, with about 180 men seated behind. Tran noted a variety of accents and ethnicities and wondered how many stops were planned and how long she’d be shackled. When an ICE-contracted guard walked by, she asked about their flight time.
“Where are you from?” he responded. Vietnam, she said—though she hadn’t been there since her family fled when she was 10. The Maryland mother of four had long put a 2001 theft conviction behind her, becoming a health care worker and small-business owner, but at an ICE check-in three days earlier, she was arrested and flown to detention in Alexandria, Louisiana.
The guard winced: “Sorry, you’re the last stop.” He told her she wouldn’t arrive in Hanoi until Thursday. It was Monday night in Louisiana.
Stonepeak, which manages $80 billion in investor funds, specializes in recession-resistant infrastructure investments—utility companies, airports, toll roads, shipping and logistics firms. Forbes estimates its Australian-born co-founder, Michael Dorrell, is worth $8.5 billion, a fortune made through his “bet on boring,” as one podcast interviewer recently put it.
“It matches my personality,” Dorrell jokingly agreed. The 52-year-old’s one public extravagance appears to be real estate, purchasing a $34 million waterfront mansion in Coral Gables, Florida; a $41 million Manhattan townhouse from David Koch’s widow; and a $150 million private island paradise in Palm Beach, Florida, less than two miles from Mar-a-Lago, all in the last few years.
Information about Stonepeak’s acquisition of Air Transport Services Group, Omni’s parent company, is scarce, comprising just two press releases: one from the day before the 2024 election announcing a $3.1 billion all-cash sale and another five months later announcing its conclusion.
Both emphasized ATSG’s subsidiaries in cargo transport (including planes leased to Amazon), ground services, aircraft leasing, and maintenance, with only passing mention of its charter airline, Omni, described as “a leading supplemental provider of passenger transport for the US Department of Defense and other agencies.” Nowhere do they say that for years, Omni has been the only large-jet airline flying shackled passengers on long-haul ICE flights to Africa and Asia.
Like Dorrell, Omni has a knack for staying under the radar, even as its profits soar from President Donald Trump’s migrant crackdown; Omni, ATSG, and Stonepeak did not respond to detailed questions. But since the sale, Omni has flown thousands of deportees delivered to its planes by ICE.