and funding for the agency in January.

“We realize this is a sensitive and complicated topic. After significant deliberations, we determined that charter flying will provide us with the stability to continue expanding our core scheduled passenger service and keep our more than 1,100 Crewmembers employed for years to come,” Levy said in a statement to Al Jazeera, comments the company had also provided to other publications.Connecticut Attorney General William Tong pressed the airline for the terms of the deal. Avelo responded by instructing Tong to file a  Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. FOIA requests typically take several months to process. Connecticut is home to one of Avelo’s biggest hubs in New Haven.

Avelo declined Al Jazeera’s request for information on the terms of its agreement with CSI Aviation, saying in an email that it was not “authorised to share the details of the contract”.Al Jazeera has submitted a FOIA request for the contract terms. ICE denied our expedited request for the contract terms, saying our request lacked “an urgency to inform the public about an actual or alleged federal government activity, if made by a person primarily engaged in disseminating information”. The phone number ICE gave to challenge the request through its public liaison did not work when called.“For reasons of operational security, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not release information about future removal flights or schedules in advance. However, the removal of illegal aliens who are unlawfully present in the United States is a core responsibility of ICE and is regularly carried out by ICE Air Operations,” a spokesperson for ICE told Al Jazeera.

Several lawmakers, including Senator Alex Padilla of California and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, have voiced concerns over these flights.“Given the Trump Administration’s mission to indiscriminately deport our nation’s immigrants – without due process, in violation of the Constitution and federal immigration law, and, in some cases, in defiance of court orders – it is deeply disturbing that Avelo has determined that its partnership with ICE is ‘too valuable not to pursue,’” Padilla’s office said in a news release.

Flight attendants have also raised safety concerns, saying there is no safe plan in the event of an emergency and it is only a matter of time before a tragic incident occurs.

As first reported by ProPublica, ICE Air detainees have soiled themselves because they did not have access to bathrooms while being transported to prisons without due process.Gangs that smuggle gold and launder money, that is what the Gold Mafia investigation is about. But who are they exactly?

They are rival gangs — with many different characters. From new-age pastors to old-school smugglers, and from diplomats to the Zimbabwean president’s niece, Al Jazeera’s latest investigation, Gold Mafia, has uncovered a band of criminals driving gold smuggling and money laundering worth billions of dollars in Southern Africa.These are some of the key individuals running the mafia.

Kamlesh Pattni aka ‘Brother Paul’The Kenyan-born Pattni knows better than anyone how to smuggle gold worth millions of dollars — and get away with it. In the 1990s, his firm Goldenberg International was at the centre of a giant scandal that robbed Kenya of $600mn — 10 percent of its GDP. Then President Daniel Arap Moi had allowed Pattni to export Kenyan gold at a time when the East African country was facing a Western aid embargo. Instead, Pattni allegedly used his license to smuggle Congolese gold through Kenya. He was charged but never convicted.