After ICE agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, activists have targeted not just the agency, but also companies doing business with it. That includes the St. Louis-based car rental company Enterprise Mobility. Action Network said it had sent more than 5,336 letters to the company urging it to cease leasing its cars to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. In Minnesota, Business Insider reports, organizers encouraged people to reserve cars and then cancel the bookings as a way to disrupt the company’s operations.
Those protests have spread locally. At a Jan. 27 protest in downtown St. Louis, a short drive from the company’s headquarters in Clayton, signs read, “Enterprise Stop Providing ICE Vehicles.”
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Enterprise did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment over the course of a week. The National Catholic Reporter said that an order of Los Angeles-based nuns had met with Enterprise officials to express their concerns about the company supplying ICE with vehicles, and that the company didn’t deny it. The Sisters of Social Service, which had leased cars from Enterprise since 2021, said it was cancelling its contract as a result.
It’s not just Enterprise, but also the team playing inside Enterprise Center, facing questions about its association with ICE.
Since November, the St. Louis Blues have used charter flight company GlobalX for some of their travel to away games. GlobalX has come under increased scrutiny in the past year for working with ICE as it provides hundreds of flights for the agency, both moving detainees around domestically and deporting people to a number of South American countries. Last month, the governor of Massachusetts issued a letter demanding the company stop providing that service.
The Blues began working with GlobalX when their previous carrier abruptly ceased operations while the team was on an away trip in November. The company likely seemed like a good last-minute substitute: GlobalX reportedly provides transportation for a host of professional and college sports teams for their travel.
A spokesman for the Blues declined comment on its relationship with the carrier.
One of the planes that ferried Blues players to Nashville earlier this month was the same plane involved in one of last year’s most controversial deportation flights.
That plane, bearing the tail number N837VA, took off from a Texas airport carrying Venezuelan migrants bound for El Salvador and its infamous CECOT prison on March 15. Simultaneously to take-off, attorneys sought to stop the deportation. A federal judge in D.C. ordered the flights to stop, either by “turning around the plane or not embarking.” But in a move that received significant media coverage, ICE ignored the court order and the GlobalX planes, after a stop in Honduras, landed in El Salvador early the next day. That same plane, N837VA, just a few days ago transported Blues players and their fathers to Nashville for an annual dads’ trip, flight records show.