by Thomas Breen
In between ads for Electric Boat and Executive Cleaners, a pair of handcuffed hands — and the message “Don’t Fly Avelo!” — now loom over an Annex stretch of I-95, thanks to a renewed campaign by a New Hampshire state lawmaker to boycott the deportation-flying budget airline.
On Monday, those electronic billboard messages returned to two locations on the I-95 highway near Tweed New Haven Airport.
The billboard campaign is backed by Seth Miller, a state representative from Dover, New Hampshire, and an independent aviation journalist, as well as by the protest group Indivisible.
Miller has been speaking out all year against Avelo’s agreement to run deportation flights for the Trump administration out of a separate airport in Arizona.
Because so much of Avelo’s commercial-airfare business is based out of New Haven, Miller decided to place his boycott billboards near Tweed.
An initial version of his anti-Avelo signs in May prompted the airline’s lawyer to send him a cease and desist order over alleged copyright infringement. The billboard signs ultimately came down — and Miller took the airline to federal court in Nevada.
After a federal judge in September declined to grant Avelo a temporary injunction in that ongoing case, Miller has now put back up in New Haven two anti-Avelo highway billboards — this time with a different design that does not include any color or font references to the airline’s logo.
The billboard signs themselves show a pair of hands, cuffed at the wrists and held behind the back of someone who also appears to be wearing an orange prison outfit.
To the right of those hands, against an expanse of cloudy open sky, are the words:
Vacations? Deportations?
Avelo Airlines Flies Both
Don’t Fly Avelo!
Paid for by AvGeek Action Alliance — AvGeekAction.com
“U.S. government agencies are snatching people off the street, moving them multiple times to evade the judicial process, and putting them on planes before they can appeal,” Miller is quoted as saying in a Wednesday email press release about the billboards. “Avelo is actively complicit in this process, placing detainees in dangerous environments.”
Miller continued: “One of Avelo’s guiding principles is to ‘Do the Right Thing by treating everyone with kindness and respect,’ yet it chooses to participate in immoral and unethical deportation operations—taking federal money while breaking up families and endangering those it transports. Travelers have a choice; buying a ticket from Avelo is an endorsement of this unconscionable behavior.”
In response to a request for comment for this article, Avelo spokesperson Courtney Goff stated the following: “We recognize individuals’ right to freedom of speech. Avelo’s top priority continues to be maintaining the safety and timeliness of our operation, which more than 8.4 million Customers across the country continue to enjoy.”
The highway-facing billboard near Main Street and Beacon Avenue.