The University of Colorado is facing continued pressure from its own students as well as immigrant rights activists over its refusal to end its contract with Key Lime Air, a small Colorado-based charter airline that operates deportation flights for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“We’re definitely not planning on giving this issue up,” Sam Sena, CU student and co-chair of the university’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter, said in an interview following a rally organized by the group on Thursday. “We’re just going to be doing whatever we can here locally to protest Key Lime, protest the deportations, and protest the campus’ contract.”
Roughly 40 students and community members gathered today for a rally outside University Memorial Center on the CU Boulder campus, including members of the Boulder County Immigrant Partnership Team, Indivisible, and other local and campus organizations.
Key Lime was first revealed to be conducting deportation flights by Colorado Newsline on Oct. 23, causing outcry from activists across the state.
The university, which has contracted with Key Lime to provide air travel to some of the school’s sports teams since 2011, came under fire for its relationship with the airline in mid-November after activists from Colorado’s Immigrant Partnership Teams and other immigrant rights groups created a petition calling on them to end the contract. The petition has over 1,800 signatures.
“The university does not, as part of its guidelines, request that potential contractors provide a list of other business relationships unless they are relevant to assisting the university in assessing the capacity and competency of the company,” CU Athletics said in a statement provided to the Colorado Times Recorder on Thursday. “In the case of Key Lime Air … the provider was selected through our standard competitive process, the latest of which occurred in September 2023. The company’s contract is in effect with the university through 2029.”
Responding to the statement, organizers of the rally pointed to several instances in which the university has chosen to cut ties with corporations based on other business relationships, such as its divestment from companies supporting apartheid in South Africa in 1988 and genocide in Darfur in 2006.
“We know in both of these instances, CU Boulder changed where its money was precisely because of what these companies were doing,” said Sena during an address to the crowd. “We shall join together today and tomorrow, and next week, and the week after, and the week after that, to make it clear this moral outrage is unacceptable.”
When asked for comment on the calls for CU to end its contract, Key Lime Air replied to Colorado Times Recorder in a statement that “as a matter of policy, we are unable to discuss our charter operations. Our focus remains on conducting ALL Key Lime Air flights in accordance with the highest federally mandated safety standards.”
Since the initial reporting, several protests against the airline were held at Centennial Airport in Englewood, where Key Lime is headquartered. Officials from the airport and Arapahoe County met with activists on Wednesday to discuss the airline’s relationship with ICE. The airline is also facing protests beyond Colorado, with activists in Minnesota organizing outside the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, where its aircraft have been seen conducting deportation flights.
As more attention is being drawn to Key Lime’s involvement in the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort, and in turn CU’s contract with them, Sena is hopeful that the campus administration will be more receptive to the community’s concerns than their initial response indicated.
“We are going to try to start contact and start a productive conversation that ends in this contract being cancelled,” said Sena.
