By Sara Wilson, Colorado Newsline
Posted December 18, 2025
Denver City Council voted against a resolution Monday that would have allowed Key Lime Air to lease ground space at Denver International Airport over concerns about the airline’s immigration enforcement flights in recent months.
The resolution would have created a lease for 1,200 feet of space at the airport for Key Lime Air, which also operates as Denver Air Connection. The space would include an area to store items like snow removal equipment, employee parking and an office trailer, according to the proposed lease agreement. Without the lease, the company can still use the common area of a cargo apron.
“When we’re talking about the values of our city, and we stand up here and we say time after time that we support our immigrant community and that we are a welcoming city — I cannot support a corporation that does not prescribe to that,” Council member Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez said.
Two of Key Lime’s airplanes have been used for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement flights to shuffle detained immigrants around the country, primarily to ICE’s hubs in Texas and Louisiana, as first reported by Newsline. During the time period analyzed by Newsline, neither of those planes landed in Colorado. There have been 122 outbound immigration enforcement flights out of Denver this year, according to the most recent ICE Flight Monitor report from Human Rights Watch, though there is little information about which airport those flights are leaving from.
Key Lime Air is headquartered at Centennial Airport in Arapahoe County. It has also operated at Denver International Airport since 2006 as a cargo feeder airline, according to George Karayiannakis, the airport’s senior vice president of airline and commercial affairs.
The airport could stand to lose Federal Aviation Administration grants because of its denial of the lease, which Council member Kevin Flynn cited as his reason for voting in favor of the resolution.
“Voting it down means they won’t be paying us. They’ll be using it for free,” he said. “We can’t kick Key (Lime) Air out of the airport, but we can make them pay to use the piece of concrete that they want to use. Voting this down means they use the common use area for free.”
Flynn was the single vote in favor of the resolution.
“This is where the rubber starts to hit the road, when we start to talk about, what are we going to do in Denver, about what’s happening at the federal level,” Council member Sarah Parady said. “I have no interest in supporting this deportation machine. And if an aviation grant is what’s on the line there, it’s very clear to me where the city should stand on that.”
Sara Wilson is a Reporter for Colorado Newsline. This article is republished from Colorado Newsline under a Creative Commons license. Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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