Jace Eon Ilias, 32, an American citizen with terminal Huntington’s disease, had to be carried from his care-home bed in Tuusula, Finland, into a chartered medical jet on Tuesday morning. The Finnish state spent upwards of €100,000 flying a bedridden patient some 4,000 miles across the Atlantic — not to a hospital of his choosing, but out of the country, because officials judged a man who cannot move unaided to be “a threat to the order and security of society.”
If a sentence requires several readings, it usually conceals something. This one conceals quite a lot.
The facts, before the outrage
Ilias applied for asylum in Finland in 2023, citing discrimination against sexual and gender minorities in the United States. The Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) rejected the application; the Supreme Administrative Court dismissed his final appeal in March 2025. Meanwhile Huntington’s disease — a hereditary, incurable neurodegenerative condition — overtook him with unusual speed. He now lives, or lived until Tuesday, as a bedridden patient in a private care home in Tuusula, unable to move independently.
Before the asylum process ended, he had married his Finnish partner and he applied for a residence permit on the basis of family ties. That application was refused. Crucially, the matter was still before the courts when the state put him on the plane. Finland did not wait for a judge; it removed the man whose case a judge was still reading.
Note the legal category, because it matters and has been widely muddled, including in an earlier version of this article. This was not a deportation of a permit-holder (karkottaminen) but a refusal of entry and removal (käännyttäminen) — the instrument Migri normally applies when a first residence permit is refused, and which can also be used when a foreign national is suspected of an offence.
The administrative pivot came with an incident at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport in November 2024. Accounts diverge and the facts are not established: authorities say Ilias was threatening; he and his family say his illness produced involuntary movements and behavioural disturbance, triggered by learning he was to be taken to the Metsälä detention unit rather than back to his previous accommodation. A criminal investigation into endangering public order and safety remains open and unadjudicated to this day — which did not stop the suspicion from functioning, in practice, as the basis of a security assessment. Migri itself has said that a suspicion of this kind could not alone have justified refusing a family-ties permit, since the law requires an overall assessment. That overall assessment, whatever it contained, ended with a terminal patient classified as a danger to Finnish society.
Follow the money — and the stretcher
The logistics deserve their own column. Ilias was collected by ambulance from the care home before dawn and driven to the airport, where a Jetflite air ambulance waited. On board: two Finnish nurses, a doctor, a representative of the Non-Discrimination Ombudsman, and four employees of the Border Guard and the police. The aircraft left on Tuesday morning and was due to land the same Finnish afternoon at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. The Helsinki police put the cost at at least €100,000, the charter flight forming the bulk of it; the final figure, with allowances and preparatory work, was still being calculated. The bill goes to the Helsinki police, which holds its own appropriation for removals. So the arithmetic runs as follows: palliative care for a 32-year-old Huntington’s patient was treated as a public-order liability; a six-figure charter flight was sound policy. Governments rarely reveal their priorities more candidly than in their invoices.
Is Finland becoming ICE with better paperwork? No — and that is almost the point
The inevitable comparison is with America’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, currently busy reinventing detention as armed theatre: masked agents in unmarked cars, fast-track removals, and a mass no-bond detention policy that nine federal appeals courts have now found unlawful — the ninth, the Fourth Circuit on 10 September, comparing it to the wartime internment of Japanese Americans.
Measured against that, Finland still looks civilised, and the contrast should be stated honestly. Decisions pass through a named agency, appeals reach the administrative courts, the case file exists, and an ombudsman boarded the plane. Finland’s June 2026 amendments to the Aliens Act did strip deportation appeals of automatic suspensive effect — but they concern karkottaminen, not the procedure used here, and they were not what made this removal possible. An earlier version of this article called the flight the new machinery’s baptism run. It was not. It was something less reassuring: an extreme outcome produced by powers Finland already had.
What is newer is the vocabulary. When an EU member state describes a bedridden, terminally ill man as “a danger to the order and security of society”, the words stop functioning as description and start functioning as permission. Once permission is granted, the rest is logistics.
Photo Credit: Private Archive
Questions the Finnish state has not answered
A political journalist’s job is to be tiresome on behalf of people who cannot be. So, tiresomely:
What made him dangerous? The only concrete allegation is an incident under investigation and never tried, which his family attributes to neurological disease. Migri concedes such a suspicion could not alone have carried the permit decision. What, then, did — and if suspicion suffices to remove the terminally ill, what would exculpate a suspect?
Was a duty of care ever arranged? On arrival at Teterboro, Finnish officers telephoned the US authorities, after which an ambulance collected him. That is a handover, not a care plan. His family spent close to 48 hours unable to reach him; they learned only in the early hours of 17 September that he believed himself to be in Jamaica, Queens. He has since been located in a hospital in Queens, New York. His spouse, Lehto, was directed by the US Embassy in Finland to the Department of Health and Human Services; requests for a direct care contact went unanswered. Jace was found only after a two-minute call, made before his phone stopped working. Hospital staff reportedly asked him to “just stand up”. Did Finland secure a chain of care before severing a chain of residence?
Why not wait for the court? The family-ties case was live. What urgency justified enforcement while the judiciary was still seized of the matter, and who decided that the answer could not wait?
Where does the precedent stop? Finland’s removal machinery is defended, rhetorically, with reference to alleged Wagner fighters and violent offenders. If the threat threshold now accommodates a man who cannot get out of bed, it accommodates anyone. That is not a slippery-slope argument; it is an observation about where the slope already ended.
Chief Inspector Jarmo Heinonen of the Helsinki Police says there is no certain information about Ilias’s continued treatment. “The role of the police is to take care of the return and to get the person handed over to the authorities of the other country. It is impossible to see what happens once the person has been handed over.” He goes on: “One can question how good the care each person receives is, but does it mean that the treatment is inhumane if the other country has a system in which you have to obtain health insurance yourself?” He answers himself: the United States is, “by general understanding, a civilised state that does not treat its citizens inhumanely.” Then, revealingly: “But there may be many opinions about that.”
There may indeed.
Sidebar: What Huntington’s actually does to behaviour
Huntington’s disease is an autosomal-dominant neurodegenerative condition caused by an expanded CAG repeat in the huntingtin (HTT) gene on chromosome 4; each child of a carrier faces a 50 per cent risk of inheriting it. Symptoms typically begin between the ages of 30 and 50, with a mean onset around 45. The disease presents as a classic triad: motor symptoms (chorea — irregular, dance-like involuntary movements — with rigidity and swallowing difficulty later); cognitive decline (impaired executive function, attention and cognitive flexibility); and psychiatric and behavioural symptoms. Apathy is regarded as a core feature and the one that tracks disease progression most closely.
It is the behavioural track that matters here. Irritability and aggression are recognised clinical features, not character flaws: Finnish clinical literature groups irritability, behavioural inflexibility, loss of temper, verbal outbursts and physical aggression as one of the disease’s classic symptom clusters, and international reviews put the prevalence of irritability at roughly 38 to 73 per cent of patients, frequently manifesting as abrupt and unpredictable outbursts of anger. These symptoms are consistent with frontal-lobe dysfunction and attributed to frontostriatal degeneration, and they often appear before motor symptoms do.
The clinical literature also records what follows from this. Irritability and aggression in Huntington’s are documented as leading to legal problems and, in some cases, incarceration. Patient guidance notes that behavioural symptoms become more pronounced in unfamiliar environments and situations demanding concentration, that communication difficulties are frustrating for the patient, and that the disease can impair a person’s awareness of their own condition. Median survival after symptom onset is generally given as 15 to 20 years. There is no cure. Whether Finland removed a dangerous man or a sick one depends heavily on which chapter of the neurology textbook the decision-maker had read.
The larger discomfort
Europeans enjoy believing that cruelty in migration policy is an American genre — all raid footage and internment comparisons. The truth Finland has just demonstrated is more uncomfortable: procedural civility and substantive harshness are perfectly compatible. Nobody was masked on the tarmac at Helsinki-Vantaa. Forms were completed. An ombudsman watched. And at the end of the paperwork stood a state that had decided one life was administratively inconvenient, and an aircraft waiting to carry it away. The definition of a liberal democracy is not that it lacks the power to remove a dying man. It is that it chooses not to. Finland had every lawful opportunity to make the other choice. It chose the plane
Juha Rekola
International Media Policy & Ethics Expert
This is a "Viewpoint" opinion column. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or position of The Helsinki Times. This column is not fact checked and HT is not be responsible for any possible inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article.
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