Press Release
Published on September 15, 2026
Washington, D.C. — In a report released today, ICE Flight Monitor, housed at Human Rights First, reveals that the Trump administration conducted at least 325 removal flights to 40 countries throughout August, subjecting people aboard these flights to horrific conditions, including being shackled often for over 20 hours, and removing them to places where they face persecution and harm. This month, the cruelty of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign was on full display through an escalation of forced third country transfers, shuffle flights between U.S. detention centers, and weekly removal flights to danger and insecurity in Haiti.
On August 20, the first deportation flight to Haiti occurred since the termination of Temporary Protected Status for 350,000 Haitians in the United States. Despite the dangerous conditions in Haiti, deportation flights have increased to a weekly pace in the last month, exposing people, including families, babies, and children, to extreme insecurity and violence. The U.S. Department of State has itself acknowledged the heightened danger in travelling to Haiti, issuing a travel advisory for Haiti due to widespread violent crime, kidnapping, civil unrest, terrorism, and extremely limited health care.
The Trump administration continues to circumvent the protections offered to refugees and torture survivors by deporting them to third countries, where they have no ties and are at risk of harm or being further refouled to the very places from which they fled. In August, ICE Flight Monitor tracked an alarming record of 16 flights to 13 countries with third country agreements, with ICE Air flights forcibly carrying third country nationals for the first time to Liberia, Burundi, and Saint Lucia, as well as repeated forced third country flights to Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR), Costa Rica, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Moldova, Panama, Paraguay, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. To learn more about third country deportations, visit Banished by Bargain: Third Country Deportation Watch, a joint project from Human Rights First and Refugees International.
“The Trump administration is sending people that we promised to protect directly to danger. Every day, we receive messages from attorneys representing refugees and torture survivors, who have received protection from U.S. immigration judges, because their clients are being shackled, forced onto planes, and taken to places they have never been before, where they may be detained indefinitely, or sent back to their country of origin,” said Savi Arvey, Director of Policy, Refugee and Immigrant Rights. “This cruelty is also painfully clear in the administration’s targeting of our Haitian community members – people who have long called the United States home – who now live under constant surveillance, and the debilitating fear of being taken to a place where their lives and their safety are in immediate danger.”
Key Findings from August Include:
Read the August report and explore the dashboard here.
ICE Flight Monitor uses publicly available aviation data to track U.S. immigration enforcement flights operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and partner agencies. Founded on the methodology pioneered by researcher Tom Cartwright, the project provides transparent, data-driven reporting to strengthen accountability and inform the public about the human and democratic costs of mass deportation policies. Our public interactive ICE Flight Monitor Dashboard enables users to visualize common routes and patterns, track historical deportation flight trends, and look up recent deportation flights to specific countries.
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To speak with Savi Arvey, please contact press@humanrightsfirst.org.
