Report
Published on January 9, 2026
Since taking office on January 20, 2025, the Trump administration has pursued an unprecedented mass deportation agenda. U.S. officials have adopted a range of new tactics, that are legally questionable and undoubtedly cruel, to achieve this objective, including expanding the use of expedited removal, sending people from the United States to offshore detention facilities in the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo, terminating protected legal statuses, disappearing people without due process—including to a high security prison in El Salvador notorious for torture—ramped up interior enforcement, and forcibly transferring individuals to other countries of which they are not citizens. Many of these actions have been determined to be unlawful by federal courts and carried out with little to no transparency, while thousands of peoples’ lives are uprooted from communities across the country, families separated, and their rights systematically violated.
ICE Flight Monitor responds to this lawlessness and lack of information by using publicly available aviation data to monitor and document flights conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including deportation flights and domestic transfers between U.S. detention centers and deportation staging facilities. The methodology is grounded in Tom Cartwright’s nearly six years of independent work tracking tens of thousands of flights, between 2020 and July 2025, after which the project was transitioned to Human Rights First in August 2025. To ensure the accuracy and integrity of the findings, ICE Flight Monitor cross-references flight data with public records, media reports, communications with attorneys and family members, and observations from trusted partner organizations. The project also tracks other relevant air operations—such as military planes involved in immigration enforcement and Mexican and Panamanian government deportation flights. ICE routinely carries out a small number of additional removals on commercial flights, which ICE Flight Monitor does not have visibility into.
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