The Retired J.P. Morgan Executive Tracking Trump’s Deportation Flights

The Trump administration’s plan to dust off the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was in the works long before March 15. But the precise timing was hazy. Immigration attorneys went to federal court that morning to try to block the government from using the extraordinary wartime authority, which allows deportations without due process. There were few signs that the White House was about to use the law to send planeloads of Venezuelans to a prison complex in El Salvador.

The first person to alert the public that the flights would actually take place was not an official or a lawyer or a journalist, but a retired J.P. Morgan executive living in Ohio named Tom Cartwright. “TWO HIGHLY UNUSUAL ICE flights showing up now from Harlingen to El Salvador,” he wrote on social media, noting that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had taken that route, flying out of a city in southern Texas, only once during the past month and a half. “Venezuelan deportation??”

Immigration attorneys raced back to court. And the events of the next several hours took the  country closer to a constitutional crisis than any other clash to date between Donald Trump and the judicial branch, as Trump officials brushed off D.C. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg’s order to halt the flights.

Cartwright’s role in the episode isn’t well known. But over the past two months, as immigrant-rights groups, congressional aides, and reporters have struggled to keep tabs on the Trump administration’s deportation push, they have relied more and more on Cartwright, a 71-year-old immigrant-rights activist who, in retirement, has become an eagle-eyed tracker of U.S. deportation flights, which the government rarely publicizes.

Every day, he compiles data on ICE flights, applying skills developed over a career managing banks with hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. Using publicly available information from aviation tracking sites, he produces weekly and monthly reports detailing where ICE Air—the government’s deportation airline—is directing its planes.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Trump is deporting ‘them’ in ways that threaten us]

Over the past several weeks, Cartwright has become the go-to source for many people looking for details on the Trump administration’s deportation flights to Guantánamo Bay, its use of military transport planes, and the controversial flights to El Salvador. Think tanks and legal organizations cite his work. This past weekend, when The New York Times published a visual report describing how the frequency of U.S. deportation flights has not significantly increased since Trump took office, despite the president’s promises, the article cited “a New York Times review of an independent database.” The database is Cartwright’s. His work was the basis for a similar CNN story earlier this month.

Cartwright began tracking ICE flights during Trump’s first term and continued sending out monthly reports to journalists, nonprofit groups, and congressional staff through the Biden administration. But Trump’s pledge to deport “millions” in his second term—and his mobilization of federal resources and aggressive use of executive authorities—has recently put Cartwright’s data in higher demand.  

“He took information that was publicly available but labor-intensive to compile, and did something nobody else was doing,” Adam Isacson, a border-security analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a rights organization in D.C., told me. “I don’t know if he expected this second career to make him basically the world’s only credible public source on U.S. deportation flights, just as they were becoming part of one of the United States’ biggest national news stories.”

“He’s indispensable,” added Robyn Barnard, an advocate for refugees with the group Human Rights First, who told me she was stunned when she first learned of Cartwright’s background in banking rather than activism.

Soft-spoken and bookish, with a graying beard, glasses, and a gentlemanly manner, Cartwright takes a more modest view of his role in the nation’s immigration furor. “I think that these people deserve the dignity of at least someone paying attention to what’s happening to them,” he told me, referring to the deportees on ICE Air. “It’s a dehumanizing process.”

ICE Air doesn’t operate like an ordinary commercial carrier. It uses private charter aircraft whose crew include security contractors and ICE officers. The flights typically carry about 125 deportees placed in shackles and leg chains. ICE says that these security measures are necessary to ensure that the badly outnumbered crewmembers can maintain order and prevent deportees from attempting to seize the cabin or rioting (both of which sometimes happen).

The U.S. immigration enforcement system is notoriously opaque; unlike in the criminal-justice system, ICE does not typically release the names of the people it arrests. ICE periodically discloses its flight activity in press releases, though it does so selectively and at its own pace. Still, the charter aircraft that ICE uses have tail numbers that show up on aviation tracking apps and sites, such as Flight Aware, Flightradar24, and ADS-B Exchange, where Cartwright can get a real-time view of the planes in the air.

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The work became more difficult when Trump officials started putting deportees on military-transport planes, whose tail numbers and itineraries don’t appear on the tracking sites. Cartwright has managed to find military flights by using the apps to search more than a dozen airports where U.S. military flights originate, looking for aircraft with no tail numbers. Then he cross-references that information with other public sources, such as news reports in destination countries.

Cartwright said that he spent about 20 hours a week tracking ICE flights before Trump took office this year. That’s up to 30 or 40 hours now. “It’s literally an everyday job,” he told me, wearily. “There’s no backup.”

Cartwright grew up in Springfield, Illinois, and settled in Columbus, Ohio, as he moved up the ranks at J.P. Morgan to become the chief financial officer for one of the company’s largest divisions, covering 5,000 bank branches. He sees the immigration-advocacy work he embraced in retirement as a continuation of the ethos he practiced during his career. “I always felt in the financial world we were helping people,” he told me. “I know that’s a really bizarre thing to say for someone who's a liberal activist, but that’s really how I got into the career in a small bank in Springfield.”

Cartwright did volunteer work during the migrant crisis in Greece in 2015, when the bodies of drowned migrants were washing ashore, including a toddler whose photograph pushed European countries to accept more refugees. During the first Trump administration, when the president escalated ICE efforts against Central American families and minors who arrived without parents, Cartwright, a practicing Catholic, began volunteering at shelters run by Catholic aid groups in South Texas. He joined the activist group Witness at the Border, which monitors ICE operations to “bear witness” to practices it considers abusive.

Cartwright told me he was inspired by a fellow volunteer he met in Texas, a woman in her 80s, who was watching deportees being loaded onto an ICE flight, counting each person out loud. He asked her if she was trying to figure out how many people were getting on the plane. “She said, ‘No,’” Cartwright told me. “‘I don’t know their names, but I want to make sure I see every individual.’”

Activist groups were struggling at the time to figure out where ICE was sending deportees. Cartwright had never used aviation tracking apps, but he had data-management and analytical skills that other activists lacked. Tracking ICE flights allowed him to ward off the despairing feeling that no one was watching and no one cared, he told me.

Cartwright’s database shows that ICE has carried out 267 deportation flights under Trump, and that the president is using military-transport planes—whose operating costs are three to five times as high as conventional passenger aircrafts’—at an unprecedented rate.

[Read: ICE isn’t delivering the mass deportation Trump wants]

Otherwise Cartwright’s data show that the pattern and frequency of ICE flights haven’t significantly changed under Trump 2.0—something that might come as a surprise given the controversies and court battles triggered by the administration’s aggressive attempt to ramp up immigration arrests and deportations. ICE officers—backed by other federal law-enforcement agencies that Trump has mobilized—have made about three times as many immigration arrests as they did during President Joe Biden’s final months in office. But a sharp drop in illegal crossings at the Mexico border has left ICE with fewer easy-to-deport migrants. ICE officers are trying to meet Trump’s deportation goals by going after more immigration-law violators in U.S. cities and communities than during Biden’s term.

The Department of Homeland Security has not told Cartwright to stop publishing the information he compiles, he said. In fact, he sometimes sends his reports to ICE, though he’s never received a response. The agency did not respond to a request for comment about Cartwright’s data gathering.

Cartwright takes accuracy in his reports seriously, he told me. “I spent 38 years in the financial world, and often my things would end up in SEC filings,” he said. “I don’t bend facts. It’s not in my nature.”

But after logging nearly 35,000 ICE flights, Cartwright told me that he’s worn out. He’s ready for his retirement to become a real one. He wants the work to continue, though, and has found some willing understudies among a group of activists in Seattle whom he’s started to train. He’ll share his methods with anyone, he said, then added: “There are some things you know that just aren’t teachable. You have to learn them as you go.”

What’s important to him, he said, is to make sure someone will keep watching.