KPBS Border Reporter Gustavo Solis hosted Tom Cartwright from Witness at the Border for a brief conversation about his work tracking deportation flights. They spoke about the status of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation operation and how his deportation efforts compare to former President Joe Biden.
This transcription has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Let's start with the why, because I find this really interesting. Why track deportation flights? What kind of information can we learn from them?
Cartwright: I think really the base reason that I started was really that there was no transparency back in 2020, and there still isn't.
And I just feel like people who are on these flights, the thousands and thousands, deserve some recognition, some bit of dignity because they are very inhumane flights in terms of being shackled and other things.
So that's kind of the fundamental reason why I think it's important. The other reason is there is no transparency. And we spend hundreds of million dollars a year doing this to people. And it just seems like the public deserves to know. They have a right to understand how this operates and the scale.
Tell me a little bit about how you go about doing this work. You’re tracking multiple airlines and flights online from your place in Ohio right?
Cartwright: Yes, it's all publicly available information.
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But that said, there are many disparate parts that have to come together. Understanding the contractors that are used, the planes that are used, the locations that are flown to and flown from. So there's a lot to bring it all together and it takes some learning. It's a fairly complex thing and becoming more complex all the time it seems like.
You've been doing this since 2020, right around the start of the Biden administration. Have you noticed any differences in the Trump administration? Obviously the rhetoric is different between the two administrations, but how do the numbers compare?
Cartwright: Yeah, just in terms of the numbers, the deportations are really not up from where they were under Biden.
So one of the measures I use is looking at deportations per weekday. Puts everything on a common base. It's just an average. And if you go back into the last couple of years of the Biden administration, just for talking purposes, you could call that six per weekday. You know, it bounces around a little bit. And in the Trump administration, so far, it's around the same level.
And that includes the military flights as well. So it's all deportation flights.
You mentioned the military flights. Tell us a little bit more about that. How much of an impact are they having? I know there's been some to Guantanamo Bay. Is that how they’re being used?
Cartwright: Yeah, so for the military flights, there was really no reason to use the military flights. They didn't really add capacity.
And the reason, in my view, that they use the military was really for theatrical purposes to underscore their specious argument that we were under an invasion. And the only way that you fight an invasion is with the military. And so it was all to really underscore that theme that they really wanted to get across to the public.
"The reason, in my view, that they use the military was really for theatrical purposes to underscore their specious argument that we were under an invasion."Tom Cartwright, Witness at the Border
I want to ask you about something that’s been in the news. These third-country-deportation flights. Like flights of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. That's been a massive story. But also earlier on, the administration sent migrants from different Asian countries to Panama. What have you been tracking?
Cartwright: There were three flights to Panama and two flights, I believe, to Costa Rica. Since then, there have been none. So, that seems to be, at least for now, on a pause.
And thank goodness. It's really kind of odd because, India for example, we fly deportations to India and so to think that we needed to fly people to Panama from India rather than just to India just seems kind of incongruous to me.
Wrapping up, what advice would you give to people who are interested in doing what you're doing? Either tracking these flights or getting involved in another way? How can they get started?
Cartwright: I think getting involved in a way that is cognizant of what's happening.
Just pay attention to the facts, not what you see in some cases from the White House. And be sensitive to what these people go through. I mean, they are numbers and you know, above all people can really get focused on the numbers. But what we really need to do is think of every plane is 110 or 150 people, and those people all have brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers that they may be leaving behind in the United States or they may be going to countries they've never lived in.
To me, the most important thing is really to take the numbers out of it and think of the people.
Tom, tell the audience about how they can follow your work. I know you publish reports regularly, what's the best way for them to keep track of everything you're doing?
Cartwright: I think the best way is probably to follow my Twitter (X) feed and my Blue Sky feed because I post my monthly reports there. I followed flights today. I posted about a return flight from Mexico to Venezuela. There was a flight to Guantanamo today. I post that on those feeds. And that's @THCartwright is the handle.
