Thomas Cartwright, from JP Morgan executive to ICE’s sole flight tracker

He began tracking flights while crawling across the floor of Brownsville airport, on the Texas-Mexico border, in the still-dark early morning hours one day in late 2019. Thomas Cartwright, along with several other volunteers from the crowded pre-pandemic migrant shelters, had learned that planes carrying deportees were silently taking off from the city’s small airport terminal, which runs alongside the Rio Grande on its final stretch before merging with the Gulf of Mexico. So they decided to witness it. “It was horrible — people shackled, searched, walking up ramps in chains. Just dehumanizing,” Cartwright recalls more than five years later.

Much has changed in that time. The job he did with his chest against the floor has morphed into a full-time job that consumes most of his life. Today, Cartwright is the most reliable source — perhaps the only one — on the U.S. government’s deportation flights. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rarely releases official data on its removal operations, and when it does, it’s usually incomplete.

It was thanks to Cartwright, for example, that the world first learned of the flights to El Salvador carrying more than 200 Venezuelans accused of being gang members. It was also thanks to Cartwright that we know that, starting in mid-May, the Trump administration has accelerated removals to what are now historic levels.

It’s crucial work for lawyers, activists, and journalists. And the only person who knows how to do it is this nearly 72-year-old man with a well-groomed white beard, horn-rimmed glasses, and a friendly smile. He invented and perfected the method for tracking Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) planes using free flight-tracking apps. Using data such as the company, aircraft registrations, and departure or destination airports, he triangulates information and determines whether the plane is carrying migrants, either in internal transit within the United States or for deportation. He is now in the process of training several members of a well-known human rights non-profits, which he cannot yet name, but which will soon take over and continue the increasingly grueling task of counting ICE flights.

To get to this point, Cartwright’s seven-decade journey began with a simple childhood in Springfield, Illinois. There, after college, he started working at a bank, which, after being bought several times, eventually became part of JP Morgan. He stayed there for 38 years. “Maybe it’s not a popular idea now, but I always thought banks helped people. That might not be a popular idea nowadays, but I still believe it. I saw it firsthand — my father used to go pay the mortgage on Saturdays and would say, “This is how we got a house.” People who couldn’t afford cars could get them. I felt like banks had a role in helping people start their lives,” Cartwright explains now via video call from his home in Columbus, Ohio, fully aware of the banking system’s bad reputation.

Within that system, he led a busy life. He rose through the ranks at the bank, from regional positions to financial executive and commercial strategist. He enjoyed the job and learned invaluable skills, but even so, when he retired in 2015, he felt a sense of emptiness. “It was a demanding career. I traveled a lot, worked long hours, weekends. I always felt I wanted to do more in terms of giving back. It was a great career, one I loved, and it gave me freedom of time and resources — but I couldn’t really do anything while I was working. You get disconnected from your community,” he reflects a decade later.

In the midst of that disconcerting period of time that follows retirement, Cartwright didn’t know what to do with himself. But that was until his daughter sent him something about a small organization traveling to Greece to help during the refugee crisis. “Once you do that, you see a whole different side of the world.”

That pivotal point in his life coincided with the arrival on the scene of a politician who changed everything: Donald Trump. “It wasn’t the initial catalyst, but it definitely propelled me into more urgent action.” Cartwright became heavily involved in the movement to stop the repeal of Obamacare. He made numerous visits to Congress and participated in acts of civil disobedience, a point of pride for someone who grew up watching the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Finally, he was there in the Senate gallery when John McCain was the only Republican to reject Trump’s healthcare reform and cast the deciding vote to defeat it. The experience inspired and motivated him. “The disability community especially was incredible — kids in wheelchairs staying in congressional offices for 24 hours, getting arrested. If they could do that, I felt like I had no excuse not to act.”

It was precisely at that moment that the tragedy of family separations began during Trump’s first term. With his Greek experience, acting on immigration issues seemed like the next logical stop for Cartwright. “These were fundamental human rights issues to me, not just policy debates.” He volunteered in El Paso and McAllen, and also protested in Tornillo, all in Texas, where authorities built a camp to house 4,000 minors who had been separated from their parents: “A stain on the soul of the nation.”

It was there that he began tracking flights. Initially, the mission’s usefulness wasn’t so clear. For Cartwright, that didn’t matter; it was a discreet way to restore some dignity to all those who were, and are, anonymously deported. Then came the pandemic and the lockdown. He decided to continue to see if the removal patterns would change. They didn’t.

Flight tracking became almost his sole job in the following years. “People who needed help started reaching out to me. For example, a lawyer with a client about to be deported to Ecuador would contact me to ask when the next deportation flight to Ecuador would be so he could make sure a family member would be there to meet him. By analyzing the data, I can tell him the next flight will most likely depart from this location, on this day, at this time. That’s deeply gratifying. It’s behind the scenes, but it makes a real difference.”

But over the past six months, the challenge of keeping up with ICE flights has naturally grown as the Administration pursues the goal of “the largest deportation in history.” That’s one of the reasons why he’s about to pass the baton to a non-profit that will be able to dedicate more resources and manpower to flight counting. “I’m spending eight or 10 hours a day, maybe 10 or 12 hours a day, just trying to capture the flights and document the flights and do analysis. I have no time to do anything with visualizations, to do lots of other enhancements that could be done by people with that skill set. And it’s a perfect time right now to hand it over to a group like that.”

Cartwright’s original plan was to step away from flight tracking in April, but the Trump administration’s avalanche of removals made him change his mind. Now that he’s on the verge of quitting, he underscores that this doesn’t mean he’s turning his back on activism. He’ll continue to lead a coalition of small organizations in the Rio Grande Valley, on the Texas border where his second life as a flight tracker began; and he’ll make time to go to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago for the eleventh time, because this year, despite everything, he hasn’t been able to. “I was really lucky in my career to have the ability at that point in time to do what I wanted. And not everybody has that. Not everybody has the resources of time and finances to do what they want. And I just didn’t feel like living on a golf course and playing golf every day. That just wasn’t me.”