ICE Flight Monitor: March 2026 Report

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 thous ands 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 R ights 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 Costa Rican, 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.

Key findings from March 2026 include: 

March saw 225 removal flights to 46 countries as part of the Trump administration’s escalating mass deportation campaign. This marks a 23% increase from the 183 flights in February and a 48% increase in removal destinations from the previous month. March saw first-time removal flights to Moldova, Myanmar, and Thailand, as well as resumed removal flights to Tajikistan, Belize, Togo, and Trinidad and Tobago. Guatemala and Honduras remain the top removal countries, accounting for 41 percent of all removal flights.

Record immigration enforcement flights despite government shutdown impacting DHS. Total flights reached 1,794 in March, a 122% increase over last year. This surge included 225 removal flights and 1,225 shuffle flights, supported by an expanding network of ICE Air Operations. Notably, removal-related flights increased as fuel stops jumped 46% from last month, utilizing international destinations from Curacao and Senegal to Ireland and Bulgaria to facilitate Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

Expanded forced third-country transfers of individuals to countries where they are not citizens, with first-time flights to Moldova and Uganda, and continued flights to Eswatini, Poland, and Uzbekistan. The administration also continues to send non-Ecuadorans to Ecuador and non-Hondurans to Honduras under the Asylum Cooperative Agreements. For more information on third country agreements, visit Third Country Deportation Watch. 

CSI Aviation Began Conducting ICE Air Flights Using Its Own Aircraft. CSI Aviation expanded the ICE Air network with four of its own 19-passenger aircraft to conduct small-scale domestic shuffle flights. In March alone, these planes conducted 121 shuffle flights, primarily to detention centers in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and Alabama. This expansion has added over 460 flights across eight U.S. cities since December 2025.