A CFO turned activist has become a go-to source for understanding the administration’s immigration crackdown.
www.theatlantic.com
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.
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.”
www.theguardian.com
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