Habeas Flight Watch: New tool helps track ICE flights to your city

A group of activists have built a new online tool to track domestic ICE flights in real-time and predict their schedules. Called Habeas Flight Watch, it was designed to help the legal teams of detained migrants with habeas petitions and emergency motions, but activists and journalists have also begun using it to document ICE’s actions in their cities. 

The tool is the joint project of Lexington Alarm, a New England-based offshoot of the No Kings movement, and an anonymous ICE flight tracker who goes by “JJ in DC.” Together, they have been quietly piloting the tool for months; now they say, it is ready for everyone to use.

“We just hope to make this transparent so that everybody in the country knows exactly what’s going on,” said Toby Sackton, a Lexington Alarm co-founder, who wrote much of the code for the tool.

Lexington Alarm is part of a coalition that has been trying to stop ICE’s use of Hanscom Field, a small airport northwest of Boston that has become an important part of ICE’s northeastern operation. While federal courts have ruled public-use airports cannot refuse ICE charter flights, Hanscom has grandfathered-in regulations that the coalition says airport authorities could use to stop most ICE flights from landing there. 

At a meeting with the governor’s office last December, Sackton said the officials there seemed surprised by how much the activists knew about ICE’s air operation, with one noting it could be incredibly useful information for overwhelmed legal teams needing to triage their filings.

Habeas corpus petitions, which allow people to challenge their detention in court, are one of the oldest legal proceedings and have become a key weapon against Trump’s ICE. But they can be difficult to file when attorneys don’t know where their clients are and are forced to rely on dishonest and vague officials for information. 

When habeas is filed in a federal district where a migrant physically is at that moment, they cannot be removed from that district without a hearing. Consequently, ICE often races to get newly captured migrants to its nexus of detention centers in southern states, where they will have to get new attorneys and face harsher courts. Crucially, jurisdiction does not change until a plane lands at its destination, meaning if an attorney knows what plane her client is on and can prove she filed before it landed, ICE has to fly them back the district, keeping them closer to their family, their legal team, and fairer judges.

After consulting with the Habeas Project of Massachusetts, Sackton got to work on building a user-friendly dashboard. But for the flight data, the team didn’t stay local, turning to “JJ in DC.” (Full disclosure: JJ and I have become friends over the past year.) 

A veteran who until recently worked in national security, JJ started posting on Bluesky about ICE flights in April 2025, after the FAA used an obscure rule to make the flights disappear from most popular flight-tracking apps. The flight data is still public, but it’s harder to access and understand if you don’t have aviation experience.

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“It made me angry that they were hiding it,” he told me. “Like it’s bad enough that you’re doing this horrible thing to people, but that you’re trying to hide it? I’m sorry, fuck you.”

Eventually, he reached a level of expertise where he started being able to predict their schedules, privately tipping off journalists (including me last summer), activists, and attorneys to ICE flights arriving in their areas, so they could observe as shackled migrants were loaded onto ICE flights.

“Mostly people are just collecting information,” he said. “But also, ICE hates being watched. And when they know they’re being watched, it changes their behavior – usually for the better – and it slows them down. That’s the key, slowing them down.”

By last winter, JJ was fielding messages throughout the day from all over the country with urgent requests for ICE flight info. He tried posting long threads on Bluesky and a daily forecast to YouTube, but they were pretty unwieldy and hard to update once the planes took off. So the Lexington Alarm activists’ idea of building a custom tool was a godsend.

“Now most of the people I’m working with on a regular basis, I’m just saying, ‘It’s on the dashboard,’” JJ said.

Much of the data on the dashboard is now automated (not using AI), pairing JJ’s expected ICE flight schedule with the planes in its charter airline fleets. It updates automatically when a plane takes off. That leaves more time for a human – either JJ or another flight tracker named Mimi, who asked that her last name not be used – to make better forecasts. It also flags them when a plane diverges from the forecast, so they can manually update it and investigate the reason for change.

An airport icon turns light blue when an ICE flight is expected that day, yellow when the plane is inbound, red when it’s on the ground, and pink when it has taken off but habeas is still attached because it hasn’t landed somewhere else yet. Icons for the airports in ICE’s detention network have bars across them. They also recently added the borders of each federal district.

Clicking on an airport icon produces a window with detailed information about exactly when an ICE flight is expected to land, or how long it has been on the ground, as seen here for Newark Liberty International Airport.

Perhaps the best feature is the “Record” button in the lower righthand corner, which generates an official record attorneys can attach to their filings. You can see part of one these records below:

The dashboard also saves ICE flight data for the previous seven days, and posts the expected schedule for the next week.

You can view the Habeas Flight Watch live map here.

You can view Lexington Alarm’s explanation of the project here.  

When shown the dashboard, Emma Winger, a staff attorney at the American Immigration Council who works on habeas cases said: “This tool certainly appears very useful, given that ICE has tried to avoid habeas court jurisdiction by rapidly transferring people from one facility to another. It is important for advocates to know whether and when their client is likely to be transferred out of the state so they can bring a timely habeas petition and to have evidence showing the client was still within the district when the petition was filed.”

For now, the dashboard only monitors domestic “round-up” ICE flights. Though there are currently 50-80 ICE flights a day, if the map included all the “shuffle” flights between detention centers plus the removal flights out of the country, it could become too unwieldy to be helpful.

ICE flights loading at airports are one of the most visible parts of Trump’s deportation machine, yet most people still may not know they’re happening at airports near their homes, or when. He hopes the dashboard will change that. More activists are starting ICE flight observation groups at their local airports – like the one organized by MN50501’s Nick Benson in Minnesota, which has kept detailed records of every migrant taken away on an ICE flight there, more than 4,000 people – but so many more are needed, he said.

His main goal for the dashboard though? “Long term, I want it to go away. I want this to become unnecessary.”

Thank you for reading. I am a former Washington Post staff writer, and as far as I know, I’m the only journalist in America covering ICE flights full time. I am committed to keeping this reporting non-paywalled, but if you are able, please sign up for a paid subscription or send me a one-time tip, so I can continue this important work. –Gillian