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By Dan Gooding
Associate News Editor
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The Trump administration is rapidly increasing the number of daily Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) flights, new data released Thursday showed.
Across August, an average of 45 ICE flights took off per day, either to deport immigrants or move them elsewhere within the United States, per the ICE Flight Monitor housed at the nonprofit Human Rights First, making it the busiest month since records began in 2020.
Newsweek reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment via email Thursday afternoon.
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Why It Matters
President Donald Trump promised his administration would carry out the mass deportation of millions of illegal immigrants once he returned to the White House in January. While slow to begin with, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in July, gave a multi-billion-dollar boost to ICE's budget, providing funding for extra staff and detention capacity.
What To Know
ICE Flight Monitor said that between January 20 and August 31, 2025, the Trump administration carried out at least 7,454 enforcement flights, marking a 34 percent increase over the same period in 2024 when President Joe Biden was in office.
In August alone, there were 1,393 ICE flights, the data showed, with around 240 of those counted as removal, or deportation, flights out of the country. That number had only moved above 200 in May, when 209 were recorded.
The other flights included in the monitor's totals—gathered through independent tracking due to no official government data—are removal-related flights, meaning planes linking up deportation efforts, and domestic "shuffles", referring to ICE flights which move detainees between the agency's various detention centers.
More shuffle flights have been recorded under the Trump administration, likely due to a rapidly growing detention center line-up and a record number of ICE detainees.
Most of the flights leaving the U.S. were headed for Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and El Salvador, with nationals from those four countries making up some of the largest shares of known undocumented immigrants in the U.S. New destinations recorded under the second Trump administration included: Greece, Pakistan, Argentina, Azerbaijan, Chile, and Kazakhstan.
Human Rights First raised concerns about the conditions on board the planes, with many deportees held in handcuffs or shackles for the entire flight, which can stop off in multiple countries and last more than 30 hours.
The Trump administration has insisted that ICE detainees receive high standards of care, while also maintaining that those being deported have broken U.S. laws and must be sent home or to a third country.
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What People Are Saying
Savi Arvey, Director of Research and Analysis, Refugee Protection at Human Rights First, in a press release: "Behind every flight are families torn apart, people disappeared without due process, and human rights violated on an industrial scale. The Trump administration's deportation campaign is unprecedented in scope and cruelty and is a clear attack on due process, the rule of law, and overall transparency of our immigration system."
Human Rights First President and CEO Uzra Zeya, in a press release: "U.S. democracy is strengthened when Americans know where their tax dollars are going – in this case, a mushrooming deportation machine fueled by an unprecedented $170 billion cash infusion to DHS and its components. We need Congress and the courts to rein in this anti-democratic enforcement overreach."
A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official on the arrests of alleged illegal immigrants in late August: "We've said it before, and we'll keep saying it: If you come to our country illegally and break our laws, we WILL find you, arrest, you, and deport you. The days of letting dangerous criminals terrorize American citizens are over. President Trump and Secretary Noem will continue to do everything in their power to fulfill the American people's mandate to remove the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens from our country."
What's Next
The number of ICE flights will likely increase as more people are detained by the agency, held in its expanding facilities, and the Trump administration reaches more agreements with other countries to repatriate their citizens or those from nations that will not accept deportees.
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