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From afar, the plane doesn’t look different from any other charter plane preparing for takeoff at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. But this one is carrying more than 50 people detained by ICE in the latest surge of immigration enforcement efforts by the federal government.

“You could be sitting down in the terminal, you could be eating your cheese and crackers in the Delta lounge right now, you could have been watching it all morning and not even realize what’s going on,” said Nick Benson, as he looks out at the flight from atop the Terminal 1 Parking Ramp. “It looks pretty normal.”

Benson, an activist with MN50501 who works in commercial flight data analytics, is one of a handful of people who spend much of their days documenting ICE activity at the airport. Over the past week, these observers have noticed a surge of ICE flights and the amount of people on them. 

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The flights have increased from one to two times a week last summer to two flights per day last week. Benson says sometimes his estimates are based on the number of vans carrying people across the tarmac. His numbers are not a full accounting of all the people detained by ICE and flown out of Minnesota.

On Saturday, Benson counted one plane carrying 127 people. That’s the most he’s ever seen board a single flight. 

“They’re our neighbors, they’re people who are doing things the right way, most of them as far as I understand,” said Benson. “We still are just shipping them off and letting it happen. It’s terrible.”

Since the beginning of December, Benson has observed more than 1,000 people board ICE flights at MSP.

ICE flights at MSP and other airports around the country have become increasingly more difficult to track. While these flights have operated out of MSP for years, Benson said they stopped popping up on the airport’s public schedules last spring, around the time the Trump administration ramped up immigration enforcement efforts. 

Benson said most of the charter airlines used to operate ICE flights were added to FAA’s privacy list, and these flights started using a special call sign instead of their usual company identifier. This means they don’t always appear on websites like FlightRadar24 or FlightAware. 

That leaves it up to people like Benson to document the flights. Through his work analyzing commercial flight data, Benson is able to determine what flights are being used to move people detained by ICE based on publicly available data like call signs and flight logs. But he can only confirm it’s actually an ICE flight by driving from his house in Burnsville to the airport as fast as possible and seeing if people are boarding the plane in shackles. 

“The only way we know how many people are on any of these flights are when other concerned citizens like myself are here and looking at it with binoculars or a long telephoto lens and counting the number of people who are hobbling up the steps,” said Benson. 

On Monday, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant DHS secretary of public affairs,

said that DHS has made more than 2,000 arrests since immigration enforcement efforts ramped up in December, but she did not specify how many people arrested were being flown out of Minnesota. 

In a statement, the Metropolitan Airports Commission said federal law prevents MSP from restricting access to the airport and cannot interfere with law enforcement operations. 

“The MAC does not coordinate or get any advance notification of general aviation or non-commercial flight operations, which would include government-operated or chartered aircraft,” MAC strategic communications manager Jeff Lea said in a statement. 

Speed and secrecy of flights doesn’t leave time ‘to fix any mistakes’

The secrecy surrounding the ICE flights has made it difficult for immigration attorneys to know where their clients are, and moving people detained by ICE in Minnesota out of state is a relatively new practice. Ana Pottratz Acosta, a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota’s Binger Center for New Americans who specializes in immigration law, said people detained by ICE over the last week are being flown out of Minnesota within 24 to 48 hours of their arrest.

“If this process is happening within 24 or 48 hours, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of time to fix any mistakes,” she said. “If you’re moving people very quickly and [[detainees]] don’t have a way to contact family members or someone they know to try to get evidence of their status in the country, I’m afraid it’s going to inevitably lead to erroneous deportation of U.S. citizens or people who have a right to be in the United States.”

Acosta said the main mechanism to get somebody out of detention is through filing a writ of habeas corpus, a court order that forces law enforcement to produce someone they are holding and justify their continued confinement. 

“If somebody is transported from Minnesota to Texas or to Louisiana, for example, it kind of gets tricky with filing the habeas because it then becomes a question of jurisdiction,” Acosta said.

‘The most important work I’m ever going to do’

There are now so many ICE flights out of MSP that it’s difficult for Benson to get to every single flight. He’s been thinking about ways to train other activists to help document the flights. He believes his work may be the most accurate source of deportation and detainment numbers in the region.

“I am fortunate that I am self-employed and have a flexible schedule, and I happen to have professional working knowledge of how commercial flight operations work,” Benson said as he watched one of the planes carrying more than 50 detainees pick up speed on the tarmac. The plane is headed for Omaha. “If I don’t do it, I don’t know who will. That’s why I keep coming back.”

Every time a plane takes off, Benson takes a moment to think about the people inside. They could be his neighbors or parents of children his kids go to school with. The weight of the work he’s doing doesn’t go unnoticed. 

“I feel like this is the most important work I’m ever going to get a chance to do,” he said.

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Immigration enforcement in Minnesota

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As the immigration enforcement surge continues in Minnesota, more people detained by ICE are being flown out of state. It’s raising concerns of “erroneous deportations.” 

Observer: ICE detainee flights increase at MSP as enforcement action ramps up

A plane is loaded with people detained by ICE.

Courtesy of Nick Benson | MN50501

A man looks through a camera's zoom lens toward an airport.

Ellie Roth | MPR News

A man poses with his arms folded on the roof of a parking deck.

Observer: ICE detainee flights increase at MSP as enforcement action ramps up

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