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On the top floor of a parking garage at the Minneapolis airport, a quiet scene has been playing out daily for the past month. One man has been documenting the federally chartered deportation flights taking people out of Minnesota. NPR's Kat Lonsdorf reports.
KAT LONSDORF, BYLINE: Forty-one-year-old Nick Benson stands tucked out of the cold inside an elevator terminal next to a window overlooking the tarmac.
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LONSDORF: Commercial airplanes dart by, but one chartered flight sits parked away from the gates, a set of stairs pulled up to its open door.
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LONSDORF: Dressed in a plaid button-up in a knit beanie, Benson leans into a digital camera on a tripod with a long telephoto lens pointed toward that plane and slowly counts.
NICK BENSON: So we are at one for today so far.
LONSDORF: He's counting people as they hobble out of a minibus...
BENSON: That's No. 2 at the top of the steps.
LONSDORF: ...Up the steps and onto that plane.
BENSON: Three.
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LONSDORF: These are immigration detainees, hands and feet shackled...
BENSON: You can see them dangling, glistening in the light.
LONSDORF: ...Being flown out of Minnesota...
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LONSDORF: ...Caught up in President Trump's sweeping federal immigration campaign that started in Minneapolis back in December.
BENSON: We're up to seven now.
LONSDORF: The administration has touted it as the largest ever.
BENSON: Eleven.
LONSDORF: Today's plane will head to Texas.
BENSON: You could be sitting in the Delta lounge eating your cheese and crackers, and you wouldn't have even noticed that that was anything unusual going by out the window.
LONSDORF: Benson is a professional airplane enthusiast. He runs an app to let other enthusiasts know where to see unusual planes coming and going from airports. But in recent months, he started tracking these flights in and out of Minneapolis, counting the people loaded on as they're forced to leave the state.
BENSON: The count is what is important to me because there's no other source of quantitative data with respect to what's actually going on.
LONSDORF: The federal government could be a source, but the Trump administration has been opaque about data in its immigration enforcement operations. NPR requested the number of people detained and flown out of Minnesota in recent months from the Department of Homeland Security. Instead, DHS responded saying that 3,500 arrests had been made during the operation without offering specifics and did not say where those people were sent. That's one of the reasons Benson has started keeping detailed spreadsheets of every flight he can - 42 in January alone.
BENSON: This was just one of the best ways that I could be a helper, and I'm glad that I'm here to be able to do it.
LONSDORF: Benson has a wife and three kids. He works full-time running his app, but he often drops everything with just one or two hours' notice to get to the spot and observe.
BENSON: Eighteen. Look at the guy going up the stairs now in his bright-green jacket. He's a construction worker. Nineteen.
LONSDORF: It's 19 today. Other days, he's counted more than a hundred. The airplane door is closed. The steps are pulled away, and eventually, Benson watches as it takes off.
BENSON: Another sobering moment in a never-ending chain of sobering moments here.
LONSDORF: Benson estimates that 2,339 people were flown out of Minnesota like this, this past month.
SAVI ARVEY: That is extremely valuable. That is not something we can track.
LONSDORF: Savi Arvey oversees ICE Flight Monitor, an initiative by Human Rights First. It's been logging these kind of flights by DHS for several years across the country and the world. Deportation flights on ICE Air, as DHS calls it, aren't new. They were happening under the Biden administration as well. But in Trump's second term, their frequency and scope has essentially doubled. Tracking them has gotten more difficult too, and Arvey's team doesn't have the visibility of how many people are on board, which is where observers on the ground, like Benson, come in.
ARVEY: Knowing that someone is there counting the number of people and observing what is going on is really essential.
LONSDORF: Many immigration lawyers and advocates have noted that detainees are often whisked to airports quickly, 24 to 48 hours after being detained.
ARVEY: What worries us the most is that people are being put on these flights without due process.
BENSON: Welcome.
LONSDORF: Hey, Nick. Thank you.
The next day, Benson shows me the spreadsheets he's been keeping at home.
BENSON: Here, first, we are now at 83 flights that we have notes on.
LONSDORF: He says sometimes the weight of what he's witnessing catches up with him.
BENSON: And a lot of these people, when they're hobbling up the steps in chains, a lot of them are pausing for a moment at the top of the steps, and they're taking a look around. And I can't even imagine what they're thinking.
LONSDORF: But he says he's going to keep at it.
BENSON: I think it's the most important work that I'm ever going to get an opportunity to do.
LONSDORF: He starts to tear up a bit.
BENSON: But I really wish I didn't have to.
LONSDORF: And then he looks at his watch. Another flight is coming in soon. Nick Benson grabs his tripod and his camera and heads out the door to count. Kat Lonsdorf, NPR News, Minneapolis. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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