‘The Bird-Watchers’ of Memphis: tracking ICE flights and documenting detainees in shackles

This story was originally published by the Institute for Public Service Reporting Memphis. 

On a Saturday morning in July, Joni Laney, a 73-year-old retired English teacher, parked her car in a small lot overlooking Wilson Air Center near Memphis International Airport. She had received word from her group of fellow volunteers that a flight there was going to be used to transport several detainees held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Laney had shown up, as she has done numerous times over the past few months, to document what would transpire. On this occasion, Laney invited me to come along and see for myself the manner in which ICE treated its detainees in transit. Seated in her car, and attempting to be as inconspicuous as possible, we kept watch as a bus and a van — both vehicles white and unmarked — stood next to a stationary Bombardier plane registered to an ICE contractor.

“Oh gosh, can you see the shackles? Oh my God,” Laney gasped as a group of women detainees stepped out of the van, their hands and feet in shackles and chains running around their waists. “Three, four…,” she kept count of the number of detainees who got out of the van and made their way to the aircraft in front of them.

Moments earlier, a larger number of male detainees had similarly exited the bus. Laney documented the details carefully, as well as she could from the distance we were at, across a barbed wire fence bordering the air center.

“I’m a bird-watcher,” she told me. That’s what she and her group of just under ten like-minded individuals call themselves — The Bird-Watchers — as they go about tracking ICE flights in Memphis and documenting the manner in which detainees are transported on them.

Many of The Bird-Watchers, like Joni, are retired Memphians. For months, they have painstakingly collected evidence of the harsh conditions in which ICE detainees are moved, bound in shackles and chains.

“It must violate most safety regulations to have that many people shackled (on a plane)”, said Jim West, a 75-year-old retired physician and bioethicist, and another of The Bird-Watchers. “They’d never be able to evacuate if they had to.”

“(ICE) treats them as though they’re non-human at every point,” said Laney, “and every time they’re moved, the airplane gets money, ICE gets money, the prison gets money, (private prison contractor) CoreCivic gets money — I mean it’s just like a revolving door of money.”

Protesters who gathered Tuesday at a rally outside Wilson Air Center echoed those sentiments.

“And we can’t forget, too, that the reason all of this is happening is (because) someone thinks we’re less than” human, Latina activist Gisela Guerrero said.

Pressure on the Wilsons

Now, following that money trail, The Bird-Watchers are seeking to pressure the owners of the private air center where the flights are boarded, seeking to stop it from profiting from ICE operations.

At the heart of the row over ICE flights in Memphis is one of the city’s most famous business families, the Wilsons of Holiday Inn fame.

Wilson Air Center is a fixed-base operator or FBO, which is a company authorized to provide aviation services for certain private aircraft. The private enterprise was founded in 1996 by Robert Wilson, also known as Bob, son of the late Kemmons Wilson, the founder of the Holiday Inn chain of hotels. The Wilson Air Center proclaims on its website that “our Memphis location is home of one of the world’s largest aircraft canopies, and is touted by the aviation industry as among the top fixed base operations in the United States for the quality of its services and the comfort and design of its facilities.” The enterprise also has facilities in Houston and Chattanooga.

Now, as The Bird-Watchers and other advocacy groups protest Wilson Air Center’s continued operations with regard to ICE flights, the financial ties between the air center and the federal agency or its contractors have come into question.

On the day that I accompanied Laney to document the detainee transfer at the air center, the flight in question was a Bombardier registered by CSI Aviation, a private air charter company that received a $1.6 billion contract over one year from the Department of Homeland Security “for enforcement and removal operations under the ICE Air Program”. It is unclear whether the services of the Wilson Air Center were requisitioned by DHS, ICE, CSI Aviation or some other agency or contractor. Wilson Air Center did not respond to The Institute’s requests for comment.

Vecindarios 901, a grassroots rapid response group that works on immigrants’ issues in Memphis, has joined The Bird-Watchers’ call to pressure the Wilsons to drop their ICE flight operations. In a statement, the group said that Memphians are joining “a nationwide movement against ICE flights operating in our communities, and against the companies secretly servicing and profiting off the inhumane systems hurting our people.”

“People around the country are sending them emails, asking them to make the same move that other companies around the county are being asked to make,” Blake Burr, one of the co-founders of Vecindarios 901, told The Institute. Burr, who is also part of the group of Bird-Watchers, added that, as a Memphian, she felt that the Wilson family would want to be remembered in a different way, with a positive legacy.

Behind the scenes, The Bird-Watchers said they have spent weeks trying to reach out to Bob Wilson’s extended family, trying to persuade them to use their influence to get Wilson Air Center to drop its ICE flight operations. Laney, for one, said she managed to have a phone conversation with Spence Wilson Sr., son of Kemmons, brother to Robert and chairman emeritus of Kemmons Wilson Companies. Laney said that in the conversation, Spence referred to the air center’s operations as a business proposition and pushed back against her protestations.

“They’re a charitable family in lots of ways,” said another Bird-Watcher, who requested to not be identified by name due to her work on tracking ICE flights, “but then at the same time, you know, here they are profiting off human misery.”

A meticulous process

Every morning, a retired teacher in her seventies who joined The Bird-Watchers a few months ago, wakes up early and gets to work. Her tasks — detainee searches and database updates — are the start of a meticulous process that The Bird-Watchers have nearly perfected over their time working together.

The retired teacher, who requested that she not be named due to fears of retaliation over her work, logs on to an online database of detainees held at the West Tennessee Detention Facility in Mason. There, she manually searches for the names of the detainees.

“I am the one who every single morning spends up to three hours searching through Mason’s database one at a time to find out who is new there and who has left”, she told The Institute. “I don’t get everyone because they don’t make it easy. It’s a tedious process.”

“All these ways to find people was all brand new to me,” she said. But now, the searcher said that she has a long-term database of about 3,500 detainees who were there at the facility at some point since it reopened in September 2025, and over 800 names of detainees who were held there in July.

“I have a sheet for every month and so I have who at the beginning of the month started there, who comes there, and then I keep a database in the same sheet of those who are leaving. And so I can look at my sheet and I can tell you what day they came, I can tell you what day they left,” said the searcher.

When a large tranche of names that was there the previous day suddenly no longer appears the next day, she said it’s a sign that there would likely be a flight that will transfer them out of Memphis from Wilson Air Center.

“Because these planes are leaving at like nine o’clock, I get up really early to make sure we know how many people are going to be on the planes.”

As the searcher hands off this information to The Bird-Watchers, the next stage gets underway — flight tracking. On cue, a resident of Midtown Memphis who specializes in flight tracking for The Bird-Watchers, begins her part of the process.

Before she got involved with The Bird-Watchers, she had never tracked a flight before. “I didn’t know that was possible,” she told The Institute. Now, she scans multiple flight tracking websites, including a real-time flight monitoring site focused on ICE flight paths. She zeroes in on flights near Memphis International Airport, and tries to confirm whether there is a flight registered by an ICE contractor that is in the vicinity.

It’s not always easy to track the flights. “There’s like five of them (flight trackers) you have to kind of look between because they hide a lot of the flights — they have them on special lists so they don’t show up on trackers the same way.”

But when she needs help, she reaches out to a national group of ICE flight watchers who have been performing similar tasks elsewhere in the country. “The national group is helpful,” she said. “If there’s something I can’t figure out, I can ask.”

Over the past five months, The Bird-Watchers have tracked around 50 such ICE flights leaving Memphis. Most of them head toward Alexandria airport in Louisiana, she said, due to it being a hub for multiple detention centers in that Deep South state.

Once the flight details are confirmed by the tracking specialist, the details are promptly shared with the group. Finally, the last leg kicks off — Bird-Watchers must go in person to vantage points near the Wilson Air Center, and document what takes place.

West, the retired physician, and Laney, the retired teacher, are among those who are tasked with this final stretch. Both of them have been near Wilson on these observation trips on numerous occasions. Each time, it hits them just as hard.

“When you go and watch it, it just tears at your gut to see these people that have been separated from their families,” said West. He shares photos and videos from his trips documenting detainees bound in shackles. A majority have no criminal conviction yet are treated like criminals, eliciting sharp and emotional reactions.

“It’s like watching a death train,” said the flight tracking specialist, “You’re watching people get torn away from their families — some of them are going (to be sent) back to very dangerous situations. It’s not safe for them to go back.”

But for The Bird-Watchers, it reinforces the need for the work they do.

“I think it’s important to bear witness,” said the searcher, adding that they have been sharing the details on social media. “But also, we want to verify what they (ICE) are actually doing. Like I had no idea they were shackled, hands and feet.”

“It makes me want to scream because it’s not right,” she added. “They’re not getting the criminals. They’re getting somebody’s mommy and somebody’s daddy and somebody’s grandpa.”

Most Memphis detainees transferred out of state

Under the Trump administration, an overwhelming majority of immigrants listed as having been detained by ICE in Memphis end up in detention facilities in neighboring states such as Louisiana, according to The Institute’s analysis of data provided by ICE in response to a public records request by the Deportation Data Project.

Of the 2,529 ICE detainees listed as having been detained first in the Memphis Hold Room since the day President Trump took office in January 2025, over half of them — 1,291 detainees, or 51% — had their final detention stint in Louisiana. Only 15%, or 374 of the detainees, had their final detention stint within Tennessee, either at the Memphis Hold Room itself or the West Tennessee Detention Facility in Mason.

Vecindarios 901 said in a statement that these transfers of detainees are “designed to punish and wear down migrants in detention, forcing legal counsel to constantly recalibrate and families to wonder where their loved ones are being held and how they are being treated.” The statement added, “As habeas corpus petitions can only be filed in the jurisdiction of a person’s physical location, ICE can effectively prevent habeas filings with constant relocations and no transparency.”

DHS and ICE did not respond to The Institute’s request for comment.

Even as these “shuffle flights” continue, so do the efforts of those such as The Bird-Watchers of Memphis. And their pressure on private partners of ICE flights, such as Wilson Air Center, is also increasing.

“The reason I started doing this work was because I have a five-year-old grandson,” said the retired teacher who performs the early morning detainee database searches. “When he’s old and says, ‘What did you do when all this was going on?’ I want to be able to tell him, ‘I fought against this. I did something, I didn’t just sit and tsk tsk at the news.”

Erika Konig contributed to this article.