There is something almost strange about being stopped at a departure gate instead of a border or during a traffic stop. Checked bag. Getting ready to board. Then federal agents come up behind them.
That scene used to happen so rarely that it was interesting, but now it happens all the time in American airports. Immigration lawyers all over the country say they are getting more calls from clients who were detained in airport terminals before boarding domestic flights. Some of these clients are very involved in American business and education. It looks like the trend is planned, coordinated, and getting stronger.
People are paying more attention to ICE arrests at airports these days because of a number of high-profile cases that brought the issue to the public’s attention. Fatima Ameaka, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and a citizen of Cameroon, was arrested at Baltimore/Washington International Airport as she was getting ready to board a domestic flight. According to the Department of Homeland Security, she was arrested because she overstayed a visa that expired in June 2024. Johns Hopkins said it was going to help her and called her a “respected member” of the community.
Her case is not unique. An immigration lawyer in Washington, D.C., talked about a client who was detained at a D.C.-area airport while going to Texas for her father’s funeral. The client was a woman seeking asylum who had legally entered the country. Another lawyer said that a client was held in a similar situation at a Chicago airport. Both were legally in the country and had applications for immigration still being processed. Both are now being held by ICE.
The role of the Transportation Security Administration seems to be what sets this wave of airport arrests apart from earlier patterns of law enforcement. Before a flight, TSA checks the information of every passenger. An internal document made public earlier this year said that ICE had arrested more than 800 people after getting tips from the TSA. “Not that an airport is a holy place,” said Jeff Joseph, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “But enforcement at airports is like nothing we’ve ever seen, and neither is cooperation between TSA and ICE.”
The airport makes sense as a place to do enforcement work, even if it seems strange. Agents know when and where a person will be. Sharing data makes it easier to find people. John Sandweg, who was acting director of ICE under the Obama administration, agreed: when there is a lot of pressure to make more arrests, agents tend to do what is easy and quick. “It’s all about what is the fastest and easiest way to get people into custody,” he said.
DHS, on the other hand, has been clear about what it wants to do. A government spokesman told CNN that the government is working to make sure that people who are in the country illegally “can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport.” That frame doesn’t leave much room for doubt. It is now official that the airport is part of the enforcement net.
What is still really not clear is where the policy’s edges are. So far, the cases that have come to light involve people overstaying their visas. Many of these people have pending asylum or marriage petitions, so they are not trying to hide from the system. If someone who is in the process of immigration can be detained while traveling within the United States, it will have big effects on hundreds of thousands of people. Already, immigration lawyers are telling their clients not to travel within their own country until they fully understand the risks.
It’s hard not to notice that airports have a certain effect on people. For most people, they are places where they leave and come back from normal movement. As they turn into places where people are arrested, not just international visitors but also people whose documents aren’t clear, it shows a change that goes beyond the numbers. The number of arrests at airports is still a small part of what ICE does overall. But it’s likely that the effect on behavior and who feels safe traveling through this country is much bigger than any number can show.
