ICE expanding its arrests at airports to new targets, lawyers say

The Trump administration is ramping up immigration-related detentions at airports nationwide, including in the D.C. area, according to advocates and attorneys, as part of what appears to be a new push targeting foreign nationals who have overstayed their visas.

Six immigration lawyers interviewed by The Washington Post said immigration officials have stepped up enforcement at the three airports that serve the D.C. region, detaining passengers as they prepare to board or step off domestic flights.

Similar ICE enforcement actions involving visa overstays have been reported at airports across the country, including in San Francisco, Houston and Denver, as the Trump administration looks to step up deportations, according to lawyers and media reports.

While Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had previously detained people with deportation orders at airports, the targeting of people who entered the country legally but now have expired visas is a new development, the lawyers said.

“This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

Atenas Burrola Estrada, deputy program director at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, said her group was aware of about a dozen arrests at Reagan National, Washington Dulles International and Baltimore-Washington International Marshall (BWI) airports.

“The profile of people who are being arrested has largely changed,” Burrola Estrada said. “It’s people who entered the country lawfully and then overstayed, many of them because they feared persecution. Some of them have pending asylum applications, many of them seem to have work permits, and now they’re being targeted for arrest.”

“We’ve been saying for a while: If you don’t have permanent status, you should really consider whether it’s safe to fly,” Burrola Estrada added. “I think a lot of people were still flying, and it was safe, and that is clearly not the case anymore.”

The arrests appear to stem from increased information sharing between ICE and the Transportation Security Administration. TSA last year began supplying ICE with data on passengers suspected to have been ordered deported. In May, the two agencies signed an information-sharing agreement, according to a memo published this week by the watchdog group American Oversight.

“Information sharing between ICE and TSA is essential in identifying who is attempting to travel in our country, including violent criminals, to keep our skies and our country safe,” according to the DHS statement.

In a social media post earlier this week, a coalition of immigrants’ rights groups reported an “uptick in detentions of noncitizens without status at DMV area airports” and advised passengers to assess their personal risk before flying.

The recent D.C. arrests include multiple foreign nationals who sought asylum because of a fear of persecution in their home countries.

Paul, who spoke on the condition that The Post not use his last name for fear of retaliation, was detained by ICE officials at Dulles Airport late last week after he returned from a trip to Hawaii with his family. After the aircraft landed, Paul said, a flight attendant called him to the front of the plane, where two plainclothes ICE officers were waiting to take him into custody.

As he was being processed at an ICE field office in Virginia, Paul said, he began to feel his chest tighten and had difficulty breathing before he collapsed from a heart attack. He was rushed to a hospital, treated and then released back to ICE custody. Authorities later released him under a preexisting ICE supervision arrangement, according to his attorney, Jay S. Marks. Paul’s next check-in with ICE is scheduled for September.

Marks said Paul has an order withholding his removal to his home country, India, based on the U.N. Convention Against Torture. “They can’t send him to his home country. They can send him to a third country, which they will likely do at some point,” he said.

“It’s an entirely new level of aggressiveness,” Marks said of the spike in airport arrests. “People think they’re simply taking a domestic flight. They’re going to see family or they’re going to do this or that. And in fact, ICE has triangulated with TSA and with the airlines and has now got this individual in their sights.”

In another case, ICE agents arrested a Colombian woman on July 17 as she was about to board a Southwest Airlines flight to Florida at BWI.

The woman was waiting at the gate with her fiancé, who is an American citizen, when an airline worker asked her over the loudspeaker to come up to the gate, where ICE agents were waiting, according to the woman’s attorney, Johanna Kelley.

“There were two or three men, without uniform, without ID, in regular clothing,” Kelley said. “Then they said, ‘We are ICE. You need to come with us. You are arrested because you’re an illegal alien.’”

Kelley said her client, whose identity she asked to be kept private over concerns it would negatively impact her case, came to the United States from Colombia about four years ago with a visitor visa. Kelley said her client was fleeing persecution in her home country and later filed an asylum claim, which is still pending.

The woman was detained for several hours at the airport, Kelley said, before being transferred to an ICE facility in Baltimore, and then to an ICE facility in Virginia. She was then transferred to an ICE facility in Louisiana before an immigration judge in Virginia granted her a bond this week. She was released from ICE custody on Wednesday but is still facing removal from the country, Kelley said.

Kelley said she’s in a Facebook group with immigration attorneys from across the country. Around the time that her client was detained, she said, “so many lawyers started reporting the same.”