At least a dozen immigrants have been detained by federal agents at Bay Area airports over the past month — many over expired visas rather than active removal orders, leading advocates to suspect ICE is accessing flight information.
The recent surge in ICE arrests has prompted immigrant rights organizations and attorneys to advise many non-citizens to postpone both international and domestic flights when possible, as KQED reports. Bay Area attorneys say they've seen travelers with pending asylum claims, green card applications, student visas, and work visas detained at airports in San Francisco and elsewhere despite having no criminal records or active removal orders, according to the Chronicle.
One of the first cases from the past month involves an Argentinian man who was arrested June 27 at Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport while preparing to fly to Texas, per KQED. Centro Legal de la Raza attorney Jazmin Preciado said the man and his wife had been planning to return permanently to Argentina later this year, as they overstayed their visas during the pandemic. After previously flying without incident, he was detained for several days before Alameda County's Rapid Response Network connected him with legal counsel and secured a court order for his release.
Last week, San Francisco resident and Ukrainian national Iryna Gorb was filmed being forcibly detained by ICE at San Francisco International Airport while returning from a trip to Portland. Gorb, who has lived in San Francisco for more than a decade but whose visa expired in 2011, remains in ICE custody as immigration attorneys continue challenging her detention.
"Ask any immigration attorney, whether they've been practicing for five years or 40 years, the types of actions that we're seeing at airports across the country is essentially unheard of," said San Francisco immigration attorney Ghassan Shamieh, speaking to the Chronicle.
Attorneys say the recent arrests suggest ICE may be using airline passenger information to identify travelers before they fly, a concern also raised by the ACLU and the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus. Per the Chronicle, the Transportation Security Administration has long said information sharing within the Department of Homeland Security is legal and routine, though immigration attorneys argue the frequency of apparent coordination has increased dramatically.
“What we’re seeing now is ICE showing up at airports because they have information about travelers, they have ID information,” Milli Atkinson, director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the San Francisco Bar Association, told KQED. “It just appears that TSA is now cooperating with ICE at a level that we haven’t seen before.”
The recent arrests follow similar incidents earlier this year, including the dramatic detention of a mother and daughter at SFO in March after TSA alerted immigration officials when the pair appeared on a passenger manifest, which also turned into a viral video.
Related: Woman From Ukraine Forcibly Detained at SFO In Viral Video; Feds Say She Overstayed Her Visa
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