For years the rule at the airport was simple. ICE took the people who had already lost — final orders of removal, names already in a system, no appeal left to file. You could tell a client who was at risk. Usually it was not the woman with a pending case and a work permit in her bag.
That rule is gone.
On July 30 the Washington Post reported that ICE has started pulling a different traveler off domestic flights: people who came in legally and overstayed. Asylum seekers whose cases are still open. People holding valid employment authorization. No criminal charge of any kind. One man, identified only as Paul, landed at Dulles after a family trip to Hawaii and was met at the front of the plane by two plainclothes officers. During processing his chest tightened and he collapsed from a heart attack. He holds a withholding order protecting him from return to India under the Convention Against Torture. His lawyer called the airport spike an entirely new level of aggressiveness. In a separate case, agents arrested a Colombian woman with a pending asylum claim at Baltimore-Washington International as she waited to board a flight to Florida with her U.S.-citizen fiancé.
Here is how they find him.
The machine under the arrest
When you book a domestic flight, TSA collects your name, date of birth, and gender. That collection is not new, and it is not sinister on its own. It runs on the Secure Flight Final Rule, 73 Fed. Reg. 64018 (Oct. 28, 2008), codified at 49 C.F.R. Part 1560. Congress ordered it after 2001 for one reason: to check passengers against terrorist watch lists. Counterterrorism. That is the purpose the law authorizes.
In May 2025, TSA and ICE signed a Memorandum of Agreement that routes that same passenger data toward immigration enforcement. The public never saw it. American Oversight had to sue under the Freedom of Information Act to get it, and released it on July 28. The agreement cites Secure Flight as its legal footing, says TSA will hand ICE specified data elements, and says ICE will keep what it receives in its own repository. The appendices that would tell you exactly which data — those are redacted almost to the last line.
There is a second problem, and it is about candor. In January, before the House Homeland Security Committee, the acting TSA Administrator was asked directly whether TSA had an agreement to share passenger information with ICE to check travelers for deportation orders. She said that was not what was happening — that TSA does not send the information to ICE, but only helps ICE check against TSA’s information. The agreement American Oversight pried loose describes a formal data-sharing arrangement and lays out how ICE retains what TSA gives it. Read the testimony against the document and they do not sit easily together. That is my read, not a ruling. But it is the kind of gap oversight committees exist to close, and so far the administration has declined to close it: at his confirmation hearing this month, the nominee to run TSA would not tell the Senate what TSA shares.
The government’s answer is short. DHS says information sharing between ICE and TSA helps identify who is trying to travel in the country, including violent criminals, and keeps the skies safe. That is the defense. It does not explain why the target has moved from people with removal orders to people with pending cases and work permits.
What this actually does
The shift is easiest to see side by side. What changed is not the raw authority to arrest at an airport. What changed is who gets caught, and how the government locates them.
| The old pattern | What lawyers are seeing now | |
|---|---|---|
| Who is arrested | People with final orders of removal or prior deportation orders | Also people who entered legally and overstayed a visa |
| Their status | Out of options, already ordered removed | Pending asylum, valid work permits, no criminal charge |
| How they are found | Known targets ICE was already tracking | Passenger data matched through the TSA feed |
| Data source | ICE’s own enforcement records | Secure Flight passenger data, collected for watch-list matching |
| Paper trail | Ordinary enforcement | A May 2025 agreement hidden until a FOIA lawsuit forced its release |
The newest chokepoint
This is not an isolated program. It is the newest chokepoint in a pattern this blog has tracked all year. The licensing system reached Dreamers through their commercial driver’s licenses. USCIS reaches them through renewal queues that let a work permit lapse in the gap — the deferred-action squeeze I wrote about when three rulings in thirty days dropped the floor out for SIJ and DACA recipients. The mega-master calendar reaches them through the hearing itself. Each one finds people not by investigating them but by sitting on infrastructure they cannot avoid. The airport is the same move. The government already knows you have to fly, so it waits where the data already is.
And notice who it catches. Not fugitives. A man with Convention Against Torture protection. A woman with a pending asylum claim and an American fiancé. These are the same people my DACA and deferred-action posts keep returning to, and the same population behind Chicago’s collision between a growing immigrant city and the hardest enforcement in a generation — lawfully present or lawfully mid-process, doing what the system asks, and finding that the compliance is what makes them easy to locate.
The real danger is what follows the arrest
The arrest itself is not the sharpest risk. What can follow it is.
If detention follows instead of summary removal, the fight moves to bond — the same mandatory-detention battle I covered in Cunha v. Freden. The Colombian woman arrested at BWI won her release on bond this week. The door is not welded shut. But it is a fight, and it starts from inside a detention center far from home.
What to do now
- If you do not hold a green card or citizenship, treat a domestic flight as a decision, not a routine. Weigh it before you book.
- Carry proof of more than two years of continuous physical presence whenever you travel — leases, pay records, medical and school records. This is the single most important defense against expedited removal.
- Know the airport is interior enforcement. You keep the right to remain silent and the right to refuse consent to a search. Say plainly that you wish to remain silent and to speak to a lawyer.
- Sign nothing. A signature can waive a hearing you did not know you had.
- Give family a plan before you leave: who to call, which attorney, where the documents are kept.
- Counsel: ask new clients about recent and planned air travel as a matter of routine intake. It is now a risk factor.
Where this goes next
The FOIA litigation is not over. American Oversight says it will keep pushing for how the data moves, what safeguards exist, and how many travelers are swept in. Congress can demand the same, and a nominee who will not answer a senator’s direct question is a fight waiting to happen. Whether repurposing counterterrorism data for immigration targeting satisfies the Privacy Act is a real question, and no court has answered it yet.
The government has quietly made the airline manifest an enforcement tool. It did it with data you were required to hand over to fly, through an agreement it kept out of public view until a lawsuit dragged it into the light.
Until the courts or Congress force more into the open, the honest advice is the plain kind. If your status is not secure, the airport is no longer neutral ground. Fly carefully, carry your proof, and know your rights before an officer is standing over your seat.
📄 Download the TSA–ICE agreement (PDF)
This post is for informational purposes only and is not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Consult a licensed immigration attorney about your specific situation.
🔄 Updates
August 6, 2026 — Initial publication. Monitoring the American Oversight FOIA litigation for the unredacted data-element appendices, the Senate’s follow-up to the TSA nominee’s confirmation testimony, and any Privacy Act challenge to the TSA–ICE data sharing.
