ICE arrests surge at airports, opening new front in deportation drive

An undated photo of a custom photo book made for Chantal Rojas by Lauren and Scott Cahr, who hired her to care for their children. Federal agents are arresting spouses of Americans, tech workers and others whose visas have expired, including many who have active applications to stay in the country. (via The New York Times)

By HAMED ALEAZIZ and MIRIAM JORDAN

The Trump administration has begun arresting foreign citizens with expired U.S. visas as they travel through airports, including spouses of Americans, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with immigration lawyers — a tactic that opens up a vast new pool of people for deportation.

Immigration agents in plain clothes have whisked away targets at check-in counters and arrival gates, with enforcement actions in at least 15 airports in recent weeks. Some of the arrests have occurred quietly, while others have happened as angry fellow passengers filmed the encounters.

The recent arrests appear to be an expansion of an arrangement between the Transportation Security Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Times reported in December that ICE officers were arresting people with deportation orders at airports with the help of information provided by airlines to the TSA.

Now, through a review of Homeland Security Department documents and interviews with lawyers for more than 25 people from more than a dozen countries recently detained at airports, the Times has learned that the program apparently now includes people with expired visas — a much larger group.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants and visitors overstay visas each year. Many with expired visas occupy a legal gray area, as they are awaiting visa extensions or green cards and have been issued work permits. Such individuals were not prioritized for deportation in the past unless they had committed crimes, and they were rarely detained while waiting for visa extensions or green cards. But that has changed under President Donald Trump, whose administration has undertaken a campaign of mass deportation and views all visa overstays as illegal.

“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 Homeland Security Department said in a statement. The agency did not confirm the expansion of the program.

The department, which oversees ICE, has not disclosed how many people have been detained at airports as overstays under the new initiative. The arrests come during a period in which the White House has pushed ICE for more arrests across the country, and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has pledged to turn “up the heat on the streets.” To that end, the administration has set a target of 2,000 immigration arrests a day, roughly double the pace from earlier this year.

Interviews with more than a dozen immigration attorneys, advocacy organizations and an airline employee reveal a broad cross-section of targets: an engineer awaiting a work-visa extension, several newlyweds married to U.S. citizens, and a former au pair.

Footage of encounters between travelers and ICE officers have flooded social media. In one widely circulated video, Chantal Morales Rojas, a 27-year-old from Ecuador, was detained by plainclothes officers as she boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from Denver to Oakland, California, on July 20. She had been spending the weekend with the family for whom she had worked as an au pair, according to the family.

When Morales Rojas scanned her boarding pass, an alarm sounded and the gate agent asked her to wait. Moments later, two plainclothes agents intercepted her in the jetway.

“They said they were going to be respectful, that they would be polite,” Alicia Dantzker, a friend of the family, who was on the same flight and filmed part of the encounter, told the Times in an interview. The video captures the men encircling Morales Rojas, and then ushering her through a side door and down steps to the tarmac as Dantzker screams for help.

Also among those detained was a Ugandan woman in a wheelchair who has sickle cell anemia and an active asylum application, according to her lawyer.

In another case, ICE attempted to arrest an Australian citizen who had overstayed his visa at the Las Vegas airport, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The scene was recorded by a bystander whose video of the encounter drew wide attention. Officers let him go “to de-escalate the situation and for officer safety,” but ICE ended up taking him into custody a day later when he tried to board a flight in Los Angeles, the department said in a statement.

“In 38 years practicing immigration law, I had never seen this,” said Charles Kuck, who is based in Atlanta and is representing an Indian engineer who was detained while awaiting a work-permit extension. “And I know it’s happening to lots of people.”

Shannon Shepherd, an immigration lawyer who is vice chair for the Chicago chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said she and other lawyers were revising long-standing advice about domestic air travel.

“Before, I was saying, ‘As long as you have an ID, you can travel domestically,’” Shepherd said. “Now I am turning around and saying, ‘If you are in the process of changing status, avoid any travel.’”

The original collaboration between TSA and ICE began in May 2025, when the airport security agency started sharing information with the immigration agency for enforcement purposes, according to a document obtained via the Freedom of Information Act from the government transparency group American Oversight and shared with the Times.

ICE shared names of individuals with deportation orders with the airport agency, which would run them through its databases and report any hits to ICE for potential arrest. It was a remarkable shift from past practices, when the federal government avoided involving the TSA in immigration enforcement for fear of disrupting domestic travel.

Now, “the net they are casting for people they want to detain is far wider,” said Ghassan Shamieh, an immigration lawyer in San Francisco.

“It’s not people with criminal records” being targeted, Shamieh said. “You are talking about people with legitimate pending applications.”

Morales Rojas, the au pair, entered the United States lawfully in January 2023 as a J-1 exchange visitor, a legal status that allowed her to work for two years, according to her lawyer. Her visa expired Jan. 4, 2025, according to DHS. Before the exchange program ended, Morales Rojas filed an application with immigration authorities to remain in the country, said the lawyer, Laura Lichter.

“During the last 3 1/2 years, Morales Rojas lived openly in the United States with the government’s knowledge of her pending case, passed repeated background checks, and received work authorization from DHS while waiting for her application to be reviewed,” Lichter said. “The process she’s pursuing is completely lawful.”

But homeland security officials said in a statement that “in violation of our nation’s laws, she overstayed her visa.” On Tuesday afternoon, a judge granted her release on a $3,000 bond, and she is likely to leave detention by Wednesday.

Lichter has filed suit challenging the government’s decision to arrest and detain Morales Rojas without a proper arrest warrant and without an individualized determination that detention was necessary.