The Trump administration has begun arresting foreign citizens with expired US 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 New TSA-ICE Partnership
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 program apparently now includes people with expired visas — a much larger group.
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. 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.
Who Is Being Targeted
Interviews with more than a dozen immigration attorneys, advocacy organizations, and an airline employee reveal a broad cross-section of targets :
· Spouses of US citizens awaiting green cards
· Engineers and tech workers awaiting work-visa extensions
· Former au pairs with expired visas but pending applications
· Airline employees with visa issues
· Asylum seekers with active applications
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants and visitors overstay visas each year. Many with expired visas occupy a legal gray area — 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 Trump, whose administration has undertaken a campaign of mass deportation and views all visa overstays as illegal.
The Human Toll
Footage of encounters between travelers and ICE officers has 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 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. A friend of the family who filmed the encounter told the Times: “They said they were going to be respectful, that they would be polite.” The video captures the men encircling her, then ushering her through a side door and down steps to the tarmac as the friend 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 at the Las Vegas airport who had overstayed his visa, according to the Department of Homeland Security. 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.
Lawyers Warn Clients
“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.”
Ghassan Shamieh, an immigration lawyer in San Francisco, said: “The net they are casting for people they want to detain is far wider”. He has four clients who were detained at airports in the past 10 days, including two women who recently married Americans and are in the process of obtaining permanent residency through their spouses.
“It’s not people with criminal records” being targeted, Shamieh said. “You are talking about people with legitimate pending applications.”
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 longstanding 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 Administration’s Position
“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 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.
The agreement between TSA and ICE was obtained and made public on Tuesday by American Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group.
The Bottom Line
ICE has ramped up arrests at US airports, targeting foreign nationals who have overstayed their visas — including spouses of American citizens, tech workers awaiting extensions, and asylum seekers with active applications. The arrests are enabled by a data-sharing agreement between TSA and ICE. Lawyers are warning clients with pending immigration applications to avoid air travel. The administration has set a target of 2,000 arrests per day.
