Passenger Data Meant To Stop Terrorists Is Now Helping ICE Ambush Travelers At Airports

Airports are no longer just travel hubs, and law enforcement’s role there isn’t to protect aviation from terrorists. We set up the TSA Secure Flight system to let government screen passengers who posed a terrorist risk to airplanes. Now that the government scoops up the name, date of birth, gender and itinerary of every passenger they now funnel potential immigration matches to ICE, letting agents know exactly when and where to intercept someone. It’s the sort of mission creep that advocates of the system said could never happen, calling critics unhinged for even suggesting it. Plainclothes ICE agents now make arrests at check-in counters, gates and baggage claim – at at least 15 airports in recent weeks. Targets include visa overstayers without criminal records, spouses of U.S. citizens, students and skilled workers. Some have pending applications for asylum, adjustment of status and even proper work authorization. The TSA–ICE partnership has produced more than 800 arrests so far during the Trump administration. To be clear, an expired visa does not necessarily mean someone is unlawfully present. A visa controls admission. Presence after visa expiration can still be legal because immigration status and an authorized period of stay are separate. A person with an adjustment of status application may not be ‘illegal’. But airports are ideal ambush points. The government receives advance notice of travel, knows precisely where the person will be, and they’ve already passed through security where they’ve been screened for weapons. The government now tracks travel as a means of seizing persons of interest and this can easily be expanded beyond immigration. Furthermore, ICE itself no longer focuses its airport enforcement on security threats, let alone criminals or people with final removal orders. It is using passenger manifests to find ordinary civil immigration violations, including in cases that are still being adjudicated by the U.S. Citzenship and Immigration Service. A far cry from TSA accepting arrest warrants from undocumented immigrants as ID for airport security just four years ago! In the past few weeks I’ve written about, A 57-year old Australian citizen who had overstayed his legal presence. After the plainclothes agents abandoned their attempted arrest at Las Vegas airport, leaving a handcuff attached to him, airport police removed it and the man boarded his flight. ICE arrested him at LAX. A Southwest flight attendant in Nashville just off a trip. The Jamaican citizen had entered legally and had both an active asylum claim and work authorization. He hadn’t departed at the end of his original six month entry permission but has no criminal record. You can believe strongly that immigration laws should be enforced and still have strong concerns about the government tracking all domestic travel and using it as an opportunity to take down minor targets. Secure Flight was built to stop terrorism, not identify people with paperwork violations. Data collected for one narrow security purpose has become a general surveillance tool. Americans have traditionally been free to move around the country without proving their immigration status. This diverts resources from genuine threats. Agents waiting at gates for peaceful visa overstayers aren’t investigating trafficking, violent crime or aviation threats. Administrative violations are treated like security threats. Overstaying an admission period is generally a civil matter. Conflating it with airport security is dangerous. Immigration status can be complicated (because the law is complicated), involving pending asylum claims, extensions, appeals and work authorization. An itinerary matched against an imperfect database now creates takedowns before resolving actual facts. That punishes people for government dysfunction. Plainclothes arrests create an actual security risk. Passengers at the Las Vegas airport thought the man being arrested was being mugged. The agents ran off because they appeared to be the threat to law-abiding travelers around them. People with valid work permits, pending cases or mixed-status families may avoid flying, reporting crimes or cooperating with government because they cannot trust how their data will be repurposed. This makes crimes against this community profitable, promoting lawlessness by citizens. There’s no principle that keeps the data from being used for taxes, debts, or political investigations. Even if you favor that power being exercised by the current administration, will you like it when it’s exercised by the next one, with different targets? In an article in the months after 9/11 I warned about the militarization of airports. I also argued that concentrating passengers in security lines created a new target; moving the perimeter simply relocated that vulnerability; burdensome screening diverted travelers to riskier highways; and greater restriction therefore reduced both liberty and actual safety. I wasn’t especially insightful. It was obvious where we were headed. I thought at the time that our response to 9/11 at the airports should satisfy three tests: legitimate security objective, actual effectiveness and least-restrictive means. That is not the path we chose. Topics on this page