MIAMI — Boarding a domestic flight now carries genuine legal risk for immigrants in the country's largest Latino hubs, as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement leans on traveler information the Transportation Security Administration collects to detain people at check-in counters, boarding gates and arrival concourses alike. Cases documented across California, Texas and Florida in recent weeks involve travelers holding pending asylum claims, valid work permits or no criminal record at all — a pattern immigration attorneys say has turned ordinary trips into legal minefields for entire communities.
How the data pipeline works
Airlines must pass the TSA a traveler's name, birth date, sex, passport number, reservation code and itinerary before any covered flight departs, through a screening system called Secure Flight, built in 2007 to check fliers against terrorism watchlists. That same pipeline now doubles as an enforcement tool for ICE under a memorandum of agreement the two agencies signed on May 29, 2025, whose existence only became public this summer after American Oversight, a nonprofit transparency group, won a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit forcing its release. The appendices spelling out exactly which data fields change hands remain almost entirely redacted.
The arrangement sits awkwardly beside sworn testimony: TSA's then-acting administrator told a House committee in January that the agency does not send traveler records to immigration officers directly, describing its role as merely helping ICE check names against existing watchlists — a distinction the released agreement and subsequent reporting have significantly blurred.
What's confirmed, and what's still murky
Internal agency figures that Reuters examined show TSA handed ICE upward of 31,000 traveler files between the start of Trump's second term and the end of February 2026, feeding more than 800 arrests, though Reuters could not confirm how many of those arrests actually happened inside a terminal, since the tips were often just as useful for predicting when someone would be flying. Separately, an internal government memo obtained by ABC News put the count at 27 arrests spanning at least nine states, without specifying the time period covered. A DHS official has told reporters the agency is now making between 20 and 40 arrests a day at airports nationwide. Neither ICE nor DHS has published a current, official tally of airport-specific arrests.
California: sanctuary limits push enforcement to terminals
California's sanctuary-state restrictions bar most local police from assisting ICE, a gap that has pushed federal agents toward airports and courthouses instead. San Francisco alone has logged at least 2,440 arrests since Trump's second term began — the fourth-highest total of any California city, per a Chronicle analysis of newly released federal data — and at least 11 Bay Area residents were detained at SFO in a single month. Among them: Iryna Gorb, a Ukrainian photographer confronted by plainclothes agents inside the terminal as she returned from a trip to Portland, with a bystander's video capturing her pleas for help; and Galina Bobreneva, a Russian national with a pending green-card petition and no criminal record, pulled aside minutes after landing at Hollywood Burbank Airport and held in a Mojave Desert detention facility for two weeks. A Guatemalan mother detained alongside her nine-year-old girl at SFO in March as the pair prepared to board a flight prompted Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff to open a formal inquiry into the data-sharing practice.
Texas: a different legal terrain, same tactic
Texas law lets state and local police cooperate directly with federal immigration authorities, changing how arrests play out even as the underlying tactic mirrors California's. In Houston, an 18-year-old with a pending asylum application, traveling with relatives to tour colleges, was detained at William P. Hobby Airport and released three days later. At Dallas-Fort Worth, a University of Maryland pharmacy instructor was pulled aside returning from a conference where he'd just won a Teacher of the Year award; DHS said his visa had lapsed in 2024, and a judge has since denied him bond, leaving him detained in Oklahoma weeks after his arrest. And an Argentine personal trainer arrested at a Miami departure gate on Aug. 1 was later roused overnight, shackled at the wrists, ankles and waist, and put through an hours-long bus-and-flight transfer to a CoreCivic-run detention facility in Laredo, where she was awaiting a Sept. 1 hearing on possible deportation — underscoring how Texas' detention capacity absorbs arrests made well beyond its own borders.
Florida: TPS terminations widen the risk pool
South Florida's Venezuelan and Haitian communities face compounding exposure now that Temporary Protected Status has lapsed for both groups. Claudia Rodríguez Caglianone, a 28-year-old former college soccer captain who held TPS from 2023 until the Venezuela designation ended in November 2025, was detained at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport on her way to watch a World Cup match with friends, drawing a public campaign from Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz; she was released after 17 days in custody, with her asylum case still pending. Attorneys say her case illustrates a broader pattern: a pending case, a prior TPS grant or a valid work permit no longer functions as protection from an airport arrest.
Pushback builds in Congress and the courts
Attorneys representing travelers detained in Denver and Burbank have also sued the government over warrantless arrests carried out without individualized review, according to reporting on the cases. In Congress, Rep. Rashida Tlaib introduced legislation, backed by 25 cosponsors and no Republicans, that would bar DHS from using TSA data for immigration enforcement; Tlaib said the agency "is complicit in ICE expanding its chaos and cruelty to target our communities." The bill's odds in a Republican-controlled chamber are slim, but it reflects mounting pressure as ICE recordedmore than 46,000 arrests nationwide in July, part of a push toward a daily target of 2,000 immigration arrests; other outlets have put the July total closer to 50,000, underscoring how unsettled the agency's own numbers still are. Attorneys are advising clients with pending immigration cases to limit nonessential domestic travel and keep documentation on hand until the scope of the TSA-ICE arrangement becomes clearer.
