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 T.S.A.
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 Trump, whose administration has undertaken a campaign of mass deportation and views all visa overstays as illegal.
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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.
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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.
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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,’” Ms. Shepherd said. “Now I am turning around and saying, ‘If you are in the process of changing status, avoid any travel.’”
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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, Mr. Shamieh said. “You are talking about people with legitimate pending applications.”