The Trump administration has started arresting foreign nationals with expired US visas as they travel through airports, including people married to American citizens, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
In recent weeks, immigration agents in plain clothes have arrested people at airport check-in counters and boarding gates. Enforcement actions have been reported at at least 15 airports. Some arrests have taken place quietly. Others have been filmed by angry passengers, with videos of the encounters later spreading across social media.
The recent arrests appear to be an expansion of an existing arrangement between the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants and visitors overstay their visas every year. Many of them are in a legal gray area because they are waiting for visa extensions or green cards and have been given permission to work.
In the past, people in this situation were generally not a priority for deportation unless they had committed crimes. They were also rarely detained while waiting for their immigration applications to be processed.
That has now changed under President Trump. His administration has launched a mass deportation campaign and considers all visa overstays to be illegal.
Target of 2,000 immigration arrests a day
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has not said how many people with expired visas have been detained at airports under the new initiative. The arrests come as the White House is pushing ICE to make more arrests across the country.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has promised to turn “up the heat on the streets.”
The administration has set a target of 2,000 immigration arrests every day, which is roughly twice the pace seen earlier this year. In a recent report, ICE was reported to be making 1400 arrests a day across the US.
According to multiple immigration lawyers, advocacy groups, and airline employees, the people being targeted come from very different backgrounds. Among them are an engineer waiting for a work-visa extension, several people who recently married US citizens and a former au pair.
Videos of ICE arrests at US airports have gone viral, including the detention of 27-year-old Ecuadorian au pair Chantal Morales Rojas while boarding a flight from Denver to Oakland. A Ugandan woman with sickle cell anemia and an active asylum case was also detained, while an Australian man who overstayed his visa was arrested after ICE first let him go at a Las Vegas airport.
TSA and ICE began sharing information in 2025
The cooperation between the TSA and ICE began in May 2025, according to a government document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by American Oversight, a government transparency group. Under the arrangement, ICE provided the names of people who had deportation orders to the TSA.
The airport security agency would then check those names against its databases and inform ICE if it found a match. That information could then be used to make an arrest.
The arrangement marked a major change from previous practices. In the past, the federal government had avoided involving the TSA in immigration enforcement because of concerns that it could disrupt domestic air travel.
Now, immigration lawyers say the search for people who could be detained has become much wider.
“The net they are casting for people they want to detain is far wider,” Ghassan Shamieh, an immigration lawyer in San Francisco, told NYT.
“It’s not people with criminal records” being targeted, Shamieh said. “You are talking about people with legitimate pending applications.”
Shamieh said four of his clients had been detained at airports in the previous 10 days. Two of them were women who had recently married American citizens and were trying to obtain permanent residency through their marriages.
“This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of the country to self-deport,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in a statement.
The agency did not confirm that the airport arrest programme had been expanded.
ICE had earlier been arresting people with deportation orders at airports using information shared by airlines with the TSA. But the programme now appears to have expanded to include people with expired visas, widening the pool of people who could face arrest and deportation.