A 38-year-old photographer and cafe worker who’s been living in San Francisco for over a decade was detained by ICE agents at SFO as she was returning from a trip to Portland Wednesday, in a video that has since gone viral.<\/p>\n
SFist noted the arrest<\/a> as the video began spreading Thursday evening, and now we have more details about what happened, and why.<\/p>\n As Mission Local reports<\/a>, Iryna Gorb, who was born in Ukraine but came to the US 16 years ago, was detained by ICE agents Wednesday at SFO. Onlookers began recording video of the scene, as Gorb could be heard screaming “You\u2019re choking me!” and “They\u2019re fucking ICE\u2026 please help me, leave me alone!”<\/p>\n The video below, posted to Instagram by Richmond City Councilmember Doria Robinson, captioning the post, “I have no words. This is unreal.”<\/p>\n Robinson tells the Chronicle<\/a> that she was waiting to board a flight to Seattle when the scene began unfolding in the terminal. She said that agents ultimately wrestled Gorb into handcuffs, and put her in an airport wheelchair to wheel her off.<\/p>\n “It just felt crazy,\u201d Robinson tells the paper. “It felt like I was in some kind of \u2026 post-apocalyptic movie or something.”<\/p>\n Per Mission Local, Gorb contacted a friend of 13 years, Andy Eblin, late Wednesday night, telling him that she was at an ICE facility in Stockton, and telling him to alert some other friends she was supposed to be catsitting for that she was not going to be making it home.<\/p>\n Gorb’s arrest appears to be part of a wave of heightened ICE activity in the last several weeks, with the average daily ICE arrest rate going from 1,300 in June \u2014 already a high rate during this Trump administration \u2014 to 1,474 per day in July, per Mission Local.<\/p>\n A similarly dramatic scene, captured on video<\/a> that subsequently viral, occurred at SFO’s Terminal 3 in March. In that incident, a Guatelamalan national named Angelina Lopez-Jimenez, was forcibly detained along with her young daughter, with whom she came to the US eight years ago \u2014 when the girl was a toddler. It was later reported that the TSA had tipped off ICE agents of the woman’s presence in the airport.<\/p>\n