By Ted Hesson and Kristina Cooke<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON, April 7 (Reuters) – U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested more than 800 people following tips shared by federal airport security officials from the start of Donald Trump’s presidency through February 2026, internal ICE data reviewed by \u200cReuters show, a figure far above what was previously publicly known.<\/p>\n
The leads came from the Transportation Security Administration, which supplied ICE with \u200crecords on more than 31,000 travelers for possible immigration enforcement, the data showed.<\/p>\n
Reuters could not determine how many arrests took place inside airports, although the TSA tips would mainly be useful \u200bin determining when a person would be traveling.<\/p>\n
ICE and TSA are part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The agencies have historically shared information related to national security threats, but they began focusing on routine immigration arrests last year as part of Trump\u2019s mass deportation effort.<\/p>\n
TSA PROGRAM WAS DESIGNED TO COUNTER TERRORISM<\/p>\n
The 31,000 traveler records were gathered by TSA’s Secure Flight Program, which was created in 2007 to allow the agency to review passenger information for people who may \u200cbe on U.S. government watchlists. The program was intended \u2060as a counter-terrorism measure, not to track down immigration offenders, according to the regulation outlining its purpose.<\/p>\n
DHS did not respond to questions about TSA providing passenger information to ICE, but said that under Trump, TSA “is pursuing solutions that improve \u2060resiliency, security, and efficiency across our entire system.”<\/p>\n
Figures for arrests and traveler records that TSA shared with ICE before Trump’s current term were unavailable.<\/p>\n
U.S. airports and immigration enforcement have been at the center of a partisan funding fight since mid-February, when Democrats refused to support additional money for the Republican president\u2019s immigration crackdown without reforms to \u200bscale \u200bback aggressive tactics.<\/p>\n
The standoff blocked the passage of a bill to fund DHS, which \u200bcaused TSA security officers to miss at least two full \u200cpaychecks. After some unpaid TSA officers began calling in sick, Trump deployed ICE officers to more than a dozen airports in March to aid security efforts.<\/p>\n
Democrats have criticized the deployment and called on the Trump administration to remove them. A group of more than 40 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives wrote in a letter to recently installed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin last week that ICE officers \u201cwill cause confusion and fear” if allowed to remain in airports.<\/p>\n
REPORTS OF UNEXPECTED AIRPORT ARRESTS<\/p>\n
Several cases of ICE officers arresting travelers in U.S. airports have sparked backlash.<\/p>\n
ICE officers detained a college student traveling \u200cfrom Boston to Texas to celebrate Thanksgiving in November and arrested a sobbing mother at \u200bSan Francisco International Airport the day before Trump\u2019s airport deployment began.<\/p>\n
DHS defended both arrests and \u200bsaid they were subject to final orders of removal.<\/p>\n
Reuters spoke with \u200bthree immigration attorneys who said they were familiar with cases of people without legal immigration status being arrested in \u200cairports.<\/p>\n
The cases included an Irish couple who had lived in \u200bthe U.S. for more than two decades \u200band were detained last summer by immigration authorities in front of their children when trying to fly from Florida to New York after a vacation, Christina Canty, one of the lawyers, said.<\/p>\n
The parents – who had pending applications for permanent residency – were deported and left their two \u200byoung children, ages 7 and 10, with adult siblings \u200cin the U.S., Canty said.<\/p>\n
In another case, a Chinese woman with a final order of removal who was seeking permanent residence \u200bwas detained by ICE last year at the Atlanta airport en route to Philadelphia, one of the attorneys said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Ted \u200bHesson in Washington and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Editing by Rod Nickel)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Ted Hesson and Kristina Cooke WASHINGTON, April 7 (Reuters) – U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":570340,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[19176,23,12,251501,46162,3,251500,251499,251498,14182,153490,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-570339","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-airports","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-ice-data","12":"tag-immigration-and-customs-enforcement","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-passenger-information","15":"tag-security-officers","16":"tag-security-officials","17":"tag-transportation-security-administration","18":"tag-tsa","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-united-states-of-america","21":"tag-unitedstates","22":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/570340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}