Galina Bobreneva was passing through Hollywood Burbank Airport last month with her husband when two federal agents pulled her aside.
After 15 minutes of questioning, she was taken away in handcuffs, accused of overstaying her visa and sent to a detention facility in the Mojave Desert for two weeks.
She spent her 40th birthday there, in conditions she described as filthy and unsanitary.
Her husband, a U.S. citizen who voted for President Donald Trump three times, managed to secure her release — for now — but was stunned by her arrest.
Bobreneva entered the country legally from Russia. She has a pending green card application and no criminal record. That did not protect her from being caught in the government’s latest front in its mass deportation drive: U.S. airports.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has had a presence at many U.S. airports since March, when agents were sent to help control lines during the government shutdown that halted pay for Transportation Security Administration agents.
ICE agents making arrests at airports, however, is relatively new, the result of the TSA sharing travelers’ information with immigration authorities. At least 27 foreign nationals have been arrested by ICE at airports across the country.
They are far from “the worst of the worst.” Those detained include a Fulbright scholar, newlyweds who married U.S. citizens and an engineer awaiting his visa extension.
One airport detainee was a woman with sickle cell anemia who uses a wheelchair; another had received a Teacher of the Year award.
Far from criminals, these people have pending immigration cases — playing by the rules of renewing visas, applying for asylum or adjusting their immigration status.
Perversely, by prioritizing immigration enforcement, the government is falling further behind in processing the paperwork people need for legal status. The immigration backlog is estimated at 3.1 million cases, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse researchers.
This amounts to a Catch-22 situation. The government is making it harder for foreigners to update their immigration status — then arresting them at airports when their visas or papers are out-of-date.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said: “This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport.”
But there is no sound logic behind the new policy of airport arrests. The only reason ICE is now targeting travelers is that the government has set a goal of 2,000 immigration arrests a day. Doing so contradicts Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s pledge that ICE operations would be low-profile and less aggressive.
ICE agents grabbing people at airports is a disaster waiting to happen.
Deadly shootings in Maine, Minnesota and Texas are proof that some immigration agents are prone to escalating volatile situations. Should fliers have to wonder when immigration agents will next open fire at bystanders? Who wants their children to witness a woman in handcuffs being dragged away by masked men, as happened in Salt Lake City’s airport?
