Immigration Agents Are Using Air Passenger Data for Deportation - TSA is giving passenger lists to ICE [View all]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us/politics/immigration-tsa-passenger-data.html

https://archive.ph/MYCZT

Immigration Agents Are Using Air Passenger Data for Deportation Effort
The Transportation Security Administration is providing passenger lists to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to identify and detain travelers subject to deportation orders.
By Hamed Aleaziz
Dec. 12, 2025

The Trump administration is providing the names of all travelers passing through U.S. airports to immigration officials in search of people with deportation orders, a substantial expansion of government efforts to draw on data to hunt down immigrants it wants to expel.

Under the previously undisclosed program, the Transportation Security Administration provides a list multiple times a week to Immigration and Customs Enforcement of travelers who will be coming through airports. ICE can then match the list against its own database of people subject to deportation and send agents to the airport to detain those people.

It’s unclear how many arrests have been made as a result of the collaboration. But documents obtained by The New York Times show that it led to the arrest of Any Lucía López Belloza, the college student picked up at Boston Logan Airport on Nov. 20 and deported to Honduras two days later. A former ICE official said 75 percent of instances in that official’s region where names were flagged by the program yielded arrests.

ICE has historically avoided interfering with domestic travel. But the partnership between airport security and the immigration agency, which began quietly in March, is the latest way the Trump administration is increasing cooperation and information sharing between federal agencies in service of the president’s goal of carrying out the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history.

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