ICE’s Airport Crackdowns Are Designed to Spread Fear

The agency is snatching and grabbing travelers without any regard for their immigration status—and with no effort to be transparent about what they’re up to.

Over the past few weeks, there’ve been reports of ICE ramping up arrests at airports around the country, picking up people boarding or exiting domestic flights in ways that not long ago would have been unheard of. This has prompted local journalists to ask whether their airports are safe to enter and to document individual arrests of people trying to travel.

The agency has described these arrests as targeting people who have overstayed their visas, without clarification or even acknowledgement of the fact that they may have separately been allowed and instructed by the government to remain in the country.

Even reasonably well-informed observers might think that there’s a simple distinction between “status” and “not status.” This type of binary language permeates political conversations around immigration, but if you’ve either read my work or the work of other explanatory immigration journalists, you know these matters aren’t quite so simple. The immigration bureaucracy is rife with administrative semi-statuses, temporary protections, and other carve-outs: “authorized stay,” presence under color of law, and so on.

“I think the public doesn’t understand that immigration is kind of very gray and very paradoxical, because you could still be amenable to detention and being placed in removal even though you’re authorized to stay here. That’s the paradox,” said Cyrus Mehta, a longtime New York-based immigration attorney and professor at Brooklyn Law School. That tension had not necessarily come to the fore because the government had for the most........

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