ICE ramped up its arrests of immigrants at major airports over the summer of 2026, including in Philadelphia, to help meet the Trump administration’s reported goal of apprehending 1,100 people daily.

The agency is collaborating with the Transportation Security Administration, its sister agency in the Department of Homeland Security. However, decades before TSA existed, local police were used in a similar fashion to help the military catch AWOL Vietnam War soldiers.

I’m a historian of race and policing in Philadelphia after the Civil Rights Movement and I spend a lot of time digging through the city’s archives. I recently combed through a 1967 collection of police incident reports from the 77th district, also known as the airport police, which patrols Philadelphia International Airport.

Most of the cases involved plane crashes and unruly passengers, rental car thefts, larceny of luggage and freight packages, bomb scares and drug smuggling.

But the airport police at times detained drafted soldiers who didn’t want to complete their tours of duty.

A site of civil disobedience

The Vietnam War was unpopular because the goals of America’s fight against communism were unclear and village massacres like My Lai exposed it as unjust.

Approximately 80% of American soldiers drafted were working-class men. The odds of facing injury, amputation, post-traumatic stress disorder and death in this war were higher than that of World War II and the Korean War.

Nearly 60,000 U.S. military personnel lost their lives during the Vietnam War. The death toll was at its highest between 1967 and 1969, when at least 11,000 U.S. troops died each year.

One in five........

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