Immigration advocates say at least 10 people have been arrested by ICE at Philadelphia International Airport since July 12, including a 68-year-old grandmother and the young babysitter of three children.
That comes amid a nationwide push by the Trump administration to increase arrests at American airports, spurring immigration attorneys to warn noncitizens with limited documentation that travel has become risky, including for those with valid work permits or pending applications for relief.
“People might not think Philly is being targeted, but we are,” said Vivian Chang, executive director of Asian Americans United, an advocacy group. “They’re trying to threaten people, trying to intimidate them — you can’t work freely, you can’t travel freely, you can’t fly.”
She said the arrests in Philadelphia include three people originally from Indonesia and others from India, Ukraine, China, Chile, and Argentina. Another person, a religious leader, was briefly taken into custody and released, she said.
Chang described the arrests in Philadelphia as especially troubling because the airport is owned and operated by the city.
She questioned why that property would not be subject to Philadelphia’s recent “ICE Out” legislation, which bars U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from conducting operations on city-owned lands and bans access to city-owned spaces, absent a judicial warrant.
Sam Scavuzzo, chief of staff for the city law department, said in a statement that “federal law enforcement access to particular areas of the airport is governed by federal law.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said airport arrests are occurring because the Trump administration “reversed the horrendous Biden-era policy that allowed aliens in our country illegally to jet around our country.”
“Under President Trump, DHS will no longer tolerate this. 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.”
The department said “being in detention is a choice,” and the federal government is offering people who are here without permission a $2,600 payment and a free flight home.
Self-deportation can preserve the right to later come back to the U.S., absent the penalties that accompany a government deportation.
DHS said people who do not leave voluntarily “will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.”
On July 11, what started out as a fun soccer trip for a South Philadelphia babysitter ended with her being arrested and ultimately moved across the country to an ICE detention center in New Mexico.
Steven Melchiorre, 35, a health worker, said that at 7 a.m. that day he dropped off his girlfriend, Iliana Lick, 30, to fly to Kansas City. Originally from Buenos Aires, she planned to see the Argentina national team play in the World Cup.
She texted Melchiorre from inside the airport to say the line was short, then did not answer his reply.
After a while, he said, Lick phoned, crying, to say she had been arrested by ICE. She was moved from Philadelphia to the Cambria County prison, which holds prisoners for the agency in south-central Pennsylvania, and in the following days was transferred to ICE facilities in Louisiana, Texas, and New Mexico.
Late Friday afternoon, an immigration judge in New Mexico set bond for Lick at $10,000, according to her boyfriend. He immediately began working to post that bond and bring her home. It was not clear how quickly Lick might be released.
DHS said Lick was arrested during a targeted operation, having overstayed her visa.
The department noted that work authorization or a pending application for immigration relief, both of which Lick has, do not confer legal status to be in the United States.
ICE began to deploy agents at U.S. airports in March, and the move was announced as a way to assist at checkpoint lines during a partial government shutdown.
The deployment quickly proved controversial, as travelers and labor unions objected, saying the agents were intimidating and lacked aviation training.
Airports rank among the most sensitive public spaces in the country, traversed by millions of people, including U.S. citizens, noncitizens, and mixed-status families, California immigration lawyer Andrew Neitor wrote for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a legal group.
The introduction of ICE agents, he said, blurs critical lines between airport security and immigration enforcement, around what authority is being exercised and by whom, and over the legal protections due to people who may be arrested.
“ICE was not intended to be omnipresent in daily civic life,” Neitor said. “Yet its footprint has expanded from courthouses to neighborhoods, workplaces, and even parking lots, shifting from targeted enforcement to visible, normalized presence.”
Last year, the Transportation Security Administration and ICE signed a memorandum of agreement that outlined how ICE would share information with TSA to identify people in whom ICE was interested, according to the memo, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the watchdog group American Oversight. The agreement said sharing the data would enhance national security, transportation safety, and immigration management.
On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan introduced a bill, the No TSA Data for ICE Act, that would bar the agencies from coordinating to conduct what her office called “a dramatic violation of privacy rights.”
The bill would ban TSA from sharing passenger names, birth dates, and other data that enable ICE to target immigrants who are in the process of changing status, including those awaiting visa extensions or who recently married U.S. citizens.
“TSA is readily offering up our immigrant residents to suffer at the hands of ICE agents so they can fulfill their daily arrest quota,” Tlaib said in a statement. “Immigrants should be able to safely fly in this country without the fear of arrest or deportation.”
Today ICE is making record numbers of arrests across the country, not only at airports but also at places that were once considered off-limits, including routine immigration check-ins.
In June in Philadelphia, a 36-year-old survivor of slavery who had fled Mauritania, a mostly desert land in West Africa, filed suit in federal court over the issue. He accused ICE of having unlawfully rescinded a policy that generally allowed immigrants to pursue their cases without fear of arrest.
Nationally, the rate of ICE arrests topped 1,300 a day in June, and grew again to a record 1,474 a day during the first 11 days of July, Syracuse University professor and immigration-data analyst Austin Kocher reported.
Some of those being arrested at airports had legally entered the United States, then stayed after their visas expired. That includes some, like Lick, who were seeking to legally change their immigration status while in the U.S.
Lick, now of Point Breeze, legally entered the country in 2023. She held and extended a visa, and holds work authorization and a REAL ID driver’s license, her boyfriend said. She was trying to adjust her status before her visa expired and continued to do so afterward, Melchiorre said.
Lick works taking care of three children for two South Philadelphia families.
Britni Zahodnick and her husband, Zane Schultz, have employed Lick as a babysitter for their two young children, ages 4 and 1, for more than a year. They described her as soft-spoken, kind, attentive, funny, thoughtful, and a good listener.
“She was very quickly thought of as family,” Schultz said.
Trust does not come easily for any parent preparing to place their children in another’s hands, but Lick won theirs, the couple said.
“All the things you would look for in a caretaker for your kids,” Zahodnick said.
Melchiorre acknowledged that ICE had legal authority to detain Lick. He said people should follow immigration laws — but the couple thought Lick was doing so. They did not know domestic flights were in question, having flown in the past without incident.
Melchiorre has started a support group on Facebook and a GoFundMe page that has so far raised nearly $17,000. All funds will be used for Lick’s immigration case.
Melchiorre said he was surprised and frustrated by her arrest, “because Iliana has not committed any crime, hasn’t missed any fees, hasn’t missed any court dates. She wasn’t trying to dodge immigration. Being detained, it’s similar to how criminals are treated.”
