The TSA-ICE data-sharing arrangement started in May 2025 with a narrow purpose: flag travelers with removal orders before they board. It's since expanded well past that. TSA has sent ICE records on more than 31,000 travelers since Trump's second term began, leading to over 800 arrests across at least 15 airports — and lawyers say a growing share of those targeted aren't people with removal orders at all, but travelers flagged as "visa overstays" who often have active green-card applications or valid work permits in process.
Here's the part that should bother anyone who cares about limited government, not just immigration hawks: the "expired visa" framing is often just wrong. A visa's printed expiration date isn't the same as someone's authorized stay — the State Department itself says the controlling record is the admitted-until date or "duration of status" notation on the traveler's I-94. Someone can hold an expired visa stamp and still be in fully lawful status. Flagging people for arrest based on the wrong document is exactly the kind of bureaucratic error that ruins a legally present person's life over a technicality — the same failure mode as the NYC Council staffer's case I wrote about earlier this week.
I want immigration enforcement to be real. I don't want it to run on Secure Flight data — information airlines are required to hand over for aviation security, full stop, not for general law enforcement fishing — getting quietly repurposed for a mission nobody voted to expand. That's not a slippery-slope hypothetical anymore; it's the current state of the program, documented in the reporting, not speculated about. If TSA passenger data can become an ICE targeting list this easily, ask yourself what else that data infrastructure gets used for next, under whichever administration comes after this one.
Conservatives spent decades warning that any surveillance infrastructure built for one stated purpose eventually gets used for another. This is that warning playing out in real time, and the fact that the current target is politically popular doesn't make the infrastructure itself any less dangerous once it exists.