WASHINGTON — An Irish couple who had lived in the United States for more than two decades were pulled off a domestic flight from Florida to New York with their children after the Transportation Security Administration flagged their names to immigration agents. They had not crossed an international border. They had not triggered any security alert. Their visas had simply expired, and the TSA’s passenger screening system had placed a call to ICE.
Their case is not an anomaly. It is the program.
Documents obtained by the New York Times from the Department of Homeland Security reveal that the TSA’s Secure Flight Program, built to keep terrorism threats off commercial aircraft after September 11, has been sharing domestic passenger manifests with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement multiple times each week. Between January 2025 and February 2026, those referrals produced more than 800 arrests of foreign nationals traveling within the country. More than 31,000 passenger records were transmitted to ICE in that period.
The reach of the program into the daily lives of longtime residents has alarmed immigration lawyers and civil liberties advocates. The American Civil Liberties Union said the effort is “departing from its counter-terrorism purpose,” an assessment that understates what has actually occurred: a security infrastructure built to find hijackers has been redirected, systematically, toward people whose immigration paperwork is incomplete or outdated.
The people being arrested are not terrorism suspects. Among those detained was a college student taken off a Boston-to-Texas flight on Thanksgiving. Camila Muñoz, a Peruvian national married to a U.S. citizen, was stopped on a routine domestic route. Iryna Gorb, a Ukrainian national, was arrested at San Francisco International Airport on July 22. In several of the cases, the people detained held valid work authorization or had pending green card applications. They had been told by the immigration system to wait, and they were waiting.
The airports where TSA-linked arrests have been made include JFK, Newark, O’Hare, Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Juan, and Denver. There is no domestic air corridor that falls outside the system.
Gorb’s arrest came days after the Supreme Court eliminated federal court review of Temporary Protected Status terminations, leaving hundreds of thousands of humanitarian beneficiaries without a judicial remedy for the first time. Whether the Secure Flight referral program is being applied systematically to Ukrainians or others living in the United States under temporary protection is not apparent from the DHS documents reviewed by the Times.
What ICE has not disclosed is how it decides who gets flagged. The criteria governing which of the millions of domestic travelers with some form of immigration complication ends up referred to enforcement agents are not public. The DHS documents do not appear to resolve that question. ICE did not respond to requests to explain the selection threshold. For the hundreds of people already arrested, and potentially many more who do not yet know they appear in the referral system, the logic of selection remains opaque.
The program fits the administration’s broader detention mandate. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed earlier this year, requires 135,000 ICE detention beds, a number that demands identifying and incarcerating substantially more people than the immigration enforcement campaign has reached through other means. After ICE suspended nationwide vehicle stops in July following two fatal shootings of civilians by agents, the domestic aviation network provides a different and lower-risk channel for building arrest numbers.
The legal scaffolding supporting the expansion has moved quickly. In June, a divided D.C. Circuit panel upheld expedited removal of undocumented immigrants nationwide without hearings before immigration judges, eliminating one procedural obstacle for processing people apprehended through airport referrals. The administration had also filed the first-ever petition to the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, a 1996 tribunal dormant for three decades, pressing counter-terrorism legal architecture into civil immigration use.
The shift is worth stating plainly. Secure Flight was designed on the premise that aviation is a specific vector for catastrophic political violence, and that agencies responsible for preventing that violence need to know who boards planes. The program now serves a different function: identifying people with expired visas or pending applications, and transmitting their travel plans to enforcement agents waiting at domestic gates.
What the Irish couple with two decades in the United States share with Iryna Gorb, arrested at a San Francisco gate on a Tuesday in July, is the mechanism: a security screening system that flagged their names, and agents who were waiting when they arrived.
The full extent of the program remains undisclosed. The selection criteria have not been published. And for people who do not yet know they appear in the system, the way they will find out may be at the boarding gate.
