They Grabbed Her on the Jetway

ICE Airport Arrests 2026: What's Actually Happening

Chantal Morales Rojas had already made it through security. She'd said goodbye to the family she used to live with, the ones whose kids she'd once put to bed every night as their au pair. She was standing at the gate at Denver International, waiting to board a Southwest flight home to Oakland after a weekend at an ultimate frisbee tournament, when a man in plain clothes walked up and asked if she could answer some questions about her visa.

Her friend Alycia Dantzker started filming. In the video, more men appear — "these two huge guys," Dantzker would later tell CNN, closing in around Rojas on the jet bridge. Someone in the group tells her, quietly, urgently: say nothing, say nothing. Passengers nearby aren't sure what they're watching. "We thought maybe they were just asking Latina women to talk about their visa status," one witness said afterward. They weren't. Within minutes, Rojas — 27 years old, a software developer who'd spent three years in the Bay Area — was being walked off the jetway and into a Homeland Security van waiting on the tarmac.

That was the night of July 20. It's now one small piece of a much bigger story that broke wide open this week, when the New York Times reported something that immigration attorneys across the country say they'd started noticing weeks earlier but hadn't yet seen laid out in full: ICE has begun arresting people with expired visas — including spouses of American citizens — directly inside airports, at check-in counters and boarding gates, in at least 15 airports so far.

A partnership that used to do something else

The infrastructure making this possible isn't new. TSA and ICE have worked together for a while, in a narrower way — TSA flagging travelers with existing deportation orders already on the books, ICE picking them up. What's changed, according to the documents the Times reviewed, is the scope. The same pipeline is now being used to catch people whose only immigration issue is a visa that's lapsed — no order, no prior encounter with an immigration judge, sometimes no criminal history at all.

That distinction is the whole story, really. A deportation order means a judge already looked at a case and reached a conclusion. A visa overstay, especially one where the person has since filed something with immigration authorities to try to fix it, is a very different, much murkier category — and it's exactly the category Rojas says she falls into.

Her attorney, Laura Lichter, doesn't dispute that Rojas's original visa expired. She disputes the story ICE has told about what happened next. According to Lichter, Rojas came to the U.S. legally in 2023 on a J-1 exchange visitor visa, followed her program's rules, and — before that visa ran out — filed an application with immigration authorities that was supposed to let her stay while the case worked its way through the system. For more than three years, Lichter says, she's lived and worked in the country with federal work authorization, never received a deportation order, and was never told she was on anyone's list.

ICE's version, given to CNN, is shorter and pointed the other way: she entered on a visa valid through January 4, 2025, and after that date, she was here in violation of the law. Full stop.

Both of those things get to be true at the same time, in the sense that they're not actually contradicting each other on the facts — they're arguing about what the facts mean. Rojas's lawyers have now filed a habeas petition, asking a court to order her release while that argument plays out. She's currently being held at a detention facility in Colorado. Dantzker, who filmed the arrest and has known her for three years, says Rojas described the last week as a nightmare.

This isn't only happening to Rojas

Airports have become a genuinely different kind of enforcement environment over the past few weeks, and the numbers give some sense of why. ICE reported roughly 43,000 arrests in June alone. Attorneys tracking the pattern point to a string of other incidents stacking up fast: an arrest at San Francisco International that went viral after agents tackled a woman on camera; a man left handcuffed by agents at LAX; a July 13 encounter at a different airport where two agents tried to forcibly detain a 57-year-old man on an expired visa and bystanders physically intervened, forcing agents to pause the arrest for what officials later called "de-escalation."

Jeff Joseph, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, put it plainly to CNN: airport enforcement at this scale, and this kind of coordination between TSA and ICE, isn't something the country has seen before. DHS, for its part, isn't hiding the strategy — a spokesperson told CNN the goal is straightforward: people in the country illegally shouldn't be able to fly domestically, only to leave.

That's the split you're going to keep running into with this story. To DHS, this is enforcement doing exactly what enforcement is supposed to do — closing an obvious gap where people with no legal status to remain were still moving freely through the country's transportation system. To immigration attorneys, the concern isn't the goal, it's the method: sweeping up people whose cases are genuinely unresolved, at their most physically vulnerable moment — mid-travel, often alone, sometimes separated from family in another city — using tactics that look less like routine enforcement and more like an ambush.

If you're flying with a visa in your pocket right now

A few things worth actually knowing, whether this is about you, your spouse, or someone you know:

This is happening at commercial airports specifically, tied to routine air travel — not, as far as current reporting shows, at land border crossings or other points of contact in the same way. A visa overstay, even one you're actively trying to resolve through a pending application, does not currently protect you from being approached at a gate. Having a U.S. citizen spouse does not automatically protect you either — that's precisely the detail that made this week's reporting land as hard as it did. And if you are approached: the advice Rojas's own group gave her in the moment — say nothing beyond identifying yourself, don't answer questions about your immigration history, ask for a lawyer — is standard guidance from immigration attorneys for exactly this scenario, not something specific to her case.

If you have a pending immigration application, a lapsed visa, or any unresolved status question, this is a genuinely reasonable moment to have an actual conversation with an immigration attorney about your specific travel risk before you book anything — not after.

What happens next isn't clear yet

Rojas's case is still moving through the courts. Whether her habeas petition succeeds may end up telling us something about how these cases get treated more broadly — whether a pending application is enough to blunt an arrest like this one, or whether it isn't. Until that's resolved, or until enough of these cases pile up to force a clearer answer, the honest state of things is this: airports are now a place where an expired visa, contested or not, can end your trip in a Homeland Security van on the tarmac before you've even boarded.

The IMMIGRANTS

Here's what we keep coming back to when we read the DHS statement next to Laura Lichter's: nobody is actually disputing that the government has the authority to enforce visa law. That's not what's in question, and it's worth being honest about that instead of pretending otherwise. What's in question is whether an airport gate, mid-boarding, with a plainclothes agent and no advance notice, is where that enforcement should happen to someone whose case — by her own attorney's account — is still sitting in the system, unresolved, with a paper trail showing she tried to do this the right way.

We'd feel differently about this story if Rojas had a deportation order sitting on file somewhere and just hadn't left. That's not what her attorney says happened, and DHS's own statement doesn't claim it either — it simply doesn't engage with the pending-application question at all. That gap, between what DHS said and what it didn't say, is doing a lot of work in this story, and it's the kind of gap that's easy to miss if you only read the headline.

None of that tells us how the habeas petition should come out. Courts exist to sort through exactly this kind of disputed record, and they haven't yet. But it does tell us something about why this story, out of all the airport arrests happening right now, is the one that made people stop scrolling: not because an overstay is rare, but because "the process was already working" is a claim that's genuinely testable, and right now, testing it seems to require getting arrested first and released later, if a judge agrees.