ICE Is Using TSA Flight Data To Find Illegal Aliens

More heartburn for the illegal alien supporters, keeping antacid companies very happy with their quarterly returns

Immigration Agents Are Using Air Passenger Data for Deportation Effort

The Trump administration is providing the names of all travelers passing through U.S. airports to immigration officials in search of people with deportation orders, a substantial expansion of government efforts to draw on data to hunt down immigrants it wants to expel.

Under the previously undisclosed program, the Transportation Security Administration provides a list multiple times a week to Immigration and Customs Enforcement of travelers who will be coming through airports. ICE can then match the list against its own database of people subject to deportation and send agents to the airport to detain those people.

It’s unclear how many arrests have been made as a result of the collaboration. But documents obtained by The New York Times show that it led to the arrest of Any Lucía López Belloza, the college student picked up at Boston Logan Airport on Nov. 20 and deported to Honduras two days later. A former ICE official said 75 percent of instances in that official’s region where names were flagged by the program yielded arrests.

What the NY Times “forgets” to mention is that Belloza has had a deportation order for ten years, and failed to appear for court

ICE has historically avoided interfering with domestic travel. But the partnership between airport security and the immigration agency, which began quietly in March, is the latest way the Trump administration is increasing cooperation and information sharing between federal agencies in service of the president’s goal of carrying out the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history.

“The message to those in the country illegally is clear: The only reason you should be flying is to self-deport home,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security.

The Trump admin should be telling everyone about it, and, I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole thing was leaked to the Times so that illegals will see it and only fly to leave the country. The harder you make it for illegals the fewer come and the more leave.

Airline passengers have long been subject to some federal scrutiny. Airlines typically provide passenger information to T.S.A. after a flight is reserved. That information is compared against national security databases, including the Terrorist Screening Dataset, which includes the names of individuals on a watch list of known or suspected terrorists.

In fact, TSA regularly flags people with warrants and reports them to law enforcement in the airport who detain until law enforcement from outside the airport come to take them away. Oh, well. Maybe illegals should consider just leaving.

“If you have more officers conducting arrests at airports, it puts more strain on the system, delays and complications may annoy and frighten some travelers, and those who are unsure about their status will move away from air travel,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a senior ICE official during the Biden administration. “It will continue to reduce the space where people feel safe going about their business.”

Illegals should never feel safe.