T.S.A. Tipped Off ICE Agents Before Arrests at San Francisco Airport

The woman and her 9-year-old daughter were walking through Terminal 3 at
San Francisco International Airport on Sunday night, heading to their
gate to fly to Miami to visit a relative, when a stranger in
plainclothes approached. 

“Angelina?” he asked.

“Sí,” she responded.

Minutes later, Angelina Lopez-Jimenez was on her knees, crying, as two
immigration agents were handcuffing her in front of her daughter,
according to video footage that went viral this week. 

Government documents obtained by The New York Times explain the events
leading up to the tense scene, including the exchange between the agent
and Ms. Lopez-Jimenez. 

The documents shed new light on how the Transportation Security
Administration is sharing with ICE officials the names and birth dates
of travelers believed to have been ordered out of the country by a
judge. That has made it easier for the Trump administration to detain
and deport undocumented immigrants as they pass through airports. 

Ms. Lopez-Jimenez, 41, a native of Guatemala, and her daughter, Wendy
Godinez-Lopez, were flagged by T.S.A. officials on Friday when they
showed up on a passenger list for a Sunday flight from San Francisco to
Miami. The agency then tipped off Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
according to the documents. 

Ms. Lopez-Jimenez and her daughter were living in Contra Costa County,
Calif., on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay Area, according to
the congressman for that region, John Garamendi. She had no criminal
history, though she entered the country illegally. 

Democratic officials recoiled this week at the detention. Mr. Garamendi,
a Democrat, said that it was the latest example of how the Trump
administration was rounding up mothers and children instead of focusing
its immigration enforcement on dangerous criminals. 

He also condemned the sharing of passenger information by T.S.A. with
ICE, saying that data sharing seemed to be “omnipresent” under the Trump
administration, putting personal information at risk and bypassing due
process. 

“The real story here is the way in which databases are being used,” he
said in an interview. “A mother and her daughter are detained, and
within 36 hours, they’re sent to Guatemala.” 

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Ms. Lopez-Jimenez came onto the U.S. government’s radar during Mr.
Trump’s first term, on April 27, 2018, when Border Patrol agents spotted
her and her daughter, then a toddler, 14 miles from the point of entry
at San Luis, Ariz., according to the federal documents. 

The agents determined that she and her daughter were born in Guatemala
and were in the United States illegally. They took her to a facility to
photograph her and obtain her fingerprints and biographical information.
She was given a notice to appear in court for removal proceedings and
was released. 

She showed up for some appointments, but not others, according to the
documents. On May 8, 2019, an immigration judge ordered her to be
deported at a hearing she missed. 

Nothing further happened in her case. Until Sunday night.

At 9:30 p.m., the two ICE agents, knowing that she had planned to fly to
Miami, found her in the terminal concourse. Ms. Lopez-Jimenez was
carrying two Guatemalan passports and handed them over at an agent’s
request. The information matched the identity of the woman who was
ordered to be deported in 2019. 

The agents told Ms. Lopez-Jimenez to follow them to the international
terminal. 

At that point, Ms. Lopez-Jimenez tried to run away, the documents said,
and the agents got ahold of her and sat her down. 

The agents tried to handcuff her, but she wriggled and cried, and they
could cuff only one wrist. A growing crowd watched, some of them
recording the scene on their phones and yelling “Shame on you!” at the
agents. 

San Francisco police officers responded to a 911 call from a bystander
and formed a boundary between the crowd and the agents. The agents
placed Ms. Lopez-Jimenez, who was refusing to walk, into a wheelchair
and wheeled her away, according to the documents. 

The encounter was not part of the Trump administration’s effort to use
ICE to staff airport security lines while T.S.A. agents are going unpaid
because of the government shutdown. 

The Department of Homeland Security said Monday on social media that Ms.
Lopez-Jimenez and her daughter were “illegal aliens” who had final
deportation orders and had resisted arrest. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/us/tsa-data-ice-deportation-san-franci
sco-airport.html