Bay Area Officials Raise Privacy Concerns After ICE Arrest at SFO

After the detention and deportation of a mother and child from the San Francisco International Airport this week, Bay Area officials and advocates are raising alarms about privacy and civil liberties as immigration enforcement expands nationwide.

U.S. Rep. John Garamendi said the revelation that the Transportation Security Administration flagged Angelina Lopez-Jimenez, 41, and her 9-year-old daughter, Wendy Godinez-Lopez, to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for arrest — as reported by New York Times Tuesday — is the latest example of unprecedented data sharing between government agencies to target and arrest immigrants.

“Herein lies a very fundamental question of our civil liberties: How did ICE know that she was going to get on an airplane at a specific time?” Garamendi told KQED.

The newspaper’s investigation adds new context to footage of the incident, which quickly went viral. Video of the arrest shows plainclothes agents struggling with a crying woman in Terminal 3, her distressed child nearby, as onlookers yell at agents to stop.

TSA officials informed ICE that the family had planned to fly within the U.S. when they showed up on a flight manifest for a Sunday flight from San Francisco to Miami, the Times reported. Lopez-Jimenez, who was born in Guatemala, and her daughter were going to visit another daughter in Miami, Garamendi said. He confirmed Lopez-Jimenez and her daughter are Contra Costa County residents.

“She was just a part of our community, living a lawful life, with the exception of this immigration issue,” the lawmaker said.

By Tuesday, the pair were on a flight bound for Guatemala.

Previous New York Times reporting has documented that TSA has shared names and birth dates of travelers as part of President Donald Trump’s far-reaching deportation effort. Lopez-Jimenez and her daughter had a final order of removal from an immigration judge dating back to 2019, the Department of Homeland Security said in a March 23 post on social media.

“While being escorted to the international terminal for processing, Lopez-Jimenez attempted to flee and resisted law enforcement officers. ICE is working as quickly as possible to repatriate the family unit to their home country of Guatemala,” the agency said.

Bill Ong Hing, a longtime immigration attorney, professor of law at the University of San Francisco and former police commissioner, said immigration enforcement is not “within the TSA’s jurisdiction or responsibilities,” and called the Trump administration’s use of TSA to go after people targeted for removal “disturbing.”

“[TSA’s] responsibility is to make sure that people have their travel documents and they have a valid ID. It’s not to test whether or not somebody is lawfully in the United States,” he told KQED Wednesday.

Earlier this week, Bay Area officials confirmed that the arrest was not part of the Trump administration’s wider push to use ICE to staff security lines, while TSA workers go unpaid during a government shutdown.

Hing said it’s not unusual for ICE to take a while to follow up with people with active removal orders, which a judge may automatically order if a person misses an immigration court hearing. While in the past, ICE prioritized those with U.S. criminal records, the administration is likely looking closely at deportation lists in order to fulfill “Stephen Miller’s goal of deporting 3,000 people a day,” the attorney said.

Hing, who volunteers with rapid response networks, also described the impact the removal process can have on young children who witness their family member’s arrest or sometimes are arrested themselves.

“There should be a different way of doing this, but every day parents are being arrested with their children,” he said.

As the TSA news came to light, local advocates filed complaints against the San Francisco Police Department on Wednesday alleging that officers violated local and state sanctuary city laws during the detention and deportation, after cell phone footage showed a phalanx of SFPD officers lining up between the agents and the crowd.

Assistant Chief San Francisco Public Defender Angela Chan, who worked on writing the SFPD sanctuary policy in 2020, said she was filing a complaint with the Department of Police Accountability.

“I reviewed all the videos. I re-reviewed the laws that I helped to write. I believe what they did was they assisted with immigration enforcement by assisting with an arrest, a detention, and transportation for ICE,” Chan told reporters outside SFPD headquarters Wednesday.

“SFPD does not assist in civil federal immigration enforcement and cannot impede federal law enforcement actions as outlined in our city charter, state law and our department policy,” SFPD spokesperson Paulina Henderson said in an emailed statement on Wednesday. Henderson said officers responded to a 911 call at the airport Sunday evening, and then determined the event involved federal immigration officials.

On Wednesday, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie told reporters that city sanctuary policies “are not going anywhere as long as I am mayor. We are going to continue those policies. SFPD and any local law enforcement will not assist federal immigration enforcement.”

Unimpressed with Lurie’s response, Chan called on city officials to address questions about SFPD’s role in the arrests.

“You don’t need a law degree to understand the SFPD violated state and local sanctuary laws that night,” she said. “They were there to protect ICE.”

KQED’s Tyche Hendricks and Paula Sibulo contributed to this report.