‘It Wasn’t Right’: Woman Arrested by ICE at SFO Is a San Francisco Photographer, Barista
A Ukrainian woman who has lived in the U.S. for 16 years was detained by immigration enforcement agents at San Francisco International Airport on Wednesday after a flight home from Portland.
Iryna Gorb, 38, was arrested by plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after landing in San Francisco, where she has lived and worked for more than a decade.
She is currently in detention at California City Detention Facility in Kern County, according to Andy Eblin, who’s been a friend of Gorb’s for 13 years.
Videos of Gorb’s arrest circulated on social media Wednesday evening after Richmond City Councilmember Doria Robinson, who was traveling through the airport at the time, posted footage of the incident on Facebook. She said two ICE agents approached Gorb in a store in Terminal 3.
“They put hands on her, pulled her down to the ground and we see the agent get on top of her,” Robinson said.
In the videos, Gorb can be heard yelling: “They’re f—n ICE, I’m from Ukraine, please, somebody.”
She can be seen telling the agents to let her go, and heard saying, “You’re f—ing choking me.”
Robinson said the officials did not respond to bystanders who asked them to identify themselves. They handcuffed Gorb to an airport wheelchair and rolled her away, she said.
“It wasn’t right,” Robinson said. “It just felt in your heart and your soul that that was not right. That was not the way we should be doing things.”
Eblin said Gorb called him from an ICE field office in Stockton late Wednesday, and told him she had been detained and would be transferred to the California City Detention Facility. She asked him to tell her boss at Better Half Coffee in Nob Hill, where she is a head barista, and a few friends whom she was supposed to cat-sit for this week, that she would not be able to work. Eblin said Gorb also requested that he ask her neighbor to water her plants.
“I can’t think of a better explanation of Iryna as a person than those concerns,” Eblin said. “She’s a good person that helped out a lot.”
Eblin said she was “not certain exactly” why she was detained, and as far as he knew, she hadn’t received any paperwork regarding her visa status.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Gorb entered the U.S. lawfully in 2010 under a visa that expired in May 2011.
“Gorb overstayed her visa and remained in the United States illegally for 15 years in violation of our nation’s laws. She will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Eblin said Gorb moved to the U.S. to attend college in Boston before relocating to San Francisco 13 years ago. He said she’s an active part of the city’s coffee and art communities.
Gorb is a professional photographer and has run a vintage pop-up over the years, he said.
“Her absence leaves a tremendous void in our cafe and in our community,” Better Half, the coffee shop where Gorb works, posted on social media Thursday. “She has been such an important part of this space, and her presence will be deeply missed.”
Eblin said that when he was able to connect with Gorb again Thursday evening, she had been transferred to California City and sounded “substantially rattled.”
He said she’s expected to meet with an attorney on Friday afternoon.
“Our predominant concern at this point is getting her released on bond so she’s able to wait out any proceedings in a safe, dignified place and dignified setting, which California City is absolutely not,” Eblin told KQED.
According to Milli Atkinson, director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the San Francisco Bar Association, immigration advocates began seeing ICE detentions at airports outside of Customs and Border Protection last year anecdotally, but in the last month, they have become a “consistent tactic.”
“What we’re seeing now is ICE showing up at airports because they have information about travelers, they have ID information,” she said. “The Department of Homeland Security includes TSA, so it just appears that TSA is now cooperating with ICE at a level that we haven’t seen before.”
SFO spokesperson Doug Yakel said via email that ICE and DHS operate outside the jurisdiction of U.S. airports, and that SFO is “not involved in any decisions about their operations, nor are we notified when they occur.”
Atkinson said for people who are not U.S. citizens, “now is not a safe time to be traveling through airports unless you’ve spoken to an attorney and you assess what risk there is.”
KQED’s Juan Carlos Lara contributed to this report.