The Trump administration has in the last few weeks cemented a new hallmark of its immigration enforcement policy: Federal officers across the country have taken immigrants from airports, streets and their homes and routed them into a sprawling and far-flung detention system, often without even their own attorneys knowing where they’ve gone.
When customs officers at Boston’s Logan International Airport spotted the gooey sack of frog embryos in Kseniia Petrova’s luggage in February, they could have issued her a ticket and sent her on her way. At worst, it would have disappointed the scientist overseeing her research at Harvard Medical School and the friends she’d just made in Paris at the Institut Curie research center who’d given her the fertilized eggs. Instead, a Customs and Border Protection officer detained her and started Petrova on a journey that sent her to a small mountain town in Vermont, then 1,300 miles south to a privately-run prison in suburban Louisiana — one accused of mistreatment that led to the suicide of a Cuban asylum seeker trapped in solitary confinement there in 2019.
She’s now been behind bars for 44 days for not filling out customs paperwork correctly.
When her attorney sued for her release on Feb. 24, his legal complaint warned the judge that immigration officials weren’t turning over required documentation and Petrova could end up at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“This overreach reflects broader concerns about the treatment of international scholars by U.S. immigration authorities,” her lawyer, Gregory Romanovsky, said in a statement last week.
Immigration lawyers are now routinely being surprised when clients who have an upcoming immigration hearing are suddenly arrested and whisked off to Louisiana or Texas without any notice.
Joseph Gordon, an attorney in Philadelphia, described how one client had a third check-in with ICE — and ended up getting sent to central Pennsylvania, then on to a jail in Port Isabel, Texas.
“What’s hard now is, I can’t walk to where he is with papers and have him sign it. I don’t have an updated asylum application. It’s harder to work together,” he said.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said the administration’s recent moves lay out how wide the gap is between the traditional criminal justice system and the civil immigration system, which grants immense power to law enforcement agents.
“Individual decisions by government officials who are not judges can be the start and the end of the process,” he told NOTUS on Monday. “At airports in particular, the CBP officer has the final say if the person has the right to enter the country. If that officer doesn’t believe you, he can take away your visa and then have you sent to detention. These decisions are significantly harder to challenge because Congress has insulated these decisions from judicial review.”
Human rights concerns have only intensified following President Donald Trump’s use of a 1798 wartime measure to deem certain Venezuelan migrants “alien enemies” and quickly transport them a terrorism stockade in El Salvador. In an ongoing class action lawsuit that has temporarily stopped those flights, detained migrants each described in four sworn declarations how officers refused to give them details the entire time — with one saying that “detainees begged for information” and were rebuffed.
A glaring example is that of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who fled El Salvador’s gangs in 2011 and eventually had a U.S. immigration judge grant him “withholding of removal” — preventing the government from deporting him, given fear of reprisal.
According to a lawsuit filed by his family, the union sheet metal worker was driving home from work in Baltimore on March 12 with his five-year-old disabled son when ICE agents pulled him over and arrested him, refusing to explain why he was being detained. Over the next three days, he was transferred from one jail to another, starting in Baltimore and ending up in Texas. At one point, he called his U.S. citizen wife and said he believed he was in Louisiana, but he wasn’t sure. On the third day, he was sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center.
On Monday, the Department of Justice admitted it made a mistake — but claimed it’s now too late for the federal judge to step in and order him brought back to the U.S.
The administration’s push on immigrants — both those with and without legal status — is now regularly revealing through court filings the way people accused of even small violations are being shipped through the opaque national network of detention centers and prisons, particularly those that are privately run.
“There’s been a general friendliness of southern states to the private prison industry,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “There’s access to larger amounts of land to build these facilities. And in bluer states, local politicians have successfully pushed to limit construction of private prisons and reduce cooperation of local police with ICE.”
As many legal experts have pointed out, these inmate transfers also place detainees within jurisdictions where federal appellate courts lean largely conservative and are less likely to side with migrants. And as the March 15 rapid removal flights headed to El Salvador showed, ICE is also capitalizing on the proximity of Texas airports to Central America to speed up the process.
“We don’t know if this is a broader trend to send people south to get ahead of lawsuits or a more innocuous situation with empty beds,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
Federal agents last month targeted Mahmoud Khalil, who has U.S. permanent resident status, over his involvement in campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza — arresting him in New York and briefly holding him in New Jersey before transferring him to a facility in Louisiana. For a time, his wife had no idea where he was. A Manhattan federal judge has halted any deportation, but the Justice Department is trying to have the case challenging his detention moved southward, too. In a court filing on Friday, government lawyers argued that the ongoing lawsuit by human rights groups improperly named New York area law enforcement officials — and should be instead directed to Shad Rice, warden of a private prison run by The GEO Group, the nation’s largest operator of such facilities.
A similar case has gotten national attention after a widely circulated video last week captured the moment when six federal agents not in uniform grabbed international PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk on the street outside her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, and pulled her into an unmarked vehicle. A subsequent lawsuit describes how “for more than 20 hours, her friends, family and legal counsel could not locate or contact her. After an exhaustive search, they learned that she had ultimately been removed from Massachusetts and sent more than 1,300 miles away to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana.” A federal judge, informed by human rights lawyers that Öztürk has not been charged with any crime and appears to have been targeted for writing a pro-Palestinian op-ed in her school paper, has also put any deportation efforts on ice.
The practice of transporting immigrants to private prisons across the country instead of keeping them near their homes dates back several presidential administrations. Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union released a report describing what it called “systemic human rights abuses carried out by” the ICE office in New Orleans, which contracts with two private prison companies and a local sheriff’s office. The report quotes one detainee who’d been held for five months and said they still had no idea why they were being detained.
But the practice is now receiving more attention, given that the Trump administration has made deportations a central pillar of its governing priorities.
Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.