At least 11 Bay Area residents have been detained by immigration agents while flying to or from local airports in the span of three weeks — a group that includes a newlywed, a visa-holding athlete, a graduate student and a 59-year-old Sunnyvale grandmother — and attorneys now say the safest advice they can give noncitizens is simple: don't fly.

For decades, domestic air travel was effectively off-limits to immigration enforcement. That has collapsed. A wave of detentions in domestic terminals — people with expired visas but no deportation orders, some with U.S. spouses and pending applications — has been traced by attorneys and privacy researchers to a data pipeline running from airlines to the TSA to ICE, formalized in an agreement that only became public this month. The result is a sanctuary-city paradox: San Francisco runs SFO, but says it cannot keep federal agents out of it.

The scale is what alarms the lawyers. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that at least 11 Bay Area residents were swept up at airports in the past three weeks. Local rapid-response networks, which track federal operations, told KQED and Berkeleyside that more than a dozen people had been detained at Bay Area airports since June 27.

"Ask any immigration attorney, whether they've been practicing for five years or 40 years, the types of actions that we're seeing at airports across the countries is essentially unheard of," Ghassan Shamieh, a San Francisco immigration attorney representing two of the detained travelers, told the Chronicle.

The people caught up in it are not who ICE has historically pursued. On July 20, Alevtina Soboleva, a 59-year-old Sunnyvale resident, was stopped by plainclothes officers for a "documents check" at the Buffalo, New York, airport as she boarded a flight home from Niagara Falls, her daughter Daria told Bay City News. She has since been moved through multiple detention centers and is being held in Louisiana. Days earlier, on July 22, Iryna Gorb, a 38-year-old Ukrainian woman who had lived in the U.S. for 16 years and had an expired visa but no removal order, was arrested at SFO on her return from a trip, Mission Local reported, citing her attorney Raisa Stepanova.

A pipeline, not a coincidence

Advocates increasingly point to one mechanism: data. A formal agreement between ICE and TSA, released July 23 to the transparency nonprofit American Oversight, states that "ICE will share information with TSA to identify individuals of interest to ICE in furtherance of its law enforcement mission." Airlines hand passenger data to TSA; TSA passes it to ICE; an arrest can follow at the gate. The specifics of what is shared are redacted.

"It just appears that TSA is now cooperating with ICE at a level that we haven't seen before," Milli Atkinson, director of the San Francisco Bar Association's Immigrant Legal Defense Program, told KQED.

Whether that sharing is even lawful is now an open question. "The longheld belief is that TSA focuses on domestic security; immigration enforcement is not part of domestic security," said Saira Hussain, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an interview with Mission Local. TSA has defended the practice as routine; acting director Ha Nguyen McNeill told a January congressional hearing that sharing among Department of Homeland Security agencies "is not new policy."

Can SFO do anything?

That question has landed on San Francisco's airport. SFO sits in San Mateo County but is run by the City and County of San Francisco — a sanctuary jurisdiction whose local police are barred from aiding immigration enforcement. Edward Hasbrouck, an airline-data privacy researcher at the Identity Project, argues the city has more room than it admits.

"The city does not have to allow ICE to roam the airport freely, without warrants, outside customs and immigration areas. The city could restrict ICE agents to those areas unless they have warrants," Hasbrouck told Mission Local, calling the data-sharing "unconstitutional." The airport did not say whether it had reviewed its federal contracts. "ICE and DHS are federal agencies that operate outside the jurisdiction of U.S. airports," SFO communications advisor Francis Tsang responded.

State Sen. Scott Wiener said the city and airport should "make this as hard as possible for ICE within the bounds of the law," accusing the agencies of "turning airports into a dragnet."

For now, the advice from the front lines is defensive. "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," Atkinson said. Jazmin Preciado, an attorney with Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland — who represented an Argentine man detained June 27 at Oakland's airport as he tried to fly to Texas — put it plainly: even for domestic trips, noncitizens should "determine whether the risks are worth it."