Adama Bah remembers the day when she last spoke to her aunt. It was Nov. 23 and she was calling her aunt to coordinate a time for her daughter to get her hair braided, like she had done multiple times in the past. On the call, Bah said it sounded as if her aunt, Aissatou Diallo, was “cooking something.”
It wasn’t until two days later, on Tuesday afternoon, Nov. 25, that the family learned about Diallo’s surprise trip.
Diallo called her husband from LaGuardia Airport in Queens and revealed that she had planned to fly to Texas from New York City to surprise her son for Thanksgiving. Over the years, she and her son alternated visiting one another, but she was so secretive about this year’s trip that she told no one in her family, said Bah, who described her aunt as the person everyone else would go to for advice and mediation. “I used to speak with her eight times a day,” Bah said.
But the surprise trip that was supposed to bring some holiday joy marked the beginning of a tragedy. “She was on the phone with my uncle, with her husband, and then they just said that she cannot fly,” Bah said. “And then her phone went off around 1 p.m.”
Last Tuesday, Diallo, whose legal counsel confirmed her lawful status, was arrested at LaGuardia Airport by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
After her arrest, ICE transferred her through three detention centers in ten days. She was finally released on Friday. But her arrest is not unique — it’s a story that’s been playing out around the country: Immigrants have been arrested while embarking on domestic flights — some have been detained and others deported.
According to newly released government data analyzed by Documented, since Trump took office through mid-October of this year, ICE arrests at airport locations have spiked 94% over the same period in 2024. The data, originally obtained by the Deportation Data Project, also shows that arrests of people without criminal convictions or charges at airports increased under the second Trump administration by 560% over the same period.
Advocates and politicians have said the detentions of immigrants without criminal records do not offer community safety, as Trump has claimed, rather they stoke fear. As Documented reported previously, of the immigrants detained with criminal convictions, many committed only minor offenses, such as traffic violations.
When reviewing the cases of 64 individuals arrested by ICE between Jan. 20 and Oct. 15 of this year, Documented found only 36% have criminal convictions, whereas nearly 73% of those arrested during the same time frame in 2024 had criminal convictions.
The findings align with recently released detention data that shows 48% of those detained by ICE nationwide lack criminal charges. And in New York state, the numbers are even starker — 60% of individuals who have been arrested by ICE since Trump took office this year were neither convicted of a crime nor had pending criminal charges, a Documented analysis found.
Speaking Wednesday during a U.S. House floor proceeding, Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who represents neighborhoods across upper Manhattan and the Bronx, said that 70% of those detained by ICE do not have criminal convictions.
“Back in New York City, my community is being assaulted and we are hearing of the fear every single day,” said Rep. Espaillat. “Fear has a way of settling into communities and making sure they don’t move forward.”
That fear is what prevented W.L., a 55-year-old asylum seeker from Ecuador living in New Jersey, from boarding a plane in late March.
W.L., who requested Documented to withhold his name due to an ongoing asylum case, told Documented that a friend he had met in New York invited him to move to California to work as a delivery driver, where he could earn between $800 and $1,200 a week.
Although he needed the money given that he had inconsistent job opportunities in New Jersey, W.L. said the trip never materialized.
“I consulted with a lawyer who was helping me to submit the paperwork [for my asylum case]… and then he told me ‘No,’ that it’s better not to travel because of these risks,” W.L. said, referring to the risks of getting arrested at the airport.
He added that if another job opportunity comes his way he would consider traveling but only if arrests were to come down. “Over here [in Newark] they [ICE] have also come to do some raids,” W.L. said. “But I am calm because at the end of the day, like we say, if things are meant to happen then they will happen.”
‘Should have never come up’
When 10 hours had passed and Bah had not heard anything from her aunt, she already knew something was up — and she said she also knew that there was a very real possibility that ICE could be involved in her aunt’s disappearance.
As the founder of Afrikana, an organization which serves immigrants in New York City, she was familiar with how ICE works. Bah herself had once been detained back when she was 16. For ten hours she looked for her aunt in the ICE locator tool, but did not find any information about her.
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It was not until 11 p.m. on Tuesday that Bah’s aunt called her and told her that she was detained at Federal Plaza. “They [the aunt] told us it was a case that’s related to 2002,” Bah said. “It was a case that literally should have never come up. It’s not an arrest, it’s not anything. It’s just that immigration is really delayed in updating their system.”
After they hung up, Bah said another five days passed before she received a phone call — this time from a detention center in Louisiana. Bah does not know when her aunt was transferred there, but screenshots of the ICE locator tool shared with Documented show that she had been moved through two detention centers in a span of five days. “It’s extremely fast and it’s not even normal,” Bah said.
The repeated transfers of detainees is known as “diesel therapy” and it makes it nearly impossible for immigrants to defend themselves from deportation or communicate with their loved ones.
“If they were at least abiding by the law, following the rules, we can say, ‘Well, we can fight it here, we can fight it there.’ But they’re honestly making it impossible because you can’t even find your relative,” Bah said, repeating that her aunt had lawful status in the United States. “The scary thing about this time is they’re not following the rules. They’re doing their own thing, and that’s what makes it really scary.”
Ginny Nunez, managing immigration attorney at Nunez Law, PLLC, said ICE can lawfully detain people who don’t have criminal convictions if there are civil immigration reasons to hold them. “This includes situations where the person has no lawful immigration status, entered the country without permission, overstayed a visa, violated the terms of their status, or has a prior deportation order,” Nunez said.
Recent enforcement trends show a growing emphasis on increasing overall removal numbers, even though public messaging initially suggested a focus on people with criminal backgrounds, she said. “The reality is that civil immigration violations are far easier and faster to enforce than targeted operations involving people with criminal histories, which require more investigation, coordination, and resources.”
Immigration attorney Moumita Rahman, who founded her own law firm and who practiced immigration law during the first Trump administration, also told Documented that since December she has been warning her clients to avoid traveling, especially immigrants who use Advance Parole (AP) to travel overseas. AP allows certain immigrants to travel abroad but it’s also at the discretion of a CBP officer to be allowed back into the U.S. when they return.
Rahman said that while people can check their criminal histories in advance to see if they might be at risk of getting arrested by immigration officers, nothing is guaranteed during these days, adding that the Trump administration this time is “more blatantly racist.”
“The majority of the people that I know who got arrested have zero criminal background or history,” she said. “We literally have a Supreme Court decision saying that it is okay to detain and arrest somebody on the basis of the language they are speaking and the color of their skin, and if they reasonably seem like they might be an immigrant.”
During the first Trump administration, Rahman explained that DHS focused on preventing people from entering the country. Whereas now, she said, they are focusing on getting people to leave. “We have seen a lot of clients decide to leave the country voluntarily too,” she said.
你知道吗？非公民办理驾照时的这个错误可能会导致选民欺诈
Rahman added that the immigration enforcement happening now should worry everyone, not just immigrants due to the fact that even U.S. citizens have gotten detained across the country. “I would just like to remind anyone who is a citizen that a lot of what we are really seeing are basically due process violations that are the testing grounds for more violations that I anticipate will be attempted by the current administration.”
As for Bah, who has spent nearly two decades professionally advocating and providing resources for thousands of immigrants in New York, she said the detention of her aunt feels like a reality check. “I really thought my immediate family were done with immigration,” Bah said. “I thought this was over for us. We all have statuses. We are good. I never thought it would hit this close to home again.”
On Friday Dec. 5, a federal court judge ordered Diallo to be released. She was represented by Co-Counsel NYC, a nonprofit legal services organization in New York City.
