Three ICE Detainments of Legal Residents at Logan Airport Point to New Deployment of Immigration Enforcement

Boston Logan Airport

Since President Donald Trump took office in January, three legal residents of the United States have been arrested at Boston’s Logan Airport upon returning to the country, pointing to a new era of politicized immigration and detainment within the city. 

On March 7, Fabian Schmidt, a German national living in New Hampshire with a green card, was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement upon returning to Boston from Germany and later transferred to a detention facility in Rhode Island. 

The reason for Schmidt’s detainment is unknown, though Schmidt has been convicted of two drug-related misdemeanors in 2015 and 2016, respectively. While legal precedent permits the deportation of a legal resident for drug offenses, officials have yet to confirm that these misdemeanors are the reason for Schmidt’s detainment. 

Schmidt’s mother, Astrid Senior, said in an interview with GBH that he was interrogated violently and stripped upon his detainment. U.S. Customs and Border Protection later denied the claims. 

“Unfortunately, this is a trend that we’re seeing,” Schmidt’s attorney, David Keller, said in an article for WBUR, “that there are people with lawful status that are being stopped at our borders and mistreated.”

On March 13, Rasha Alawieh, a kidney specialist with an H-1B visa to work in Rhode Island, was detained and deported back to her home country of Lebanon after returning to the United States. Upon her detainment, her cousin filed a case claiming the government had denied her due process, and a U.S. District Court issued an order prohibiting her removal from the state. Regardless, Homeland Security deported Alawieh. 

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Alawieh attended the funeral of Hasan Nasrallah, a Hezbollah leader, while in Lebanon and had photos of him on her phone upon her arrival in Boston. The court has sealed documents detailing the specific reason for Alawieh’s detainment. 

“According to Dr. Alawieh, she follows him for his religious and spiritual teachings and not his politics,” the court documents stated, according to the Associated Press. 

In a statement made on X (formerly Twitter), the Department of Homeland Security claimed that Alawieh openly admitted her support of Hezbollah to officers during her interrogation, writing, “A visa is a privilege not a right — glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is common sense security.”

Despite Alawieh’s deportation, Lebanon is not included on President Trump’s draft list of countries targeted with a travel ban. According to the New York Times, Alawieh’s lawyer also reportedly notified officials of the court order before her flight was scheduled to depart, but received no response until after the flight had taken off.

On February 16, Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist employed by Harvard on a J-1 scholar visa, was detained by Customs and Border Protection at Logan Airport after officials found undeclared frog embryos in her luggage. According to Petrova’s lawyer, such an offense usually results in a fine, but Customs and Border Protection canceled her visa and transferred her to a Louisiana detention facility. 

Petrova was arrested in 2022 for protesting against Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, making her potential deportation to her home country incredibly high-risk, especially after a pattern of lethal retribution for criticism of the Kremlin. 

These three deportations at Boston’s Logan Airport happened parallel to ICE’s much larger enhanced targeted enforcement operation, in which 370 undocumented immigrants were arrested or detained in and around Boston between March 18 and 23, according to ICE.  

Petrova’s case is one of several recent detainments critics say reflect a growing pattern of using immigration enforcement to silence vocal dissenters, including Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested for his involvement in pro-Palestinian protests and faces deportation, and Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was arrested and restrained by officers near her apartment for her past public support of Palestine. 

The targeted detainment of protesters within a larger escalation of arrests of immigrants, legal and undocumented, speaks to an increasing partisanship in immigration law enforcement. Public dissent and small infractions that usually result in fines have become justification for arrest, violent detainment, and deportation. This new deployment of immigration enforcement as a tool for political censorship speaks to a changing landscape for both immigration policy and free speech —one that seems to have an uncertain future.