People who are doing everything right — filing the paperwork, waiting through a backlogged system — are being pulled off flights and detained anyway.

Amina Khalifa found this out firsthand. The 23-year-old Seattle resident has been in the country since 2023, is waiting on a pending asylum claim, and has never been in trouble with the law. On Aug. 10, ICE agents detained her right as she got off a connecting flight home to Sea-Tac International Airport. She was taken to a detention facility in Tacoma. She wasn't the only one: agents pulled another traveler off a plane at a Sea-Tac gate on Aug. 19, according to a Seattle immigration attorney.

"It's very unprecedented, and very unfair," said Olia Catala, Khalifa's attorney, according to the Seattle Times. "They followed the process and the process failed them."

What changed is the data. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) now shares information on domestic travelers with ICE, which cross-checks it against immigration records to flag people at the gate — even travelers with an active, lawful case already on file. This is happening at airports in at least 15 states, and outside these two agencies, nobody knows the exact rules.

Hundreds of thousands of people overstay a visa every year while doing exactly what the law asks of them. More than a million of them are waiting on a pending asylum application alone, with the government's own data showing average wait times of close to six years.

We're asking the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA to publicly disclose the criteria behind this data-sharing program, and to stop using it to detain travelers who have an active, pending immigration case. Sign the petition to demand that transparency now — before another traveler with a case still in progress is pulled off a flight and locked up.