Deng Deng is a freshman basketball player at Southern Connecticut State University. On Sept. 4, he went to New Haven's Tweed Airport to catch a domestic flight. Instead, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents took him into custody. He was held for 12 days before being released on Sept. 16.

He was not the only one. Sen. Richard Blumenthal met with four young people detained at Tweed and Bradley International Airport in recent weeks. "None of them have any criminal record," Blumenthal said, according to the Connecticut Mirror. Each of them, he said, has "a legal basis to be in this country."

Attorney Glenn Formica of The American Immigrant Legal Clinic, who worked on these cases, described detainees sleeping on cement floors under foil blankets, with broken toilets and dirty water.

Advocates link these arrests to passenger information that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) shares with ICE. Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, says 800 people across the country have been arrested at airports, some of whom had asylum cases, green card applications, or work permits in progress. She also described agents at Tweed wearing airport access badges and using private airport parking lots.

New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker has already told the airport authority board that Tweed should help ICE only as far as the law demands. Now the New Haven Airport Authority and Avports, the company that runs Tweed, need to make that official policy. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both TSA and ICE, should stop turning routine airport screening into a path to detention.

Catching a flight should never mean weeks behind bars for people who are following the rules.

Sign the petition to stop ICE arrests at Tweed and end TSA data sharing with ICE before another traveler is taken.