How many airport arrests have been linked to TSA‑ICE passenger list matches since March 2025?
Executive summary
There is no publicly verified total for how many airport arrests have resulted from TSA sharing passenger lists with ICE since the program began in March 2025; major outlets report that the number “is not known” and that publicly available reporting has not produced an aggregate figure [1]. Reporting does identify individual high-profile gate arrests—most notably Any Lucía López Belloza at Boston Logan—and cites an unverifiable claim from a former ICE official that in one region about 75 percent of flagged instances led to arrests, but that regional percentage has not been corroborated into a national arrest count [2] [3].
1. The central fact: no transparent national tally exists
Multiple mainstream reports note that while TSA began sending passenger manifests to ICE in March 2025, outlets including The New York Times and downstream reporting explicitly state it is “not known how many people have been arrested as a result” of the data sharing, and no public DHS or ICE dataset has been produced to quantify arrests tied specifically to those matches [1] [4].
2. Anecdotes and documented cases — signals, not a complete picture
Reporting has highlighted specific arrest incidents tied to ICE acting on passenger-list matches—most prominently the detention and deportation of college student Any Lucía López Belloza after being stopped at Boston Logan Airport—which illustrate how the program operates in practice but do not sum to a verified national total [2] [5].
3. The ‘75 percent’ figure: a suggestive statistic, not a verified national rate
A former ICE official told reporters that in one region roughly 75 percent of flagged names resulted in arrests; that figure appears repeatedly in news summaries as evidence of program effectiveness, but outlets also caution that the claim could not be independently verified and should not be read as a confirmed nationwide arrest rate [3] [4].
4. Related arrest counts in the reporting — partial and context-dependent
ProPublica and other investigations have documented numerous ICE detentions and mistaken detentions in 2025, including reporting of over 170 U.S. citizens arrested or detained by ICE that year, but such tallies are not tied exclusively to TSA-derived passenger-list matches and thus cannot be used to produce the specific number requested [6].
5. Why a definitive number is missing: secrecy, fragmentation, and mixed record-keeping
The absence of a clear count reflects several reporting themes: DHS/ICE have not released an itemized public log tying arrests to TSA matches, media reconstructions rely on document leaks and individual case files, and enforcement can be carried out through multiple channels (community arrests, jail-based operations, and airport interventions), making attribution to the TSA‑ICE manifest pipeline difficult from public sources alone [3] [7] [8].
6. Competing narratives and what they imply for any future tally
Supporters frame the practice as operationally efficient and cite internal success metrics; critics warn of privacy harms, mistaken identity and curtailed access to counsel—points that reporters use to explain why journalists press for a transparent, independent count but have not yet obtained one [3] [9] [2]. The reporting therefore leaves open two plausible interpretations: that arrests tied to manifest matches are numerous but unquantified, or that selective regional practices are being generalized without national corroboration [3] [10].
7. Bottom line for the question asked
Based on the reporting supplied, it is not possible to give a verifiable numeric answer to “How many airport arrests have been linked to TSA‑ICE passenger list matches since March 2025?” because major outlets and available documents state the figure is unknown, while isolated case reporting and an unverified regional claim (≈75%) suggest substantial activity but do not add up to a confirmed national total [1] [3] [2].