A legal permanent resident claims he was tortured by customs agents after returning home from a trip to Europe. A doctor with a work visa was denied entry into the country — then flown out of the US in spite of a court order halting her deportation. Two German tourists were hassled at a port of entry, then transferred to immigrant detention centers, where they were held for weeks.
President Donald Trump promised mass deportations, vowing to rid the country of so-called “criminal aliens.” But as Trump expands the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) mandate, legal immigrants, too, are finding themselves in the government’s crosshairs. Their arrests are facilitated by DHS’s vast surveillance capabilities, which are largely invisible to the public by design — and where the details of a person’s life, from years-old criminal charges to seemingly innocuous social media posts, are weaponized.
Shocking as they are, these recent events — people with valid travel documents being detained and interrogated, sometimes violently — aren’t entirely unusual. Any noncitizen, including legal immigrants, can end up in deportation proceedings. But Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) apparent crackdown at airports and other ports of entry highlights the latitude individual officers and agents have to enforce immigration law — and in the process, determine a noncitizen’s treatment and fate.
How a “trove of databases” can turn a dismissed marijuana charge into a “crime of moral turpitude”
Two of the recent incidents happened within days of each other at Boston Logan International Airport in Massachusetts.
The first involved Fabian Schmidt, a green card holder flying back from Luxembourg who was “violently interrogated” by customs agents, as reported by the local radio station WGBH. Schmidt’s partner had driven to the airport to pick him up and ended up calling the authorities after waiting four hours for him to emerge. The only thing they were told was that “his green card was flagged,” Astrid Senior, his mother, told WGBH.
It’s likely that CBP’s databases indicated Schmidt had a prior arrest on his record. The agency has access to state, local, and federal law enforcement databases; for noncitizens, this means even minor infractions can turn an otherwise routine airport encounter into a bureaucratic nightmare.
Schmidt’s mother told WGBH that Schmidt had a misdemeanor on his record from 2015, when he was charged in California for having marijuana in his car. Schmidt was also charged with a DUI about a decade ago, according to his mother. The marijuana charge, however, was dismissed after the state’s laws changed in 2016.
Customs agents reportedly made Schmidt strip naked, put him in a cold shower, and then forced him onto a chair. Schmidt’s mother said he was held in a bright room with little food or water, where he was denied access to his medication and suffered sleep deprivation. Amid all this, she claims, immigration officers pressured him to give up his green card.
Schmidt, a lawful permanent resident since 2008, is now being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Rhode Island.
CBP did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Hilton Beckham, the agency’s assistant commissioner for public affairs, told WGBH that Schmidt’s allegations were “blatantly false with respect to CBP” but did not dispute any specific claims, pointing instead to Schmidt’s criminal record as justification for his detention.
“When an individual is found with drug related charges and tries to reenter the country, officers will take proper action,” Beckham said.
CBP officers may have seen Schmidt’s record when he reentered the US — or even beforehand. Officers have access to “a trove of databases” that reveal travelers’ information, Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Verge.
Air travel provides officers extra time to peruse these records. Where a driver crossing the border can provide a visa or green card on the spot, commercial airlines collect this documentation early and transmit it to CBP via the agency’s Advance Passenger Information System. In either case, CBP will then cross-reference it with what Hussain calls an “alphabet soup” of databases. Officers at any point of entry can use the Interagency Border Inspection System (IBIS) to decide which travelers should be flagged for secondary inspection. According to CBP, IBIS also gives officers access to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center and lets them “interface with all 50 states.”
“There’s a lot of information that’s at the fingertips of customs officials when somebody is coming into the country, and when they’re looking up information about that individual,” Hussain said.
Some of these databases were used for the no-fly list, Hussain said, while others were used for the FBI’s terrorist screening database. CBP’s rationale for interrogating Schmidt — who has been a permanent resident for six years — has little to do with national security, showing just how entangled the war on terror and the war on immigrants have become in the two decades since DHS’s founding.
These types of arrests predate the merging of immigration enforcement and national security. When noncitizens enter the US, they’re screened for inadmissibility: reasons they may be excluded from the country. Permanent residents returning to the US aren’t regarded as “seeking admission,” meaning they aren’t subject to the grounds of inadmissibility. But permanent residents with certain offenses on their record — including so-called “crimes of moral turpitude,” which have been grounds for inadmissibility since 1891 despite never having been defined by Congress — are screened for inadmissibility. In other words, Schmidt’s old marijuana charge may have made him inadmissible despite his permanent residency.
Part of the issue is that state laws around marijuana possession have changed since Schmidt’s 2015 arrest, but federal law hasn’t. Matt Cameron, a Boston-based immigration and criminal defense lawyer, said it’s possible that Schmidt’s state-level charge may have been dismissed in a way that still counts as a federal conviction for immigration purposes. Still, Cameron said, the potential for inadmissibility alone doesn’t explain CBP’s aggressive interrogation of Schmidt.
Cameron said he’s had several clients who have been declared inadmissible due to old marijuana charges. But rather than transferring them to ICE, CBP has typically offered Cameron’s clients what’s called a deferred inspection, asking them to return on a certain date with more documentation. Someone like Schmidt could still be deported if charges were upheld or the conviction involved more than 30 grams of marijuana. But if his record showed dismissed charges for a small quantity, he may well have gone home without incident.
“I don’t know why they put him through all of this,” Cameron told The Verge. “Unless there’s something else that’s not being reported, it is extremely unusual to not just give him a return date.”
Schmidt’s detainment looks far less surprising against Trump’s promises of mass immigrant arrests and deportations. Just days into his second term, ICE implemented aggressive enforcement quotas. Schmidt may be little more than collateral damage — a potentially “removable alien” whose record was on full display thanks to DHS’s surveillance powers.
Deported after a phone search
CBP isn’t just looking for people with criminal records. Border agents regularly search people’s personal devices looking for evidence that can be used to justify their exclusion or removal from the country.
Rasha Alawieh, a physician and Brown University professor on an H-1B visa, was pulled aside for secondary inspection after flying to Boston from Lebanon. Alawieh originally entered the US in 2018 on a J-1 visa. The New York Times reports that she had recently been issued an H-1B visa by the US consulate in Lebanon. CBP detained her at the airport for 36 hours, according to a complaint Alawieh’s cousin filed in a Massachusetts federal court. A judge promptly issued an order barring her removal, but CBP said it was too late — in a sworn declaration obtained by Politico, CBP official John Wallace claimed that by the time agents received official notice, they had already put Alawieh on a flight to Paris.
Amid public outcry, CBP justified its actions by pointing to photos officers had found while searching Alawieh’s phone. A government filing claimed that CBP denied entry after finding “sympathetic photos and videos” of prominent Hezbollah leaders — including Hassan Nasrallah, who was assassinated by Israeli forces in 2024 — on her phone.
“If you refuse a search of your phone or your laptop, customs officers can use that to potentially revoke your visa”
When asked about the photos, Alawieh said Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders are considered religious figures in her community, according to court filings obtained by Politico. “So I have a lot of Whatsapp groups with families and friends who send them. So I am a Shia Muslim and he is a religious figure. He has a lot of teachings and he is highly regarded in the Shia community,” Alawieh said, according to a transcript of her interrogation.
The photos were in her phone’s “recently deleted” folder. But under WhatsApp’s default settings, any photos or videos users receive via the app are automatically downloaded, making them viewable by CBP.
CBP officials told Alawieh that they were denying her entry into the US and that her visa had been canceled. She is now barred from entering the US for five years.
It’s unclear how CBP agents got into Alawieh’s recently deleted folder, which usually requires a password to unlock. Hussain, the Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney, said people with visas have fewer protections than US citizens and permanent residents with regard to having their devices searched at ports of entry. “If you refuse a search of your phone or your laptop, customs officers can use that to potentially revoke your visa,” Hussain said.
Alawieh’s case also illustrates that consenting to a search can lead to a visa revocation. Even when a phone search doesn’t lead to a deportation, it often will trigger subsequent searches. Hussain called it a “feedback loop.”
“If you’ve been stopped previously and put into secondary screening — which is when the phone searches happen, which is where additional questioning happens — you are more likely to be flagged again for secondary,” she said. “If your phone was previously searched, the contents of that search, as well as notes of that search, will be on various databases that CBP and ICE have access to.”
If Alawieh had never been pulled aside for a secondary screening before, there may have been other reasons she was flagged this time. “It could have been something such as the country that she was traveling from that could have led to heightened scrutiny,” Hussain said. Alawieh’s visa to return to the United States was reportedly delayed in February, while she was in Lebanon. “Our understanding is that this delay was due to increased vetting of Lebanese nationals in case of any security risk, under administrative processing,” her attorneys said in court filings obtained by CNN.
A digital dragnet tightening around immigrants
Alawieh and Schmidt’s cases have led to mass public outcry, but they’re not isolated incidents. DHS’s broad mandate — which merges civil immigration processing, the enforcement of transnational crimes, and national security investigations — means that all noncitizens can potentially be caught up in a web of monitoring and surveillance.
There is an algorithmic element to this enforcement: people are flagged for old criminal convictions, for being nationals of countries subject to “extreme vetting,” or simply because they’ve been flagged before. DHS’s access to troves of data means that any noncitizen — even a legal immigrant — who has had a brush with law enforcement could end up interrogated, detained, and potentially deported.
And DHS is collecting information on people without criminal records, too. Reports suggest that more travelers are being screened at ports of entry. Most recently, CBP denied entry to a French scientist who traveled to Houston, Texas, for a conference. According to the French paper Le Monde, CBP agents searched the scientist’s phone and computer and found messages criticizing the Trump administration’s research cuts, which CBP claims “conveyed hatred of Trump” and “could be qualified as terrorism.” The scientist’s computer was reportedly confiscated.
Since 2019, the State Department has required all visa applicants to disclose five years’ worth of social media history. Though this policy was implemented under the Trump administration, it had been in the works for years. It started in late 2015, with a pilot program to “examine the feasibility of using social media screening” with an unnamed automatic tool, according to a report by the DHS inspector general. Despite pushback from civil rights groups, the program grew until it was applied to the 15 million people who apply for US visas each year.
The Trump administration wants to further expand its social media surveillance of noncitizens. DHS recently proposed similar rules that would apply to people applying for immigration benefits, including citizenship and green cards. Meanwhile, DHS is building out its surveillance capabilities even further. The department is currently developing its Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART), a vast database that will be shared across law enforcement agencies and include not only biometrics like face recognition, fingerprints, and DNA but also details on people’s “non-obvious relationships” as well.
Immigration officers already have access to a lot of that information, but HART promises to bring it all together. In the middle of Trump’s renewed war on immigrants, that makes it all the easier to use.
