Diego Mauricio Ospina Sanchez was standing at an Alaska Airlines departure gate inside Portland International Airport on Sept. 9, ready to fly home to New Jersey with his boyfriend, when agents in plain clothes surrounded the couple and asked for identification. Moments later, the 41-year-old Colombian immigrant was ushered away in custody, and he never boarded the flight.
A Visa Overstay Turned Deportation Order
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed, per a DHS spokesperson cited by OregonLive.com, that Ospina Sanchez was arrested by ICE agents inside the airport. He had entered the United States legally from Colombia on Oct. 15, 2024, and later overstayed his visa. According to the outlet's reporting, he sought asylum after his visa expired but never received notice of his first immigration-court hearing — a hearing that resulted in a deportation order. An immigration judge ordered him deported on Aug. 13, and he has no criminal record, the report notes.
His boyfriend, identified as Kewin, told the outlet that agents surrounded the pair and demanded identification before taking Ospina Sanchez away. Kewin did not board the flight after the arrest and instead called the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition hotline. A Spanish-speaking community member drove to pick him up, and a mutual aid group helped locate Ospina Sanchez, later providing Kewin with lodging, meals and other resources, the same account states.
Medical Concerns and a Transfer to Texas
Ospina Sanchez was initially taken to a regional detention center in Tacoma, where he received medication for an underlying medical condition, per the report. He reported poor sleep, poor appetite, psychological distress and weight loss while detained, and was weighing whether to sign his voluntary departure order before being transferred to El Paso, Texas, on Sept. 16. Kewin worries that deportation to Colombia could interrupt his boyfriend's medical treatment and says he will keep fighting to get him released.
Pearl Jennings said Kewin was extremely emotionally distraught after the arrest and believes that had Ospina Sanchez been traveling alone, his family might not have learned of his detention for months. Kewin criticized how the couple was treated by agents at the gate.
Port of Portland Says It Was Left in the Dark
Molly Prescott said the Port of Portland, which owns and operates the airport, did not receive reports of the immigration arrest. The Port does not assist in immigration enforcement under state and city law, according to the same source. The Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, which tracks and verifies immigration arrests in Oregon, condemned the airport arrest and said the Sept. 9 incident was the first known immigration arrest this year at Portland International Airport, though the group reported receiving several reports of airport arrests last fall. The coalition also reported that an Oregon immigrant was detained at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport in August. The group urged people in immigration proceedings to continuously check their case status, warning that missing a hearing could give ICE grounds to detain someone, and it said it hopes there will be no more airport arrests.
A Broader Shift in Airport Enforcement
The Trump administration has introduced a tactic targeting people traveling with expired visas, and ICE airport arrests increased across the United States during the summer, according to reporting from The New York Times, which found the Trump administration has begun arresting foreign citizens with expired visas as they travel through airports — including spouses of Americans — with enforcement actions in at least 15 airports in recent weeks. The newspaper reported that the program now apparently includes people with expired visas, a much larger pool than those previously targeted, noting that such individuals were rarely detained in the past absent a criminal record. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants and visitors overstay visas each year, the Times reported.
The Department of Homeland Security has said undocumented immigrants can fly only out of the country to self-deport, and that the agency is reversing a Biden-era policy that had allowed undocumented immigrants to fly domestically. DHS has also said Ospina Sanchez received due process. The Transportation Security Administration, a federal agency within DHS, is collaborating increasingly with ICE, and travel plans are being cross-referenced against databases used by the agency, per the reporting. Separately, a blog covering immigration law, globalimmigrationblog.com, reported that federal authorities have used domestic air-travel information to locate and arrest noncitizens suspected of overstaying, citing at least 27 such arrests across at least nine states.
The Portland case is not an isolated one. Earlier this year, federal immigration agents arrested and detained a Gresham family, including their 7-year-old daughter, outside a Portland-area hospital while the parents sought emergency medical care for the child, according to OregonLive.com's earlier reporting. Adventist Health Portland said at the time that no law enforcement agency had contacted or coordinated with the hospital before that arrest. At Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, three travelers detained despite arriving with valid travel documents filed a federal civil-rights complaint demanding an investigation into Customs and Border Protection's conduct, according to the National Immigrant Justice Center, which said interviews conducted since January 2021 with more than 40 people reflect a pattern of what it called unjust secondary-inspection procedures at that airport.
