After seven weeks in immigration detention, Iryna Gorb returned home on bond with a new commitment: helping women she had met inside. The San Francisco photographer now keeps in touch with five former fellow detainees at the California City Immigration Processing Center, sending money for commissary accounts and phone cards and supporting a fundraiser for legal fees and bonds.
Gorb was arrested on the evening of July 22 at SFO after flying back from Portland, according to Mission Local. Video of the arrest, which showed two men who appeared to be plainclothes officers pinning her to the floor outside a store at the airport, circulated widely, as reported by NBC News. The Department of Homeland Security said Gorb had lawfully entered the United States in 2010 on a visa that expired at the end of May 2011 and that she overstayed it. Gorb has said she maintained legal status as a college student after that date, and that it was unsafe for her to return to Ukraine after Russia's 2014 invasion.
Gorb was transferred to the ICE detention center in California City shortly after her arrest and was released after seven weeks, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Her friends paid her $8,000 bond using a fundraiser that had collected $70,000 to help her find a lawyer. She now checks in regularly at the ICE office in downtown San Francisco and wears an ankle monitor wrapped in a bandanna. Her immigration court case remains pending; she has said the coming hearing will determine whether she stays in the country.
What Gorb’s support can cover
Gorb’s account of life in the unit includes both the people she met and the limits on staying in touch. Roughly half of the approximately 70 women there had been arrested at an airport, her friend Andy Eblin told the San Francisco Chronicle. Blanca helped Gorb when she arrived. She also overlapped for about 12 days with Isabelle Bueno, a 28-year-old Brazilian who had lived in San Francisco for eight years before ICE arrested her at SFO as she was leaving for Yellowstone National Park. Ana Carreño, 32, was arrested at the airport and held at California City before being released the same day as Gorb; Carreño later drove from Santa Rosa to attend Gorb’s art show.
Gorb has said that practical obstacles made communication costly. The unit’s clock was an hour off, yard time shifted from 9 a.m. to 5 a.m., and only ten tablets were available. Detainees paid 5 cents a minute to use them and 30 cents for each incoming message. Since her release, Gorb has sent more than $5,000 to friends’ commissary accounts and phone cards.
Facility conditions and access to care
The California City facility's problems extend well beyond scheduling glitches. A court-appointed monitor found the facility out of compliance with all eight healthcare areas identified by a federal judge, according to The Guardian. The monitor's findings described significant gaps in emergency care, failures to deliver medications on time, inadequate health screenings and a lack of accommodations for people with disabilities. California's attorney general has gone further, describing conditions at the state's immigration detention facilities as “cruel, inhumane, and unacceptable” in a report from the California Department of Justice.
Shira Levine, deputy legal director of the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, said legal help is scarce: attorneys are at capacity or have long waitlists. Levine said an immigration attorney’s petition to release a detainee typically costs about $10,000, while detention bonds can range from $1,500 to $35,000 or more. Those costs can put release and legal representation out of reach for people without support.
Airport arrests in a broader enforcement push
Gorb's case fits a broader pattern of enforcement playing out at airports nationwide. ICE data showed more than 43,000 people were booked into immigration detention in June, the highest monthly total since President Trump returned to office the previous year, per CBS News. From July 1 to July 11, arrests averaged a record 1,474 per day nationally, according to an analysis of federal data cited by Mission Local. Bay Area immigration attorney Ghassan Shamieh told NBC News that four of his clients had been detained at airports, including one at SFO the week before Gorb's arrest.
California's immigration-detention population has swelled alongside the enforcement push, rising more than 150% to 6,028 people during state investigators' visits, compared with 2,300 people during inspections in 2023, according to CalMatters. An immigrant legal-defense advocate told KQED that ICE detentions at airports, outside the usual Customs and Border Protection process, have become a consistent tactic in recent weeks. The Chronicle has separately reported that some immigrants have been held for up to a week in a Customs and Border Protection lounge at SFO before being transferred into ICE custody.
ICE and CBP have different airport roles
At airports, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have distinct responsibilities: KQED explains that CBP conducts inspections at ports of entry, including airports, while ICE conducts enforcement within the United States and manages detention and deportation. That division of responsibility alone does not establish the circumstances of Gorb’s arrest.
Other Bay Area travelers have faced similar arrests. Chantal Alejandra Morales Rojas, from Ecuador and living in Oakland, was detained while trying to board a flight from Denver International Airport back to the Bay Area, CBS News reported. Homeland Security officials said she had overstayed her visa, while her attorney said she had an application pending with immigration authorities at the time — a dispute the agency and her lawyer have not resolved publicly.
A public project to keep attention on detainees
Gorb has channeled her experience into a public art project. She held her first exhibit at Abacus Row, a jewelry store and gallery on Nob Hill, titled Don't Forget About Us, promoting her fundraiser with portraits she drew of the women in her detention unit. She has said she hopes the exhibit will travel around San Francisco and keep raising money for the women still inside. “I made a promise that I would not forget about them. I will continue sharing my funds with them,” Gorb has said, according to the Chronicle's reporting.
