The woman and her 9-year-old daughter were walking through Terminal 3 at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday night, heading to their gate to fly to Miami to visit a relative, when a stranger in plainclothes approached.
“Angelina?” he asked.
“Sí,” she responded.
Minutes later, Angelina Lopez-Jimenez was on her knees, crying, as two immigration agents were handcuffing her in front of her daughter, according to video footage that went viral this week.
Government documents obtained by The New York Times explain the events leading up to the tense scene, including the exchange between the agent and Ms. Lopez-Jimenez.
The documents shed new light on how the Transportation Security Administration is sharing with ICE officials the names and birth dates of travelers believed to have been ordered out of the country by a judge. That has made it easier for the Trump administration to detain and deport undocumented immigrants as they pass through airports.
Ms. Lopez-Jimenez, 41, a native of Guatemala, and her daughter, Wendy Godinez-Lopez, were flagged by T.S.A. officials on Friday when they showed up on a passenger list for a Sunday flight from San Francisco to Miami. The agency then tipped off Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the documents.
Ms. Lopez-Jimenez and her daughter were living in Contra Costa County, Calif., on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay Area, according to the congressman for that region, John Garamendi. She had no criminal history, though she entered the country illegally.
Democratic officials recoiled this week at the detention. Mr. Garamendi, a Democrat, said that it was the latest example of how the Trump administration was rounding up mothers and children instead of focusing its immigration enforcement on dangerous criminals.
He also condemned the sharing of passenger information by T.S.A. with ICE, saying that data sharing seemed to be “omnipresent” under the Trump administration, putting personal information at risk and bypassing due process.
“The real story here is the way in which databases are being used,” he said in an interview. “A mother and her daughter are detained, and within 36 hours, they’re sent to Guatemala.”
Ms. Lopez-Jimenez came onto the U.S. government’s radar during Mr. Trump’s first term, on April 27, 2018, when Border Patrol agents spotted her and her daughter, then a toddler, 14 miles from the point of entry at San Luis, Ariz., according to the federal documents.
The agents determined that she and her daughter were born in Guatemala and were in the United States illegally. They took her to a facility to photograph her and obtain her fingerprints and biographical information. She was given a notice to appear in court for removal proceedings and was released.
She showed up for some appointments, but not others, according to the documents. On May 8, 2019, an immigration judge ordered her to be deported at a hearing she missed.
Nothing further happened in her case. Until Sunday night.
At 9:30 p.m., the two ICE agents, knowing that she had planned to fly to Miami, found her in the terminal concourse. Ms. Lopez-Jimenez was carrying two Guatemalan passports and handed them over at an agent’s request. The information matched the identity of the woman who was ordered to be deported in 2019.
The agents told Ms. Lopez-Jimenez to follow them to the international terminal.
At that point, Ms. Lopez-Jimenez tried to run away, the documents said, and the agents got ahold of her and sat her down.
The agents tried to handcuff her, but she wriggled and cried, and they could cuff only one wrist. A growing crowd watched, some of them recording the scene on their phones and yelling “Shame on you!” at the agents.
San Francisco police officers responded to a 911 call from a bystander and formed a boundary between the crowd and the agents. The agents placed Ms. Lopez-Jimenez, who was refusing to walk, into a wheelchair and wheeled her away, according to the documents.
The encounter was not part of the Trump administration’s effort to use ICE to staff airport security lines while T.S.A. agents are going unpaid because of the government shutdown.
The Department of Homeland Security said Monday on social media that Ms. Lopez-Jimenez and her daughter were “illegal aliens” who had final deportation orders and had resisted arrest.
It is not clear if she knew that she and her daughter were under a deportation order. Representatives and relatives for Ms. Lopez-Jimenez could not be found on Tuesday.
Nancy Tung, who is the chairwoman of the San Francisco Democratic Party and a member of the airport commission, condemned the detention. Ms. Tung, who said she was speaking in her political capacity and not as an airport representative, said it was frightening to her that airports were now among the growing list of everyday places where immigrants could be picked up.
“These are not the violent criminals that the Trump administration talks about,” Ms. Tung said. “It’s just wrong.”
At 10:51 p.m. on Sunday night, after she was wheeled away from the stunned crowd, Ms. Lopez-Jimenez was booked into a holding room at the airport. At 7:50 p.m. on Monday, she and her daughter were checked into the McAllen Plaza Hotel and Suites in Texas.
They were checked out at 3 a.m. Tuesday.
Just over five hours later, Ms. Lopez-Jimenez and her daughter were on a flight from Valley International Airport in Harlingen, Texas, bound for Guatemala.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
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