Gov. Ned Lamont and his top public safety official acknowledged Friday the presence of federal ICE agents at Bradley International Airport without being able to say if it signaled a new emphasis on immigration enforcement by the Trump administration in Connecticut.
“We were made aware that they are at the airport, and if someone goes through TSA, that they may be checked. And if in fact there’s a violation, that they’re pulled out of the line,” said Ronnell Higgins, the commissioner of emergency services and public protection. “But that’s the extent to what I know right now.”
The media offices of ICE in New England and nationally did not respond to a request for comment.
Connecticut is one of the blue states where immigration enforcement is a source of chronic conflict, given the passage of revisions to Trust Act that set explicit limits on the circumstances in which local enforcement can cooperate with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
“Connecticut State Police is assigned to Bradley Airport. They are not involved in any way” in the immigration enforcement there, Higgins said.
Higgins said ICE officially notified the state of its presence without sharing details on long-range plans. The federal agency does not routinely notify state police of arrests at the airport, a state-owned facility in Windsor Locks with federal oversight.
“I have no reason to believe that they’re going to not be there tomorrow or the next day or the next day,” Higgins said.
Lamont on Friday repeated the message he has been articulating since the opening of the General Assembly session in February.
“Leave us alone. Leave these people alone,” he said. “These are maybe people who want to go for a long weekend and see the aunt in Chicago, instead of getting picked up by ICE, the TSA at Bradley, maybe sent away to a detention facility. I don’t want to jump to conclusions. We’ll see what’s happening.”
State authorities could not confirm if anyone was arrested and detained at the airport by ICE.
The Connecticut Airport Authority released a statement about the ICE presence late Friday.
“The CAA has been made aware that ICE agents have conducted several targeted operations in recent weeks at Bradley International Airport,” the statement reads. “The federal agents involved wore plain clothes and were not readily identifiable as ICE agents. ICE appears to be carrying out similar operations at airports across the country. The CAA did not assist in these operations in any way and has learned of them only after the fact.
“The CAA has no authority to intervene or prevent such operations, which occurred predominantly in areas under the control of the federal government,” the statement continues. “The mission of the CAA is to provide the safest and most convenient facilities for our workforce and the many families and individuals traveling through Bradley International Airport, and this initiative does not further that mission.”
TRAC, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, reported that more than 65,000 people were in immigration detention nationally as of July 11 and that 70% were individuals without criminal convictions.
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
