The Jetway, the Guards, and Why I Don't Want ICE in Our Airports

Or anywhere, really.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents patrol Louis Armstrong International Airport in Kenner, La., Monday, March 23, 2026. (David Grunfeld/The New Orleans Advocate via AP)

They stopped him before he even made it through the jetway. 

Our plane had just landed. I was walking toward the terminal, almost there, when I turned around and realized my partner wasn’t behind me. I doubled back — and found him. Standing completely still, two white security guards, one on each side.

My stomach dropped. We had a connecting flight to catch. We’d just cleared security at another airport, boarded, landed. We had no time for this.

I moved close, trying to hear what was being said. One of the officers turned to me. “Move along.”

“I’ll move along,” I said, “when my husband moves along too.”

The guard glanced at me, then at my partner — my black, Kenyan spouse — and asked, with what sounded like surprise: “He’s with you?”

“Yes.”

And just like that, they let us go. Not when my partner spoke. Not when he showed his boarding pass and ID. When I vouched for him. When my whiteness and perceived American-ness made itself known — that’s when we both became people worth letting through.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot lately. Especially with ICE now deployed in our airports.

Here’s something some of us white folks are learning — sometimes slowly, sometimes the hard way — whiteness doesn’t protect us from unjust systems built on suspicion and fear. It just changes how we move through them.

In that jetway, my whiteness opened a door. I don’t feel proud of that. But I am clear about it.

And I’m also clear about this — systems built on fear, subjective suspicion, flawed data, and broad, inequitable enforcement don’t stay contained. They don’t neatly target only the people those in power say they’re for. They spread, they make mistakes, they harm beyond their stated scope. No one is safe inside them.

This isn’t speculation. It’s documented.

In September 2025, the Supreme Court paused a lower court injunction that had blocked ICE from targeting people based on race or ethnicity, language or accent, location, and type of work. The real-world impact is that ICE can now use race or ethnicity as one factor — alongside speaking English with an accent, or a person’s location — to establish “reasonable suspicion” in immigration enforcement.

Some push back, pointing to Justice Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion that race or ethnicity alone cannot justify a stop. It must be part of a broader suspicion analysis. I hear that. But in the U.S., we carry deeply untrue stories about who lookssuspicious. They live in our bodies, guide everyday life, often unnoticed, and race and ethnicity are woven through them.

I’ve seen it happen too many times — up close, in the news — people of color targeted, stopped, detained, based on nothing more than how they look. That airport jetway was one more example. Those guards didn’t need a reason beyond my partner’s blackness and his accent. And that was before the Supreme Court gave ICE permission to factor race and language into who gets targeted.

This is playing out in real communities, in real time.

Mubashir Khalif Hussen is a U.S. citizen. In December 2025, he was walking in a Minneapolis neighborhood when multiple masked ICE agents stopped him. He kept repeating, “I’m a citizen.” He offered his ID — but the agents refused to look at it. They put him in an SUV, drove him to a federal building, shackled him, and fingerprinted him. Only after someone finally agreed to look at a photo of his passport card was he released.

A U.S. citizen. Taken into custody for walking in his own city while Black and Somali.

George Retes is a U.S. citizen and an Iraq War veteran. In July 2025, while driving to his job as a security guard in Ventura County, CA, he was swept up in a large-scale federal immigration raid. Agents broke his car window, pepper-sprayed him, and pinned him to the ground. He was detained for three days — no phone call, no lawyer, no judge. He missed his daughter’s third birthday. He was released without charges and without explanation.

Three days. No phone call. No explanation.

In September 2025 in Chicago, roughly 300 federal agents descended on an apartment building in the predominantly Black South Shore neighborhood, pulling men, women, and children from their homes in the middle of the night. DHS claimed they were targeting members of a Venezuelan gang. There’s no public evidence to support that claim.

It wasn’t Lincoln Park. It wasn’t white residents. It was South Shore.

Investigations document at least 170 U.S. citizens mistakenly detained by ICE since January 2025 — often held for hours or days without timely access to counsel or family. Reports from Minneapolis to Boston to Los Angeles show unlawful arrests, racial profiling, warrantless home and business entries, and disproportionate use of force. This is what ICE in public spaces looks like in practice.

So when people ask why I don’t want ICE in our airports, this is part of my answer. Because my black partner already gets stopped in them. Expanding a system that already makes these kinds of decisions doesn’t make it better — it increases the chances it happens more often, to him, to others, and yes, even to people who thought they were outside it.

So why do I keep telling stories like this?

Because they change me. Because they’re true. Because they interrupt the stories I was given growing up — that race doesn’t really matter, that good people treat everyone the same, that racism is something other people do loudly and obviously, in ways you can recognize and walk away from.

Moments like the one on that jetway, and what’s happening right now with ICE across this country, crack those narratives wide open. What I keep finding is that they were incomplete at best. At worst, they were lies.

Because there’s no way to experience what happened on that jetway — or what happens often to our multiracial family, to friends I love, to neighbors swept up by ICE — and still believe race is mostly beside the point. It isn’t. It never was.

What I’ve come to understand is that whiteness isn’t just a system out there in the world. It’s a collection of stories I carry with me — made up of moments and experiences that shape me. Stories about who’s safe, who deserves the benefit of the doubt, which neighborhoods are “good.” Stories I might not have consciously chosen, but that have shaped me all the same.

Stories I didn’t make up on my own but that show up again and again throughout U.S. culture and daily life. They almost never mentioned whiteness explicitly. They didn’t have to. The assumptions were already baked in.

Carrying that truth — really carrying it instead of setting it down when it gets heavy — has undone me in the best possible way. Not comfortable. Not painless. But freeing.

Because when I can reckon with how whiteness has shaped me, I get to choose. Moment by moment, I get to decide who I actually want to become. And when I can reckon with how whiteness shapes everyday life in the U.S., I’m no longer bound to it in the same way.

I can become someone who takes it apart. Someone who names injustice even when it isn’t targeting me. Someone who doesn’t walk away. Someone who shows up carrying new stories — ones where race doesn’t determine who gets to feel at home here.

I’m not doing this work because it makes me a “good white person.” I’m doing it for my own sake. Because participating in a system that diminishes other people’s humanity diminishes mine. Because I can’t genuinely love the people in my life and pretend that race doesn’t matter. Because I want wholeness and freedom — real, expansive, for-everyone wholeness and freedom — and I can’t get there while ignoring the systems built to prevent it.

Story by story, moment by moment — that’s how I absorbed something I didn’t consciously choose. And story by story, moment by moment, is how I’m learning to become something different.