Exclusive: Immigration Attorney Stopped and Searched at SFO, Told by DHS He Was on ‘Watchlist’

Nikolas De Bremaeker began to suspect something wasn’t right when he couldn’t access the boarding pass on his phone for his flight from San Francisco to Boston on June 10.

After printing it out, he was waiting to go through security at San Francisco International Airport when a Transportation Security Administration supervisor pulled him aside and said he would need to undergo enhanced screening. The 38-year-old immigration attorney quickly turned off his phone’s fingerprint sensor so agents couldn’t access his client files.

Moments later, De Bremaeker was surrounded by a half-dozen TSA agents who he said were behaving “very tensely.” For 45 minutes, the agents pored through his belongings, turned on his two phones and laptops, and gave him “the most extreme pat down,” he said.

When De Bremaeker asked why he was being subjected to such scrutiny, he said a TSA agent told him “it’s not random,” while another told him that he was on a “watch list,” but didn’t provide any additional details. In December, De Bremaeker, a managing attorney at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland, had helped win a first-in-the-nation ruling in a class action lawsuit barring ICE from illegally arresting immigrants at their court hearings.

{snip}

De Bremaeker was ultimately able to board his flight. He was not detained on the way back to San Francisco, but the experience prompted him to indefinitely postpone a trip to Belgium that he and his wife had been planning.

{snip}