ICE arrested Johns Hopkins researcher at BWI, blocked counsel access, transferred her 1,000 miles to Louisiana

On July 28, 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Fatima Ameaka, a senior analyst at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Outbreak Response Innovation and a former Fulbright scholar, at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport as she boarded a domestic flight. The Department of Homeland Security said Ameaka, a Cameroonian national, had overstayed a visa that expired June 13, 2024 — a civil violation carrying no criminal charge. At the time of her arrest, Ameaka held a work authorization permit valid until 2029 and had a pending asylum application before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, according to her immigration attorney, Benjamin Osorio.

The arrest relied on a data-sharing partnership between ICE and the Transportation Security Administration, formalized in a May 2025 memorandum of agreement that gives immigration officers access to passenger information collected for aviation security. ICE and TSA have used the arrangement to identify and detain travelers with expired visas at airports, including at least a dozen arrests in recent weeks at BWI, Washington Dulles International, and Ronald Reagan Washington National airports, according to the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, an immigration legal-services nonprofit.

After the arrest, neither Ameaka's family nor Osorio could reach her; a scheduled video interview between the two was canceled because she was being transferred. ICE moved her from a facility near Fredericksburg, Virginia, to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile — roughly 1,000 miles from Baltimore — and by July 31 indicated plans to transfer her again, to a facility in Harlingen, Texas. Osorio said the transfers meant Ameaka's asylum claim, previously headed for a non-adversarial interview with an asylum officer, would instead have to be litigated before an immigration judge.

Kelly Rojas, co-director of the Amica Center's Detained Adult Program, said her organization has tracked roughly a dozen similar arrests at the three airports in recent weeks, mostly involving people who entered lawfully and were already pursuing other legal status. "We think it's because ICE is pursuing detention quotas with regard to underlying eligibility for relief, applications for relief, and also because many of those people are already in the system. They are easy targets for ICE," Rojas said. Johns Hopkins said it was "actively working to provide support for Dr. Ameaka, including ensuring she has access to legal representation"; colleagues and a GoFundMe campaign raised more than $40,000 for her legal defense within days.