Exclusive: Immigration attorney stopped and searched at SFO, told by DHS he was on ‘watch list’

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(Behind paywall. Full text below. SR)

 

Exclusive: Immigration attorney stopped and searched at SFO, told by DHS he was on ‘watch list’

 

By Ko Lyn Cheang, St. John Barned-Smith, Staff Writers

 

San Francisco Chronicle  - June 24, 2026

 

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 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from illegally arresting immigrants at their court hearings.

 

His detention at SFO, which has not been previously reported, is an escalation of the Trump administration’s targeting of immigration lawyers that began with his March 2025 executive order calling for sanctions against lawyers and firms that violate laws, said attorney Andrew Fels, who filed a Freedom of Information Act request on behalf of De Bremaeker regarding the alleged watch list. Fels said De Bremaeker was the first immigration attorney he’s aware of who was detained for a non-random secondary screening at an airport since Donald Trump took office.

 

The situation raises questions about to what extent and how the federal government is surveilling and investigating immigration attorneys who provide legal representation to immigrants that the administration has vowed to detain and deport.

 

“It felt very intimidating, and I’m still feeling it today,” said De Bremaeker, a Belgian national who has been working as an attorney in the U.S. for the past 10 years. “It makes you weigh the risks of the work you do.”

 

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees TSA as well as immigration enforcement, did not respond to a request for comment. 

 

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.

 

De Bremaeker’s ordeal came just a day after Fels, a staff attorney at San Diego-based nonprofit Al Otro Lado, filed a FOIA lawsuit on behalf of another immigration attorney who had first discovered a secret watch list of immigration attorneys by accident.

 

That attorney, Tennessee-based Arlene Armarante, was using ICE’s detention facility appointment website to schedule a visit with her client when she clicked on a page she hadn’t seen before, according to the lawsuit.

 

It was an alphabetical list, titled “watch list,” of thousands of immigration attorneys’ names and email addresses — including her own.

 

“If DHS has in fact constructed a watch list of civil immigration attorneys, then they’ve done so without any reasonable suspicion for having put them on a watch list as a prelude to apparently investigating them,” Fels said.

 

The watch list has disappeared from the ICE website, but the Chronicle reviewed screenshots of it that included buttons to apparently solicit information from criminal law enforcement agencies about the immigration attorneys, including the FBI, the Army Office of Special Investigations and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

 

Fels said he does not know what criteria ICE used to place immigration attorneys on the watch list or if De Bremaeker is on it. 

 

He noticed that it included many nonprofit, politically engaged and nonwhite attorneys, but also people who were not. Many on the list had no prior ethics violations or criminal charges, including the plaintiff, and were in good standing with their state bar association.

 

“It is already a deeply stressful time to work in immigration law, then to have this Sword of Damocles immigration watch list hanging over your head … which is why it’s so important for the government to just clarify what this watch list is,” Fels said. 

 

Fels said that the only person he’s aware of who’s on the watch list and has had a brush with the Department of Homeland Security is a Muslim immigration attorney from Michigan, who has had her checked baggage searched by TSA each of the four times she has flown in the past year.

 

The FOIA lawsuit said a secret government watch list of attorneys could conflict with constitutional values and strikes at the “independence of the bar.” It called for ICE to publish policies and staff instructions governing the watch list.

 

De Bremaeker doesn’t know why he was stopped at the airport. However, he has been a vocal and visible opponent of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

 

In February, he was profiled in one of the largest newspapers in his home country, De Morgen, where he compared Trump’s immigration crackdown to the actions of the Nazis in the 1940s, when Gestapo agents pulled his grandfather off a tram in Brussels.

 

Brian Hofer, a privacy advocate who serves as executive director of the organization Secure Justice, called the watch list “an egregious violation of both human and civil rights” that will have a “chilling effect.”

 

“Just to do your job as a lawyer you need to have private communications,” Hofer said. “How can you do your job very well if you know you’re constantly being surveilled and profiled?”

 

Hofer said the Trump administration’s surveillance of immigration attorneys and immigrants is enabled by the vast data tracking systems created by both social media and local agencies, such as city license plate readers. ICE has long purchased location data from data brokers.

 

He has hosted training sessions for immigration attorneys and others on protecting data privacy, including by using encrypted apps and turning off advertising ID tracking on phones. 

 

Trump’s March 2025 executive order stated, without citing evidence, that “rampant fraud and meritless claims have supplanted the constitutional and lawful bases upon which the President exercises core powers under Article II of the United States Constitution.”

 

Trump directed the attorney general to sanction immigration attorneys who engage in “frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation,” including through removing security clearances, terminating contracts and disciplining them.

 

Immigration courts are unique in that they are nested under the executive branch, not the judiciary, unlike other civil and criminal courts that maintain a separation of powers. As such, although only the highest court of the state in which an attorney is licensed can disbar them from practicing in the state, the Department of Justice can disbar an immigration attorney from practicing before immigration courts.

 

To date, no attorneys have been criminally prosecuted in relation to this executive order. However, Andrew Nietor, a San Diego-based immigration attorney, said many are concerned that they are in the “crosshairs.” 

 

“The administration is definitely pushing a narrative about immigration attorneys,” Nietor said. “To the extent they’re demonizing immigrants, they’ve also demonized immigration attorneys and advocates.”

 

He has organized trainings for immigration attorneys on how to avoid criminal prosecution under laws prohibiting the harboring and transportation of “unauthorized aliens” — undocumented immigrants. 

 

Not only attorneys, but also volunteers who support immigrants, have been targeted by the federal government.

 

The first Trump administration tried unsuccessfully to prosecute a humanitarian aid volunteer for the organization No More Deaths, which works in the border desert regions, on felony charges of illegal harboring after he provided food, water and shelter to Central American migrants. He was acquitted.

 

Nietor also represented five volunteers in a separate case who were observing immigration court proceedings in San Diego when they were arrested, thrown out of the building and charged with the petty offense of “failure to conform with signs and directions.” 

 

Federal prosecutors dropped the case this month.

 

Though he acknowledged his experience at the airport spooked him, De Bremaeker said he doesn’t plan to back down.

 

“With what my grandfather went through, I don’t want that happening again,” De Bremaeker said. “I will do what it takes and if the government wants to harass attorneys, I think that it’s unconstitutional and undemocratic and it’s harassment, but that’s not going to stop me from doing this work.”

 

https://www.sfchronicle.com/us-world/article/immigration-attorney-detained-sfo-dhs-watchlist-22315192.php