Immigration Enforcement Actions at Harry Reid International Airport Leave County Officials in the Dark
Editor's note: Este artículo está traducido al español.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have carried out multiple actions at Harry Reid International Airport in recent months, including the arrest this month of a California legislator's staffer. But the Clark County department that runs the airport says it is not told when ICE agents make arrests there, and county commissioners say they do not know how often it is happening.
The lack of information has left local officials unable to say whether ICE agents are regularly stationed at the airport, how they identify people for enforcement or what role, if any, airport personnel play in the operations.
“The Clark County Department of Aviation is not notified of ICE enforcement actions or arrests,” Clark County Department of Aviation spokeswoman Amanda Mazzagatti wrote in an email to the Sun.
The questions gained new urgency Sept. 17, when ICE agents arrested Ho Yin Mo, a staffer for California Assemblywoman Catherine Stefani, D-San Francisco, at the airport. ICE said Mo had overstayed his visa.
Mo’s arrest was the latest in a series of ICE encounters at the airport since July. Jialiang Wei, a Chinese national visiting from Hawaii with a pending asylum claim, was arrested Aug. 19 after getting off an Alaska Airlines flight. In July, agents arrested Nqobile Malangeni of South Africa as she prepared to board a flight to Connecticut.
On July 13, ICE agents attempted to arrest Phu Nguyen, 57, an Australian citizen born in Vietnam, in Terminal 3 at Harry Reid but left before completing the arrest, according to Metro Police. Responding officers found Nguyen with a handcuff still attached to one wrist, removed it and notified ICE.
ICE then said it arrested Nguyen the following day at Los Angeles International Airport, saying he had overstayed his visa.
Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom said county officials first need to determine the scope of ICE’s activity at the airport.
“As far as how many ICE people are at the airport or how they’re picking people to grab, I don’t know,” he said. “It’s something that, obviously, I need to look at.”
“Do they have a team stationed at the airport? How are they selecting people?” he added.
Segerblom said the commission has limited authority over an independent federal agency. Still, he said the county should examine whether it can impede ICE’s operations at the airport.
“If there’s any way that we, being the airport, can make it more difficult for them,” Segerblom said, “I think we should try to do that.”
U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., has also raised concerns about ICE’s airport enforcement. She wrote the Department of Homeland Security in August about the agency’s presence at the airport and, after Mo’s arrest, told the Sun that her office was aware of and troubled by the incident.
The Transportation Security Administration, which conducts passenger screenings at Harry Reid, started sharing passenger information with ICE in May 2025, making it easier for ICE to identify targets for arrests. Stateline reported that the Department of Homeland Security made an average of 20 to 40 immigration arrests at U.S. airports per day in July by targeting people with expired visas.
It is unclear how many of those arrests are happening at Harry Reid, but Michael Kagan, director of the UNLV Immigration Clinic, said it’s happening a lot around the country.
“It’s clear that everyone who goes through TSA is being screened for their immigration status and that ICE is operating in airports,” Kagan said.
In a statement to the Sun, a TSA representative said information sharing between ICE and TSA is “critical” to secure the aviation system and protect the country.
Before Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, Kagan said, immigrants with expired visas or pending status were not targeted unless they had a criminal record, so they might not be aware traveling is a risk.
“I think people who have pending applications may not even understand that they are in the crosshairs of this administration, because they think that they have played by the rules, and they have,” Kagan said. “They’ve applied, they’re waiting for a decision on an application.”
In Mo’s case, DHS claims he entered the U.S. on a temporary basis in January 2020 but “overstayed his welcome” by failing to leave by May of that year.
In a statement on social media, however, Stefani said Mo is a legal employee. Work authorization is granted only to people who either have a pending application or lawful immigration status in the U.S., but a pending application does not grant someone legal status on its own.
“People with insecure immigration statuses should not regard airports as safe places,” Kagan said.
Officials also worry about what the arrests mean for Las Vegas tourism, which tourism officials have said has been hurt in part by Trump’s tariff and immigration policies. Visitation to Las Vegas fell 7.5% in 2025 to 38.5 million people.
“I’m extremely concerned about how ICE’s enforcement operations in airports are instilling fear in our communities, scaring away visitors, and hurting our tourism economy,” Rosen said. “That’s why I’ve demanded answers about TSA’s cooperation with ICE at airports and called for an end to these abuses.”
Segerblom echoed Rosen’s worries, saying, “It’s really a black mark on us that they would be enforcing these kinds of things here because we live and die by people visiting.”
Dee Sull, an attorney representing Wei, told KLAS-TV that she has clients in Mexico and Canada who “simply do not want to come and spend their money.”
“I can’t even in good faith tell foreign nationals, even if they’re coming in as tourist, to spend their money in this city,” Sull said.
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