She thought she had permission to be in the US. Then ICE arrested her on a jetway.

Indianapolis — 

Indi Veitia walked into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office on Tuesday not knowing whether she would be allowed to leave.

She was entering the nondescript building in a nondescript business park off the I-465 that encircles Indianapolis for the first time to comply with a court order. Any certainty in her life had vanished when she was detained for three weeks this month after ICE officers stopped her while she was boarding a plane home from Atlanta.

After 20 minutes, officers sent her to a location nearby, her stress rising as the morning dragged on. About two hours later, the Venezuelan asylum-seeker emerged from the office of a security firm contracted by the government. She fell into the embrace of friends and began to cry. She had a new weight of a tracking monitor strapped to her right ankle and a ton of stress, emotion and dread on her shoulders, too.

“I’m broken,” the 47-year-old corporate worker told CNN. “There is nothing I can do.”

Veitia’s detention highlights the confusing nature of US immigration enforcement and underscores the ratcheting up of the Trump administration’s efforts to deport non-citizens. Increasingly people with papers they thought allowed them to be in the US are being targeted.

Tackling immigration was a key promise of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and a priority for his White House team, including deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, which has set a goal of 2,000 arrests a day

Tactics have evolved from taking undocumented immigrants already in custody, to targeting foreign students, workplace raids often in Democrat-run cities, to traffic stops and now to identifying people using information they give before taking a domestic flight.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to specific questions from CNN but said in a statement: “DHS reversed the horrendous Biden-era policy that allowed aliens in our country illegally to jet around our country. Under President Trump, DHS will no longer tolerate this. This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport.”

Jorge Gavilanes, a seasoned immigration lawyer, told CNN: “We’ve been describing the immigration system as broken for decades. Now it’s just complete chaos.”

Veitia decided to share her story because she said she had contributed to her community and her company, had never broken any law and still was put through what she calls “hell.”

“I thought that I was going to lose my mind. I never thought that I could experience something like this in a country where you believe that the people do the things by the book.”

Veitia is a self-described rule-follower, who came to the United States on a visa in 2019 and later applied for asylum. If she encountered immigration officers, she thought she would be able to offer documents to show she is in the US with permission and be allowed to go on her way. She has a driver’s license and work permit, and the receipt of her application for asylum from 2020 states: “You may remain in the US until your asylum application is decided.” She is still waiting to be called for an asylum interview.

She told CNN she thought she was doing everything correctly. She and her wife built a life in Indiana, making friends and raising puppies, as they waited for the government to adjudicate their claim. She worked her way from a warehouse job to a corporate position in a clothing firm that requires she travel on business around the country.

Earlier this month as she walked to her plane at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, she said she was slammed against the wall of the jetway to the cabin door by immigration enforcement officers who handcuffed her and hustled her down steps to unmarked SUVs.

When the men in plain clothes finally asked her status, she decided to say nothing.

“In any other circumstances, I probably will have answered those questions, but at that moment I felt that they were already being extremely rude and extremely aggressive to me,” she said. “That’s how kidnaps happen in my country.”

At the detention center in Lumpkin, Georgia, she was given threadbare towels, a sheet and a uniform. She said she was in a windowless dorm with more than 60 women, who shared four toilet stalls and four showers. One day there was no running water for 8 hours, another day power went out. “In that center, everything is awful. The treatment is awful. The guards are one ruder than another. They treat everyone like criminals. I wouldn’t treat an animal like that. It’s just inhumane.”

She tried to visualize happier moments and places with her wife but says she was breaking down emotionally and felt hopeless. “No one could guarantee that I was going to be safe and I was going to be allowed to be back home with my family. And that was heartbreaking.”

The detainees also tried to keep each other’s spirits up, and Veitia knew her friends and her employers were fighting on her behalf, writing supporting letters and finding lawyers in Georgia who represented her at a bond hearing where she was released after 21 days.

Friends from Indiana came to pick her up. “I said I don’t want to get in a plane,” Veitia recalled. “We went down to Alabama and didn’t touch Georgia anymore.”

Veitia wanted to put Georgia in the rear-view mirror.

In Venezuela, she had worked for a Japanese multinational company, rising through the ranks to lead its operations across Central America.

In the US, she said she was content to start over, confident she would rise again. “I started as a warehouse associate. Two weeks later, I was process lead. Three months later, I was supervisor,” said Veitia, who is now in a corporate role. She’s proficient in learning languages and finding solutions, making sense of things.

Still, the arrest and detention make no sense to her. “I have done everything that the government have asked me to do,” she said.

Gavilanes, a partner at the Kuck and Baxter law firm in Atlanta, represented Veitia in her Georgia hearing. A specialist in immigration law, he said he now advises clients not to fly, and for asylum seekers to take extra care everywhere.

“Yes, they have overstayed their visa, but also yes, they’re not unlawfully present,” he told CNN. “The government has given them a permit to work, get a driver’s license, and do whatever they need to do to take care of themselves while their application is pending. But now the same government is telling them, ‘Oh no, you’re not allowed to be here,’ which is contradictory.”

In DHS’ email to CNN, a spokesperson did not address the contradiction. “To be clear: a pending application does NOT confer legal status in the United States,” the email read. “The Trump Administration is utilizing all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history, just as President Trump promised.”

Gavilanes said that it used to take two to four years to get an interview where an asylum case could be determined, but that now it’s seven to 10 years. Immigration courts are backed up and judges have been purged.

Added to that, is the increased action against groups who have traditionally been left alone, Gavilanes said, like those with work permits or petitions for asylum.

“I’ve been practicing immigration for more than 10 years. I’ve never seen this level of enforcement, and it’s really disheartening.”

He has noticed the increase in arrests at airports — calling them “low-hanging fruit” for detention.

Passenger information is shared between ICE and the Transportation Security Administration, both of which come under the Department of Homeland Security.

In theory, ICE officers would know who would be arriving at the airports for which flights, and that they are unarmed by the time they reach the gate because they have gone through airport screening.

ICE records obtained and collated by the Data Deportation Project show just 13 immigration arrests at airports for the entirety of the last two years of the Biden administration. In 2025, the total jumped to at least 39 arrests, and that number is dwarfed by at least 77 detentions at airports just in July of 2026.

But mistakes are made. US citizen John Phillips is a regular traveler from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, and has TSA PreCheck and frequent-flier status with his airline.

This month he was headed down the jetway to board a plane to Las Vegas when he was grabbed by three officers and handcuffed.

“In the moment, I was just thinking about, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s happening? Where am I going to be taken? What’s going on?’ But afterwards, you know, you start thinking about that, and you’re like, ‘Why do they think it’s necessary to do all of that for an obviously unarmed person,” he told CNN.

He said he was held back from the plane even as he said that he was a citizen. After a few minutes one of the men showed him an image on a phone of a man with apparently the same name and birthdate, but who clearly was not him.

The handcuffs were taken off, and he was allowed to board, shaking with shock.

“A week before that, month before that, I’m just figuring ICE is out there doing their job. They’re sending the criminals back, like I hear on the news,” he said.

His experience was a “big awakening,”, said the 54-year-old, adding that he has new empathy for immigrants who could be sought by ICE. “They have to feel like they’re being hunted, like a deer in deer season … They have to be thinking about this all the time, citizen or not, criminal or not, it’s got to be on their mind all the time. And now it’s on my mind all the time because I evidently share a name and a birthday with somebody that the government wants.”

Maria, a 22-year-old asylum-seeker from Venezuela, told CNN she, too, believed that immigration enforcement would be going after criminals. And like Phillips, her opinion has changed.

“It feels that they are slowly trying to get everybody that has come to this country,” she said, asking CNN not to use her real name for fear it might affect the handling of her case.

Her lawyer has advised her not to fly, but she said she is afraid everywhere she goes. Recently she saw police cars on the way to work. “I didn’t know if they were working to get people that were speeding, that were holding their phone (while driving), or if they were working to find people that don’t have a status,” she said.

“I’m already running from a country where you’re unlawfully detained for not having the same ideology as the government, and now I’m here trying to seek protection, and I’m also going to be scared to be detained again.”

Maria came to the US eight years ago on a tourist visa with her mother when she was 14. Once her asylum application was accepted for processing, she went to high school and has spent her entire adult life in the US.

“They do a really good job here in high school, teaching you the values of being an American, of always following the law, always filing for your taxes, doing the right thing,” she said. “I was hoping that by doing the right thing, I was going to get that future working and just having my life.”

But parts of her life are on hold. She’s a bridesmaid for a friend’s upcoming wedding but has decided not to go to the bachelorette party because it would involve a long drive.

“Every day, whenever I leave my house, it just feels like a gamble, if I’m going to make it to work or if I’m going to make it back home.”

In Indianapolis, those fears are impacting Veitia, too. She treasures being home and eating familiar food, but she tries not to look at her ankle monitor because it makes her cry.

“I do want to stay, but also I don’t know if I will be able to hold myself (together) if I have to be in a detention center ever again,” she said. “Those centers are built to break you down.”