Read: Custom agents’ unreasonable demand

Like most air travelers, Fields was focused on the logistics of his journey. He was hungry, and hoped to grab a quick dinner in the terminal before boarding his connecting flight to Philadelphia. Neither the agents nor the cabin crew offered any explanation for the sudden change in procedure. “You definitely felt you weren’t going to get off the plane if you didn’t show your ID,” he said. At the same time, he recalled, the agents gave his documents only a cursory look. “It was a combination of formal and structured but also pointless.”

Even today, it seems like the stuff of dystopian nightmare. In February 2017, as the country confronted the reality of Trump’s immigration agenda, it was (to employ an overused Trump-era word) terrifying. (I wrote about the incident at the time, here and here.)

No one knew what this meant for the next round of immigration wars—and the confusion and concern only deepened when CBP officials airily announced that the operation was “routine.” “We do this every day,” the CBP official in charge of JFK emailed an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who asked about the incident. “Someone took a picture and put it on twitter. That’s what led to the hysteria.” Asked for its legal authority, CBP provided a federal regulation permitting document checks—on flights arriving from abroad.

Earlier this month, after two years of litigation by the ACLU, CBP agreed to a settlement decree that binds the agency not to repeat its chilling performance at the doorway of Flight 1583. Contrary to its statements at the time, the agreement notes, CBP “does not have a policy or routine practice of compelling or requesting that passengers deplaning domestic flights submit to suspicionless document checks.” In the future, if CBP agents meet domestic flights, they will tell passengers that they don’t need to show papers if they choose not to, and they will not stand so as to “impede passengers’ ability to deplane.” They will ask cabin crews to make the same announcement—that cooperation is voluntary.

Read: Papers, please

The agency promised to distribute the decree to CBP offices at all ports of entry this summer and again in August 2021. CBP also agreed to pay costs and legal fees to the lawyers from the ACLU and the private firm of Covington & Burling, who handled the case on behalf of nine passengers from 1583.

In an interview, the ACLU lawyers—Hugh Handyside and Anna Diakun—made clear the exceptional nature of what happened at JFK that afternoon. (I reached out to CBP headquarters twice, but never got a response to a request for information about the incident.) Immigration and Customs Enforcement—a different division of Homeland Security—apparently had instructions to meet a specific individual, subject to a deportation order, who was scheduled to fly on 1583. ICE personnel will sometimes do a “meet and greet” like this; however, the New York ICE agents found themselves stuck in traffic, and called ahead to the CBP officers already at JFK. Perhaps because of a failure of communication, the CBP agents didn’t get the identifying information of the intended target. At any rate, they apparently decided they had the authority to check every passenger.