I don't think the tsa is at sfo. They use a private contractor for tsa functions. Is the quote made-up?
> Ms. Lopez-Jimenez, 41, a native of Guatemala, and her daughter, Wendy Godinez-Lopez, were flagged by T.S.A. officials on Friday when they showed up on a passenger list for a Sunday flight from San Francisco to Miami. The agency then tipped off Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the documents.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us/politics/immigration-t...
> Under the previously undisclosed program, the Transportation Security Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement of travelers are sharing names and birth dates of travelers believed to have been ordered out of the country by an immigration judge. ICE can then send agents to the airport to detain and quickly deport those people.
They don't have to be at the airport to do this; airlines have to send them the manifest.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-19/chapter-I/part-122/sub...
> Except as provided in paragraph (c) of this section, an appropriate official of each commercial aircraft (carrier) departing from the United States en route to any port or place outside the United States must transmit to the Advance Passenger Information System (APIS; referred to in this section as the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) system), the electronic data interchange system approved by CBP for such transmissions, an electronic passenger departure manifest covering all passengers checked in for the flight.
What might confuse things a bit is that this incident happened hours before ICE agents started reinforcing TSA at checkpoints and seems mostly unrelated, other than establishing the general principle that ICE will arrest people at airports based on tips from TSA's flight booking records.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/ice-agents-arrest-crying-woman-sfo
The TSA tip didn't have to come from someone physically sitting in the airport.