A vaccine researcher with U.S. permanent residency has been detained this month for at least a week inside the San Francisco airport without explanation, and his family says immigration officials have restricted the man’s access to his lawyers.
Tae Heung “Will” Kim, 40, was returning to the U.S. from his native South Korea on July 21 when he was detained at a security checkpoint at SFO.
His attorneys say he was held in the airport for at least a week, and they’re still unsure of his condition or where he is being held.
“He has spent more than seven days in a Customs and Border Protection airport detention center with no daylight, sleeping in [a] chair, with no access to [a] lawyer,” one of his attorneys, Eric Lee, wrote on X.
Kim, who began living in the U.S. at age 5, is a doctoral student at Texas A&M University, where he is working on efforts to study a Lyme disease vaccine.
His lawyers say that when they inquired on his behalf, an official told them the Fifth and Sixth Amendments guarantee people the rights to due process and legal counsel, respectively, didn’t apply in his case, alarming family members.
“I immigrated here to the States — I thought I understood it was a country of equal rights where the Constitution applies equally,” his mother, Yehoon “Sharon” Lee, said Tuesday in an interview with The Washington Post, which first reported on the detention.
It is unclear where Kim is currently being detained. His name did not appear in a federal immigration lookup system on July 30.
Attorneys for Kim believe his detention may be related to a 2011 arrest for misdemeanor marijuana possession that resulted in community service and a successful petition sealing the offense from the public record.
Drug offenses can compromise green card status, but Kim’s attorneys believe he is a clear fit for a waiver for low-level offenses.
“Why detain him when he’s got this waiver that is available to him?” Lee told The Post.
A CBO spokesperson appeared to confirm the family’s fears to The Independent.
“If a green card holder is convicted of a drug offense, violating their status, that person is issued a Notice to Appear and CBP coordinates detention space with ICE ERO. This alien is in ICE custody pending removal proceedings.”
Airports have been the sites of other notable Trump administration actions, including the May questioning of Hasan Piker, the most popular progressive political streamer on Twitch, and the search and detention of Nicolle Sourokos of Sydney, Australia, as she attempted to visit her husband, a U.S. Army lieutenant stationed in Oahu.
As it races to arrest thousands of immigrants per day, immigration officials have resorted to temporarily housing detainees in makeshift facilities with poor conditions, according to advocates.
Earlier this month, a leaked video showed roughly two dozen people crammed in, lying on a cement floor with nothing but emergency blankets, steps away from a toilet separated only by a waist-high partition in a Manhattan federal building.
