Like many rising high school seniors have done this summer, Alim Garipov packed his bags and headed to Hobby Airport on Friday, July 17, preparing to set off on a series of college tours. As an "A" student with ambitious goals, he had his sights set on several top schools, including the Ivy League universities Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
But the trip would never take off. Instead, he spent the weekend in a federal detention center.
After passing through security at Hobby Airport, two plain-clothed U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested Garipov, according to U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, D-Houston. An ICE spokesperson said Garipov had initially entered the country legally in May of 2022, but was only permitted to stay for six months and did not depart at that time.
After his arrest, the Bellaire High School student from Russia was then sent to the Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe for overstaying his visa. As an 18-year-old, he was detained alongside adults.
Garipov was released three days later. ICE said the Houston ISD student was enrolled in the "alternatives to detention program," allowing Garipov to leave the detention center and remain in the country pending his immigration hearing. He is required to "report to ICE regularly," an agency spokesperson said.
Olsa Alikaj-Cano, an immigration attorney working with the Garipov family, toldHouston Public MediaICE agents should never have arrested her client and says they did not carefully review his file to see Garipov had a pending asylum claim. ICE says pending applications do not equate to any type of legal status, and those who make them are still subject to detention or deportation.
"We worked nonstop. It took [Congresswoman] Lizzie Fletcher's office working with us, the community, all of it together," Alikaj-Cano said of the efforts behind Garipov's release.
She confirmed the family arrived here on a tourist visa from Russia, when Garipov was 14 years old during the Biden administration, and said they began working with her shortly after their arrival to file an asylum claim.
"We took plenty of time to do everything legally, properly and correctly," Alikaj-Cano said.
Rehan Alimohammad, an immigration attorney, said these kinds of detentions have spiked since President Donald Trump took office for the second time in 2025. His administration has made a push to increase deportations and detentions.
Areport by the American Immigration Councilwhich detailed the administration's rapid and ongoing expansion of immigration detentions, showed its changes in enforcement have disproportionately affected immigrants with no criminal backgrounds, such as Garipov. Arrests of immigrants with no criminal backgrounds spiked from roughly 1,000 to more than 20,000 from 2024 to 2025.
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The agency began implementing "at-large" arrests, worksite raids at farms, construction sites, factories and other areas, as well as new "rearrest" practices at ICE check-ins and immigration courthouses. Most arrests at immigration courts were migrants seeking asylum, the council found.
"It’s those policies that have changed – where it doesn’t matter whether you have cases pending with [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services]. It doesn’t matter whether you’re eventually going to win. What matters is the numbers," Alimohammad said.
Moving targets
According to an NPR report in April,detentions are up more than 70% when compared to the first year of the Biden administration. Immigration officers under Trump have arrested and detained convicted criminals in the country without legal status, but the officers have also detained many people without a criminal record as well as some migrants who are in the country with temporary protections from deportation.
A pending asylum claim does not protect immigrants from being detained or deported. However, Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, explained in the Trump administration's effort to deliver on higher detentions to show a crackdown on immigration to the U.S., ICE is casting a significantly wider net for who is investigated and arrested.
"ICE has the authority to investigate and detain any immigrant person who even with a legal status can be investigated," Ruiz Soto said. "That discretion and the breadth of that discretion have been applied more widely under the Trump administration. It doesn’t mean that a person who is seeking asylum should not or would not be detained in the past, but that now ICE is trying to increase removals and going after many other cases they would not otherwise normally go for."
Garipov's release from detention was celebrated by his community. However, his enrollment in the alternatives to detention program does not come without some future risk of detention or even deportation. He is required to check in with ICE regularly and at each appointment could be reconsidered for both.
The American Immigration Council report revealed after ICE arrests increased, many immigrants without legal status who had been detained, released and permitted to attend court hearings outside of detention were rearrested at their court hearings.
Each check-in with ICE carries the same potential for rearrest.
"These ICE check-in arrests can involve migrants who entered recently seeking asylum or, as with the previous Trump administration, individuals who received a reprieve of deportation under a different administration that ICE has now chosen to deport," the report's authors wrote.. "These arrests have sent hundreds, if not thousands, of people to detention who were actively complying with the obligations the U.S. government had set for them."
Fletcher, who represents the area where Garipov lives and aided in the efforts for his release, worries he would still be detained had she and others not intervened. Several teachers and other employees from his school voiced support for him after his arrest.
"I don’t have that confidence," Fletcher said. "I don’t have confidence in [the immigration] system right now. The system was not designed to operate this way, but my fear is that the people in charge in the White House want it to operate this way. It is not working for the people of this country and we need to make clear that that is unacceptable to us and that we demand change."
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