A friend coordinating her legal aid said the 38-year-old Ukrainian immigrant is in a federal immigration detention facility in California City.
Jul 24, 2026
Updated 3:48 pm PT
Iryna Gorb, 38, lived in the United States for 16 years before she was detained by immigration officials at SFO this week. (Courtesy of Andy Eblin)
A Ukrainian woman who has lived in the U.S. for 16 years was detained by immigration enforcement agents at San Francisco International Airport on Wednesday after a flight home from Portland.
Iryna Gorb, 38, was arrested by plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after landing in San Francisco, where she has lived and worked for more than a decade.
She is currently in detention at California City Detention Facility in Kern County, according to Andy Eblin, who’s been a friend of Gorb’s for 13 years.
Videos of Gorb’s arrest circulated on social media Wednesday evening after Richmond City Councilmember Doria Robinson, who was traveling through the airport at the time, posted footage of the incident on Facebook. She said two ICE agents approached Gorb in a store in Terminal 3.
Doria Robinson speaks at the West Contra Costa United School District rally at Marina Bay Park in Richmond on Dec. 5, 2025.
“They put hands on her, pulled her down to the ground and we see the agent get on top of her,” Robinson said.
In the videos, Gorb can be heard yelling: “They’re f—n ICE, I’m from Ukraine, please, somebody.”
She can be seen telling the agents to let her go, and heard saying, “You’re f—ing choking me.”
Robinson said the officials did not respond to bystanders who asked them to identify themselves. They handcuffed Gorb to an airport wheelchair and rolled her away, she said.
“It wasn’t right,” Robinson said. “It just felt in your heart and your soul that that was not right. That was not the way we should be doing things.”
According to Milli Atkinson, director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the San Francisco Bar Association, immigration advocates began seeing ICE detentions at airports outside of Customs and Border Protection last year anecdotally, but in the last month, they have become a “consistent tactic.”
“What we’re seeing now is ICE showing up at airports because they have information about travelers, they have ID information,” she said. “The Department of Homeland Security includes TSA, so it just appears that TSA is now cooperating with ICE at a level that we haven’t seen before.”
SFO spokesperson Doug Yakel said via email that ICE and DHS operate outside the jurisdiction of U.S. airports, and that SFO is “not involved in any decisions about their operations, nor are we notified when they occur.”
Atkinson said for people who are not U.S. citizens, “now is not a safe time to be traveling through airports unless you’ve spoken to an attorney and you assess what risk there is.”
KQED’s Juan Carlos Lara contributed to this report.
