BOSTON — Maria Rosales flew into Boston for a Noah Kahan concert. When she tried to fly home to Florida, ICE agents were waiting for her at Logan Airport — because she had been carrying a nine-year-old final deportation order the whole time.

Rosales came to the United States from Colombia at age 4 and grew up in Florida. Years later, traveling in the American Southwest, she was stopped at an immigration checkpoint in New Mexico, detained briefly, and handed a notice to appear at an immigration hearing.

She never went to the hearing. In June 2017, an immigration judge held the hearing anyway — with Rosales absent — and entered a final order of removal against her. Rosales says she did not know the hearing had been scheduled and did not know the deportation order existed until ICE picked her up at Logan.

Around the same time as the 2017 order, Rosales qualified for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — DACA — and, her attorney says, believed that qualification had settled the New Mexico case. It had not. The final order sat on her record for nine years.

DACA is a two-year status that immigrants have to renew. Rosales applied to renew hers in September 2023. Her renewal application has been sitting in the backlog ever since. By the time she flew into Boston for Noah Kahan's July 8 concert at Fenway, her DACA had lapsed — and only the nine-year-old final removal order remained in the system.

Rosales is a color guard performer who founded and directs Vestige Winter Guard, an indoor troupe in Orlando. Her Boston trip was tied to her act: she had choreographed a routine to "Orbiter," a track from Kahan's most recent album, and she flew north to see him perform the song live.

Rosales's arrest is not one-off. Pomerleau, her attorney, says ICE has detained about ten people for immigration reasons at Logan Airport in the past three months. On the same day agents took Rosales into custody, they also picked up David Ardila, a Seattle-based DJ originally from Venezuela who had flown into Boston to attend the World Cup quarterfinal between France and Morocco. Ardila is now at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility.

Airports sit inside federal jurisdiction and are exempt from Massachusetts's sanctuary rules. That gives ICE a clean lane at Logan that it does not have at a Suffolk County courthouse or a Boston police station.

Pomerleau filed a habeas corpus petition on Saturday challenging the detention. U.S. District Judge Leo T. Sorokin issued an emergency order preventing federal authorities from transferring Rosales outside Massachusetts while the case proceeds. She remains in Burlington.

The Trump administration's stepped-up enforcement posture treats final removal orders — including old, unresolved ones — as top-priority takedowns. Rosales was carrying one of those orders when she boarded her flight to Boston. She just did not know it was there.