‘Maybe we should call ICE on you’: Passenger describes United confrontation at SFO 54%
By Michael McLaughlin20%
7/19/2026, 12:30:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Framing Effect, and Availability Heuristic, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 24.2% saturation with 202 hits. Analysis detected 1,485 faulty-reasoning hits from 835 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 52.3% and a BS Rank of 54% (9,834 of 21,173 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 53.60% of the article peer group.
A passenger at SFO who filmed an airline worker threatening to call immigration authorities on him said he felt targeted and afraid, citing the political climate and a string of violent ICE encounters that have made national headlines over the past year.
“Maybe we should call ICE on you,” the United Airlines employee can be heard saying in the video recorded by Julio Varela, a 54-year-old father of three from San Ramon.
“You’re not acting like a citizen.”
Footage of the July 14 confrontation has since drawn thousands of reactions on Reddit and widespread scrutiny of United.
Varela told The Standard that he was already frustrated after more than an hour of trying to sort out a ticketing error when the exchange escalated at the United counter.
He was flying to Montreal with his wife and two daughters on Air Canada flight 758, booked through United, when the airline told him at check-in that tickets for all five family members had been purged from the system.
Varela, who says he is a Mexican American U.S. citizen, said he took the threat seriously, especially in light of recent events.
Federal agents have fatally shot two men in unrelated incidents in recent days: a Mexican immigrant in Houston and a Colombian man in Maine.
Varela said it’s hard not to feel targeted, considering how other encounters with ICE have ended in violence, and in some cases death.
“Would I have been shot?
I don’t see why not,” he said by phone from Montreal.
“I take that threat very, very seriously.
For somebody to threaten a Hispanic with ICE is a power trip.”
“It’s OK to be racist now,” he added, though he said he was still stunned by the comment.
“For a person of color to use that against me is jaw dropping.”
Varela said the United employee who threatened him had helped him earlier at the counter and stepped back in during the second visit to tell him she’d already said she couldn’t help.
Security and police were not called in, he said.
“She’s one of those people that should not be in customer service,” Varela said.
Varela acknowledged he was argumentative by the time of the recorded exchange, saying he’d reached a breaking point after being shuttled repeatedly between United and Air Canada counters — an experience he said echoed weeks of frustration trying to fix a ticketing mistake.
The trouble began when Varela and his wife accidentally entered their 17-year-old daughter’s middle name in the last-name field while booking the family’s tickets on United’s website for the Air Canada-operated flight.
Because the tickets were bought through United but flown by its partner airline, untangling the fix required going back and forth between customer service reps at both carriers, Varela said.
“We spent no less than 15-20 hours on the phone trying to get the name changed,” he said.
That unresolved error appears to have led United to cancel not just the daughter’s ticket but all five family members’ tickets ahead of the flight, Varela said.
The family didn’t discover the mix-up until they reached the airport Tuesday morning.
The family’s original boarding time of 11:05 a.m. was delayed to about 12:30 p.m., giving staff time to reissue new tickets before the flight departed.
A different United representative ultimately resolved the ticketing issue, and the family made their flight.
Varela was traveling with his wife, who works in pharmaceuticals and was headed to a conference in Montreal, and two of the couple’s three daughters, ages 17 and 14.
United said it is investigating the incident but did not identify the employee involved.
“We’re looking into the interaction in this video,” a company spokesperson said in an email, “but don’t have anything additional to share at this time.”
An SFO spokesperson declined to weigh in.
The United employee’s remarks come amid heightened tension over ICE’s presence at SFO.
In March, the Trump administration announced ICE agents would be deployed to airports to help a short-staffed TSA move travelers through security during the government shutdown.
During that time, plainclothes federal agents detained a woman and her daughter near a terminal gate, an encounter caught on video showing the mother crying as she was placed in a wheelchair and moved away by agents.
The two were later identified by the Department of Homeland Security as having a standing removal order dating to 2019.
They were deported within a couple of days.
San Francisco police said at the time that they responded to a 911 call but did not help ICE, citing the city’s sanctuary policies against participating in civil immigration enforcement.
Mayor Daniel Lurie said that he saw no evidence of broader federal enforcement activity at the airport.
The March incident prompted a Board of Supervisors resolution reaffirming the city’s sanctuary policies, and multiple current and former San Francisco lawmakers were arrested at SFO during a May Day protest against ICE’s presence at the airport.
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100%flagged-word coverageMayor Daniel Lurie
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