Woman convicted of stowing away on flight to Paris faces extradition to Connecticut
NEW YORK — A woman convicted of stowing away on a flight from New York to Paris without a boarding pass or a passport won't be released from custody as she faces new charges of breaching security at a Connecticut airport.
Svetlana Dali was sentenced Thursday to time already served for her illegal ride to Paris last year.
But a federal judge in Brooklyn said she would not be released as Connecticut authorities are seeking to extradite her to face felony charges that could have her serving up to five years behind bars if convicted.
The 57-year-old, who is originally from Russia but has a green card, has been held in a federal lockup in Brooklyn for roughly seven months.
Connecticut State Police confirmed after the hearing that they have an active arrest warrant against Dali, but, in an emailed statement, said release of any further information would be 'dependent on an arrest being made' in Connecticut.
During her sentencing Thursday, Dali spoke for more than half an hour, repeating in detail her claim that she believes she is being poisoned by unknown persons.
She pleaded with the judge to order medical tests to prove her fears, which she said had prompted her to attempt to flee the country by boarding the Paris flight illegally.
'All of these actions were taken in order to save my life,' Dali said in Russian through a translator.
Prosecutors say that on Nov. 24, 2024, Dali was able to get through security checkpoints at Bradley International Airport near Hartford, Connecticut, by hiding among other passengers.
She wasn't able to board a plane, but two days later, she successfully evaded security at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and boarded a plane bound for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
Prosecutors said Dali was initially rebuffed by a Transportation Security Administration official when she was unable to produce a boarding pass.
But she was able to get through a special security lane for airline employees by joining a large flight crew for Air Europa as they were screened and patted down.
At the gate for the Paris flight, surveillance video showed Dali sneaking past Delta Air Lines staff checking tickets by again blending into a large group of passengers.
On the plane, prosecutors say Dali hid in a bathroom for hours and wasn't discovered by Delta crew members until the plane was nearing Paris.
During her trial, Dali took the stand in her defense, maintaining she was never asked to show her boarding pass at the gate in JFK and had gone into the airplane bathroom because she was feeling sick.
She was initially released after her arrest, but was apprehended in Buffalo, New York, after authorities said she cut off her electronic monitor and attempted to enter Canada.
Prosecutors have said Dali also appears to have flown into Miami International Airport illegally.
In February 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents discovered her hiding in a bathroom in a secured area in the international arrivals zone.
Philip Marcelo, The Associated Press
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Globe and Mail
an hour ago
- Globe and Mail
Farmer worker dead, hundreds arrested in U.S. farm raid
A California farm worker died on Friday after U.S. immigration agents raided a cannabis nursery and arrested hundreds of workers, a worker advocacy group said, while a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to temporarily halt some of its most aggressive tactics in rounding up undocumented immigrants. Dozens of migrant-rights activists faced off with federal agents in rural Southern California on Thursday during the operation, the latest escalation of President Donald Trump's campaign for mass deportations of immigrants in the U.S. illegally. A California judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from racially profiling immigrants as it seeks deportation targets and from denying immigrants' right to access to lawyers during their detention. The Trump administration has made conflicting statements about whether immigration agents will target the farm labor workforce, about half of which is unauthorized to work in the U.S., according to government estimates. The Department of Homeland Security said approximately 200 people in the country illegally were arrested in the raid, which targeted two locations of the cannabis operation Glass House Farms. Agents also found 10 migrant minors at the farm, the department said in an emailed statement. The facility is under investigation for child labor violations, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott posted on X. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The scene at the farm on Thursday was chaotic, with federal agents in helmets and face masks using tear gas and smoke canisters on angry protesters, according to photos and videos of the scene. Several farm workers were injured and one died on Friday from injuries sustained after a 30-foot (9-meter) fall from a building during the raid, said Elizabeth Strater, national vice president of the United Farm Workers. The worker who died was identified as Jaime Alanis on a verified GoFundMe page created by his family, who said they were raising money to help his family and for his burial in Mexico. 'He was his family's provider. They took one of our family members. We need justice,' Alanis' family wrote on the GoFundMe page. U.S. citizens were detained during the raid and some are still unaccounted for, Strater said. DHS said its agents were not responsible for the man's death, saying that 'although he was not being pursued by law enforcement, this individual climbed up to the roof of a green house and fell 30 feet.' Agents immediately called for a medical evacuation, DHS said. The melee in southern California came as the Trump administration faces dozens of lawsuits across the country over its controversial tactics in tracking down undocumented immigrants for deportation. U.S. District Court Judge Maame Frimpong granted two temporary restraining orders blocking the administration from detaining immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally based on racial profiling and from denying detained people the right to speak with a lawyer. The ruling, made in response to a lawsuit from immigration advocacy groups, says the administration is violating the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution by conducting 'roving patrols' to sweep up suspected undocumented immigrants based on their being Latinos, and then denying them access to lawyers. 'What the federal government would have this Court believe -in the face of a mountain of evidence presented in this case - is that none of this is actually happening,' Frimpong wrote in her ruling. California Rural Legal Assistance, which provides legal services and other support to farm workers, is working on picking up checks for detained Glass House workers, said directing attorney Angelica Preciado. Some Glass House workers detained during the raid were only able to call family members after they signed voluntary deportation orders, and were told they could be jailed for life because they worked at a cannabis facility, Preciado said. DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin rejected those allegations, saying in an emailed statement that 'allegations that ICE or CBP agents denied detainees from calling legal assistance are unequivocally false.' Some citizen workers who were detained reported only being released from custody after deleting photos and videos of the raid from their phones, UFW President Teresa Romero said in a statement. 'These violent and cruel federal actions terrorize American communities, disrupt the American food supply chain, threaten lives and separate families,' Romero said. Farm groups have warned that mass deportation of farm workers would cripple the country's food supply chain. In her most recent comments, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said there would be 'no amnesty' for farm workers from deportation. Trump, though, has said migrant workers should be permitted to stay on farms.
CTV News
3 hours ago
- CTV News
Second arrest made in murder of 14-year-old boy
Two 16-year-old boys have now been charged with first-degree murder after turning themselves in following last weekend's fatal incident.
CTV News
4 hours ago
- CTV News
Trump says he wants to deport ‘the worst of the worst.' Government data tells another story
A volunteer sets up an art installation displaying names and faces of people who have been detained, deported, or sent to offshore camps during ICE raids in Southern California, at Olvera Street Plaza in Los Angeles, on Thursday, July 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) U.S. President Donald Trump has pledged to deport 'the worst of the worst.' He frequently speaks at public appearances about the countless 'dangerous criminals' — among them murderers, rapists and child predators — from around the world he says entered the U.S. illegally under the Biden administration. He promises to expel millions of migrants in the largest deportation program in American history to protect law-abiding citizens from the violent threats he says they pose. But government data around ongoing detentions tells a different story. There has been an increase of arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement since Trump began his second term, with reports of raids across the country. Yet the majority of people currently detained by ICE have no criminal convictions. Of those who do, relatively few have been convicted of high-level crimes — a stark contrast to the chilling nightmare Trump describes to support his border security agenda. 'There's a deep disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality,' said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-faculty director of the UCLA Law School's Center for Immigration Law and Policy. 'This administration, and also in the prior Trump administration, they consistently claim to be going after the worst of the worst and just talk about immigration enforcement as though it is all about going after violent, dangerous people with extensive criminal histories. And yet overwhelmingly, it's people they're targeting for arrest who have no criminal history of any kind.' The latest ICE statistics show that as of June 29, there were 57,861 people detained by ICE, 41,495 — 71.7 per cent — of whom had no criminal convictions. That includes 14,318 people with pending criminal charges and 27,177 who are subject to immigration enforcement, but have no known criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. Each detainee is assigned a threat level by ICE on a scale of 1 to 3, with one being the highest. Those without a criminal record are classified as having 'no ICE threat level.' As of June 23, the latest data available, 84 per cent of people detained at 201 facilities nationwide were not given a threat level. Another 7 per cent had been graded as a level 1 threat, 4 per cent were level 2 and 5 per cent were level 3. 'President Trump has justified this immigration agenda in part by making false claims that migrants are driving violent crime in the United States, and that's just simply not true,' said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice. 'There's no research and evidence that supports his claims.' Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, called the assessment that ICE isn't targeting immigrants with a criminal record 'false' and said that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has directed ICE 'to target the worst of the worst—including gang members, murderers, and rapists.' She counted detainees with convictions, as well as those with pending charges, as 'criminal illegal aliens.' Nonpublic data obtained by the Cato Institute shows that as of June 14, 65 per cent of the more than 204,000 people processed into the system by ICE since the start of fiscal year 2025, which began Oct. 1, 2024, had no criminal convictions. Of those with convictions, only 6.9 per cent had committed a violent crime, while 53 per cent had committed nonviolent crimes that fell into three main categories — immigration, traffic, or vice crimes. Total ICE arrests shot up at the end of May after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller gave the agency a quota of 3,000 arrests a day, up from 650 a day in the first five months of Trump's second term. ICE arrested nearly 30 per cent more people in May than in April, according to the Transactional Records Clearinghouse, or TRAC. That number rose again in June, by another 28 per cent. The Cato Institute found that between Feb. 8 and May 17, the daily average of 'noncriminals' processed into the system ranged from 421 to 454. In the following two weeks at the end of May, that number rose to 678 and then rose to 927 in the period from June 1 through 14. 'What you're seeing is this huge increase in funding to detain people, remove people, enforce immigration laws,' Eisen said. 'And what we're seeing is that a lot of these people back to sort of the original question you asked, these are not people who are dangerous.' Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said the administration is intensely focused on rooting out unvetted criminals who are in the country illegally. 'Just this week, the Administration conducted a successful operation rescuing children from labor exploitation at a marijuana facility in California, and continued arresting the worst of the worst – including murderers, pedophiles, gang members, and rapists,' she wrote in an email. 'Any suggestion that the Administration is not laser focused on these dangerous criminals is flat out wrong.' While most ICE detainees are not convicted criminals, there are detainees who have committed serious crimes. On Friday, the administration released information on five high-level offenders who had been arrested. During his campaign, Trump highlighted several cases where immigrants in the country illegally were arrested for horrific crimes. Among them: The killing of 22-year-old Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student who was slain last year by a Venezuelan man in the U.S. illegally. Jose Ibarra was found guilty of murder and other crimes in Riley's February 2024 killing and sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Ibarra is seeking a new trial. Trump in January signed into law the Laken Riley Act, which requires the detention of unauthorized immigrants accused of theft and violent crimes. Research has consistently found, however, that immigrants are not driving violent crime in the U.S. and that they actually commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. A 2023 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, reported that immigrants for 150 years have had lower incarceration rates than those born in the U.S. In fact, the rates have declined since 1960 — according to the paper, immigrants were 60 per cent less likely to be incarcerated. Experts say the false rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration creates real harm. 'It makes people in immigrant communities feel targeted and marginalized,' Arulanantham said. 'It creates more political and social space for hate in all its forms, including hate crime against immigrant communities.' Eisen noted that the impact extends to other communities as well. 'All Americans should want safe and thriving communities and this idea that the president of the United States is making misleading statements about the truth and distorting reality is not the way to deliver public safety,' she said. By Melissa Goldin.
