American citizens have been increasingly caught up in the immigration crackdown: a 4-year-old boy with cancer deported to Honduras, a doctoral student filming a raid in Hollywood detained for 25 hours, an Illinois man held for 10 hours in detention.
Increasingly frustrated that the aggressive tactics are sweeping up American citizens, Democratic members of Congress have been pressing for a full accounting of the citizens detained.
On Friday morning 49 Congress members, led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), and Reps. Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) and Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), sent letters to the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari and two other immigration oversight offices asking them to open an investigation into encounters with American citizens and “determine whether DHS is violating Americans’ civil rights.”
“ICE policy makes clear that, by law ‘ICE cannot assert its civil immigration enforcement authority to arrest and/or detain a U.S. citizen,” the legislators wrote. “However, in recent high-profile cases, ICE has erroneously arrested U.S. citizens, at times appearing to use violent physical force.”
“ICE has even deported U.S. citizens: in multiple cases, ICE has deported U.S. citizen children along with their undocumented parents, reportedly against the families’ wishes. Particularly in Latino and Native American communities, Americans increasingly fear that their citizenship will not protect them from being swept up in DHS’s immigration enforcement activities.”
For months Democratic members of Congress have been demanding the Trump administration answer pointed questions, to little avail.
The letters were sent to Cuffari, Troup Hemenway, acting officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and Joseph Guy, director for the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman. The latter two of those offices have been hollowed out under the Trump administration, which had attempted to abolish them completely.
“The administration owes the American people answers, particularly as Republicans in Congress just approved record funding for immigration enforcement, which threatens to put even more citizens at risk,” said Warren.
The Trump administration has adamantly defended its actions.
“DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted and are not resulting in the arrest of U.S. citizens,” said department spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin in response to The Times’ inquiry about the number of Americans detained, arrested and deported under the administration.
“We do our due diligence. We know who we are targeting ahead of time,” she said. “If and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, our law enforcement are trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine status and removability. “
In the case of Romero, the 4-year old with Stage-4 cancer, DHS said at the time that his mother had a final deportation order and said she chose to be deported with her children. Her lawyers contend the mother, who was arrested during a check-in with immigration officials in Louisiana, was never given a choice and was prohibited from talking to lawyers. They filed a lawsuit last month, along with another mother who also was deported with her 2-year-old citizen daughter.
Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, a policy expert at the National Immigration Law Center, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement used to publish data related to citizens booked-in and arrested, but that was mandated through appropriations and is no longer required.
Currently available data show that in fiscal year 2025 there were no citizens deported and seven arrested. There were 3,700 parents of citizens removed and 6,341 arrested. The data are aggregated and do not show the location, reason for enforcement, outcome or length of detention — as lawmakers are asking for.
Whitlock suspects the data are an undercount based on the number of cases she has seen in the media.
The immigration crackdown is expected to expand considerably. Congress approved a $170-billion budget for border and immigration enforcement earlier this summer, giving the agency the largest boost in generations. President Trump wants 10,000 new U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and 3,000 new Border Patrol agents to be hired.
Immigrant advocates fear with more capabilities, enforcement levels will explode and exacerbate encounters with citizens. Already they said, the White House has given agencies wider latitude than they had before.
“We are seeing the agency unleashed like never before,” said Jesse Franzblau, associate director of policy of National Immigrant Justice Center. “ICE is just picking up people, whoever is nearby and there is a lot of racial profiling happening.”
He points to Julio Noriega, a 54-year-old U.S. citizen who was among those picked up in sweeps in early January in Chicago and placed in handcuffs.
Noriega had been looking for work when agents picked him up and took him to an ICE processing center before looking inside his wallet, according to court documents. The Center and the ACLU of Illinois attorneys said he was detained for 10 hours and then released without his arrest ever being documented. Lawyers argued DHS violated a 2022 settlement requiring agents have probable cause to believe that a person is in the country illegally before arresting them and then reporting it.
“We don’t have any transparency about warrantless arrests, we don’t have transparency about how many U.S. citizens are being swept up and being arrested, “ he said. The data on citizen detained, he said, aren’t always being captured.
“We don’t know how many U.S. citizens are being detained beyond the media accounts,” he said. “It’s incumbent on these agencies to produce this information. These are serious issues.”
The letter asks the oversight bodies to provide by Sept. 5 detailed information on stops, arrests, detentions and deportation of citizens including a breakdown by month, location, reason for enforcement action, outcome, and length of time in ICE custody.
“It should send chills down everyone’s spine if just one U.S. citizen is detained without due process during an ICE raid,” said Padilla. “This is not a question of rights of immigrants versus rights of Americans, it’s about ensuring that due process is afforded and protected for everyone, which the 5th Amendment guarantees.”
Debra Fleischman, the former chief of staff at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said verifying somebody’s citizenship can sometimes be complicated, but officials should be explaining how that works.
“It’s not necessarily automatically inappropriate to have arrested or held a U.S. citizen, but they certainly should not be deporting them,” she said.
“My guess is that they are encountering U.S citizens much more often than they have historically just because the scope of their interior enforcement activities are so much larger than they ever have been.”
Eduardo Casas, an attorney for Job Garcia, the doctoral student who was detained after filming a raid at a Home Depot in Hollywood, said he has been asking immigration officials for information about citizens detained and arrested during the Los Angeles sweeps this summer, but has so far been rebuffed.
“They are not being transparent,” said Eduardo Casas, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. “We know that citizens are being caught up in this broader enforcement paradigm that centers around mass deportation. The way they try to accomplish mass deportation is by pushing the boundaries of civil liberties in the same way that they’ve done for people like Job.”
Casas said he interviewed other citizens present during raids and a pattern emerged. People filming angered agents, who then arrested them and took them to detention centers.
“They’ll take people as far as detention centers, and then say that you may be charged, and then they let them go,” he said. “It’s also not always a very formal process.”
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