“I’ve never seen so many U.S. citizen encounters in all my years,” one former ICE official admitted
More than 500 U.S. citizens have been targeted and detained under the Trump administration’s bloody mass deportation agenda, including dozens of American citizen children, according to an updated tally by ProPublica. “Collectively, these cases show that as the administration has relentlessly pursued immigrants, federal agents have run roughshod over the constitutional rights of citizens too,” the report said.
In one example, federal officials acknowledged separating and detaining four U.S. citizen kids following a military-style raid on a Chicago apartment building last year. Federal agents indiscriminately terrorized American children during this operation, rounding up kids as young as one at gunpoint. “Agents marched them outside in their pajamas and separated the father. One of the boys, now 9, had a panic attack,” the outlet reported in May.
ICE ABUSES AND DEPORTS AMERICAN CITIZEN CHILDREN
ProPublica’s updated tally – collected through “scouring social media, court records and local media to confirm and compile incidents,” the outlet said – reveals that the administration’s mass deportation agenda has targeted at least 70 American children and teens, some of whom were handcuffed or zip-tied.
“DHS said that ICE doesn’t zip-tie or restrain children, or separate families,” the report said. “But agents handcuffed a 15-year-old with disabilities outside a school in Los Angeles in 2025. The agents said they mistook the teen for an alleged gang member.” As we noted in part one of our two part timeline of the administration’s abuses of power, when agents finally uncuffed the U.S. citizen boy, his mom said they tried to spin their harassment into a positive. “[One agent] was like, ‘Oh, we confused him with somebody else, but look at the bright side: You’re going to have an exciting story to tell your friends when you go back to school,’” she said. “What’s exciting about getting guns pointed at you?”
In one of the most devastating revelations from the updated tally, of the “roughly” one dozen American citizens deported from their own country, most have been children. Last year, advocates decried the administration’s deportation of a four-year-old U.S. citizen child with stage four cancer.
U.S. CITIZEN: ‘I COULDN’T PROCESS WHAT THEY WERE DOING TO ME’
Mass deportation officials are also outright ignoring official documentation, as part of the administration’s un-American campaign to determine who does and who doesn’t belong. U.S. citizen Brian Morales Garcia told ProPublica that when he was pulled over in Texas earlier this year, he told officers right off the bat that he was an American. They refused to allow him to get his birth certificate and then deported him. It took a lawsuit for Morales Garcia to be able to come back home to America, the report said.
“‘I couldn’t process what they were doing to me,’ Morales Garcia told ProPublica. When he was first stopped in Texas, he had told officers, ‘I’m a citizen, it’s fine.’”
Earlier this year, mass deportation officials falsely claimed that Maryland-born Dulce Consuelo Díaz Morales had a fake U.S. birth certificate and kept her detained for nearly a month. “They’re denying that any of her birth certificates, which are from Laurel, Maryland, her records of immunization, medical records — they’re denying the authenticity of them,” her attorney said. “It is something I’ve never encountered.” Díaz Morales would ultimately be shuttled around five different detention centers across the country, including a Louisiana camp where a woman suffered a stillbirth after being denied care last year.
TALLY OF AMERICANS TARGETED UNDER MASS DEPORTATION IS LIKELY AN UNDERCOUNT
Despite these verified arrests and deportations, the administration continues to insist that we shouldn’t believe our eyes. “The Trump administration says none of this is happening,” ProPublica reports, noting official statements claiming that mass deportation officials are not arresting U.S. citizens “by mistake,” are not conducting “indiscriminate” stops, are not restraining children, and are not racially profiling Americans. But at the same time, the administration cites Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s notorious opinion last year “stating that agents can consider factors like ‘apparent ethnicity’ when making stops,” the report said. This directly ties into how Kavanaugh stops are weaponized to detain U.S. citizens in every part of the country.
ProPublica’s updated tally is likely an undercount, the report notes. “For instance, witnesses estimate that more than 200 citizens were detained in an Idaho raid last fall, but we only included the 30 citizens who we were able to identify.” Masked officers from this raid – which involved participation from at least eight local, state and federal agencies including the FBI and ICE – allegedly hurled racist slurs at Latinos and zip-tied U.S. citizen children, which officials initially tried to deny but then acknowledged following photo evidence.
FORMER ICE OFFICIAL: ‘I’VE NEVER SEEN SO MANY U.S. CITIZEN ENCOUNTERS IN ALL MY YEARS’
In a statement, U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM) said that the tally proves that “nobody is safe” under mass deportation and that the goal is to “terrorize” Latino and immigrant communities. “Our government has handcuffed, hauled away, and locked up more than 500 American citizens,” she said. “Citizens have been deported — including Brian Garcia Morales, who spent four months trying to get home.”
Even a former ICE official expressed astonishment at the scale of arrests targeting Americans. “I’ve never seen so many U.S. citizen encounters in all my years,” Darius Reeves told ProPublica. “It’s an embarrassment.”
