Donald Trump and his allies have built a mass deportation machine that runs on violence and disorder, and Americans are living with the fallout: chaos, fear, and cruelty tearing through their neighborhoods, hitting them at the register and on their block.
Last weekend in Austin, an ICE agent shot a Venezuelan delivery driver during a pursuit, leaving him seriously wounded, with a bullet still in his back. It’s the kind of encounter now playing out in schools, workplaces, and homes across the country, with no regard for who gets caught in the middle, and courts are already stepping in to stop some of these tactics. Trump, Stephen Miller, and their allies in Congress have flooded the agency with cash, deployed it with impunity, and pushed agents to hit arrest quotas at any cost. The result is the same dangerous chaos, over and over, in every part of the country.
Here’s what the record shows:
The Scale of the Crackdown
- ICE has arrested more than 253,000 people nationwide this year, according to an ABC News Data Team analysis of Deportation Data Project figures.
- At least 36 people have died in ICE detention in 2026, including Edwin Lopez Cornejo and Lianyong Wei – both within the last two months.
- The White House claims it has deported more than 605,000 people since Trump returned to office, but the most rigorous independent tracker, Syracuse University’s TRAC project, counts just 290,603 verified ICE removals, despite a massive surge in spending and personnel.
- Congress has handed DHS nearly $261 billion for immigration enforcement in under a year – $191 billion from the 2025 reconciliation bill and another $69.5 billion from the June 2026 Secure America Act. DHS says it’s on track to spend 75% of the first pot by the end of this month, even as no comprehensive public accounting exists of how it’s actually being used.
Children Are Being Detained, Deported, and Left Behind
- A Marshall Project and MSNow investigation found ICE detained more than 500 children age 3 and younger between January 2025 and March 2026, with roughly 25 babies and toddlers held on an average day.
- Stephen Miller is personally directing a whole-of-government push across at least five federal departments to speed up the removal of undocumented children. Nearly 200,000 children have been ordered removed by immigration judges since Trump returned to office, double the rate from before his term.
- Two Fort Worth teenagers, both U.S. citizens, spent nearly a year on their own after ICE arrested and deported their parents in August 2025. Nineteen-year-old Dulce Zepeda has been raising her 13-year-old sister and sold her mother’s jewelry to pay the bills.
- Earlier this month, ICE agents detained the parents of a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old minutes after school drop-off near John Marshall Elementary in San Diego – one of at least four ICE arrests near San Diego schools in a two-week span.
- Two 17-year-old U.S. citizens were pepper-sprayed and beaten by ICE agents in Alamo, Texas, with video showing an agent striking one teen repeatedly while he was on the ground. The pair had been on their way to enlist in the Marine Corps. A mother of one of the teens who spoke out about what happened to her son was summarily deported a week later.
Military Families Are Not Off Limits
- An Associated Press investigation released in August 2026 found the administration has detained more than 50 spouses and parents of active-duty troops, with at least six deported. DHS separately told Senate Democrats it detained 125 military veterans and arrested more than 150 immediate family members of service members in just over a year.
- Border Patrol arrested Luis Manuel Aviles, father of Navy sailor Joshua Aviles, in Key West while his son was nine months into deployment aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. “This is heartbreaking for me. I don’t know how I can mentally continue working 12+ hour days knowing that my dad is somewhere, possibly treated like a criminal,” Joshua wrote after learning of the arrest.
- Retired Staff Sgt. Wilmer Trujillo, a 20-year Army and Texas National Guard veteran who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, is fighting to bring home his wife, Arelys Barahona-Martinez. She has no criminal record but was detained during a routine ICE check-in. Their American son depends on her care for a serious medical condition.
- Army Sgt. Hedar Leonel Turcios Juarez’s wife was detained by ICE outside a Walmart in El Paso in front of their 6-year-old daughter and later deported to Honduras.
- Army Spc. Jasmine Hernandez enlisted in part to protect her undocumented father, but ICE detained him anyway. He remains at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona.
U.S. Citizens And Lawful Permanent Residents Are Being Wrongfully Targeted, Beaten, and Detained
- A federal judge in Alabama temporarily blocked ICE from conducting warrantless raids on construction sites after ruling agents likely violated the Fourth Amendment when they tackled U.S. citizen Leo Garcia Venegas, rejected his valid REAL ID, and held him anyway – three separate times.
- ICE detained Venkata Vasamsetty, a North Carolina special-needs teacher who’d held a green card for 13 years, even after a judge dismissed the government’s case against her months earlier. Her legal team says she’s insulin-dependent and didn’t receive proper diabetic care while detained.
- ICE agents tackled and struck an Evanston, Illinois man after mistaking him for someone else, leaving him with head, neck, and dental injuries. Agents released him once they confirmed he was a U.S. citizen.
- An 18-year-old Norfolk woman says agents handcuffed and detained her in front of her 4-year-old sister after claiming her valid Virginia ID was fake – even after her 15-year-old sister rushed over with her birth certificate.
- A 19-year-old Boise resident and U.S. citizen says ICE detained him and used him as bait to lure his father after he stopped to record an enforcement operation.
- ICE agents pinned a U.S. citizen Georgia man against a jet bridge wall and handcuffed him at the Atlanta airport – after he’d already passed through TSA and facial recognition. The detention was a case of mistaken identity based on a shared name and birthdate.
- During “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota, ICE arrested 131 U.S. citizens on allegations of assaulting federal officers, though the vast majority of those cases ultimately collapsed in court, according to the agency’s own acting director.
The bottom line: This is what a deportation system without guardrails looks like: children detained, military families torn apart, and people gunned down on their own streets. No agency tasked with public safety should operate this way. Congress and the administration must rein in ICE’s tactics, restore oversight and accountability, and build an immigration system that treats people with basic humanity.
