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MORE THAN 170 U.S. CITIZENS HAVE BEEN HELD BY IMMIGRATION AGENTS  
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Nicole Foy
October 16, 2025
ProPublica
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_ “If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S.
citizen,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the
individual go.” But in fact Americans have been dragged, tackled,
beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. _

Leonardo Garcia Venegas was detained by immigration agents while
filming a raid on his worksite, despite having a REAL ID on him and
telling the officers he was a citizen, source: screen grab

 

Reporting Highlights

* Americans Detained: The government doesn’t track how many
citizens are held by immigration agents. We found more than 170 cases
this year where citizens were detained at raids and protests.
* Held Incommunicado: More than 20 citizens have reported being held
for over a day without being able to call their loved ones or a
lawyer. In some cases their families couldn’t find them.
* Cases Wilted: Agents have arrested about 130 Americans, including
a dozen elected officials, for allegedly interfering with or
assaulting officers, yet those cases were often dropped.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked
on this story.

When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los
Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice
Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned.

“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S.
citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote
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promptly let the individual go.”

But that is far from the reality many citizens have experienced.
Americans have been dragged
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tackled [[link removed]], beaten
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tased [[link removed]] and shot
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by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on
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They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear
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At least three citizens
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were pregnant
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when agents detained them
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One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off
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while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched
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About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day
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without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones.

Videos of U.S. citizens being mistreated by immigration agents have
filled social media feeds, but there is little clarity on the overall
picture. The government does not track how often
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immigration agents hold Americans.

So ProPublica created its own count.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
Sign up to receive our biggest stories
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soon as they’re published.

We compiled and reviewed every case we could find of agents holding
citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or
protests. While the tally is almost certainly incomplete, we found
more than 170 such incidents during the first nine months of President
Donald Trump’s second administration.

Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with
cancer. That includes four who were held for weeks with their
undocumented mother and without access to the family’s attorney
until a congresswoman intervened.
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Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited
circumstances. Agents can hold people whom they reasonably suspect are
in the country illegally
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We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned
their citizenship. They were almost all Latino.

Immigration agents also can arrest citizens
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who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases
of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused
of assaulting or impeding officers.

These cases have often wilted under scrutiny. In nearly 50 instances
that we have identified so far, charges have never been filed or the
cases were dismissed. Our count found a handful of citizens have
pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.

Among the detentions in which allegations have not stuck, masked
agents pointed a gun at, pepper sprayed and punched
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a young man who had filmed them searching for his relative. In
another, agents knocked over and then tackled
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owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. His lawyer said he
was held for 12 hours and wasn’t given medical attention despite
having broken ribs in the incident and having recently had heart
surgery. In a third case, agents grabbed and handcuffed a woman on her
way to work who was caught up in a chaotic raid on street vendors. In
a complaint filed against the government, she described being held for
more than two days
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without being allowed to contact the outside world for much of that
time. (The Supreme Court has ruled
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generally the longest federal officials can hold Americans without
charges.)

In response to questions from ProPublica, the Department of Homeland
Security said agents do not racially profile or target Americans.
“We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote
spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

A top immigration official recently acknowledged agents do consider
someone’s looks. “How do they look compared to, say, you?”
Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino said to a white reporter
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in Chicago.

The White House told ProPublica that anyone who assaults federal
immigration agents would be prosecuted. “Interfering with law
enforcement and assaulting law enforcement is a crime and anyone,
regardless of immigration status, will be held accountable,” said
the Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson. “Officers act heroically
to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens, and protect
American communities with the utmost professionalism.”

A spokesperson for Kavanaugh did not return an emailed request for
comment.

Tallying the number of Americans detained by immigration agents is
inherently messy and incomplete. The government has long ignored
recommendations [[link removed]] for it to
track such cases, even as the U.S. has a history of detaining and even
deporting citizens
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including during the Obama administration and Trump’s first term.

We compiled cases by sifting through both English- and
Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media
reports. We did not include arrests of protesters by local police or
the National Guard. Nor did we count cases in which arrests were made
at a later date after a judicial process. That included cases of some
people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks
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flare to start a fire
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Experts say that Americans appear to be getting picked up more now as
a result of the government doing something that it hasn’t for
decades [[link removed]-]: large-scale
immigration sweeps across the country, often in communities that do
not want them.

In earlier administrations, deportation agents used intelligence to
target specific individuals, said Scott Shuchart, a top immigration
official in the Biden, Obama and first Trump administrations. “The
new idea is to use those resources unintelligently” — with
officers targeting communities or workplaces where undocumented
immigrants may be.

When federal officers roll through communities in the way the Supreme
Court permitted, the constitutional rights of both citizens and
noncitizens are inevitably violated, argued David Bier, the director
of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He recently
analyzed how sweeps in Los Angeles
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have led to racial profiling. “If the government can grab someone
because he’s a certain demographic group that’s correlated with
some offense category, then they can do that in any context.”

Cody Wofsy, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, put it
even more starkly. “Any one of us could be next.”

When Kavanaugh issued his opinion that immigration agents can consider
race and other factors, the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices
strongly dissented. They warned that citizens risked being
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“grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of
their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing
manual labor.”

Leonardo Garcia Venegas appears to have been just such a case. He was
working at a construction site in coastal Alabama when he saw masked
immigration agents from Homeland Security Investigations hop a fence
and run by a “No trespassing” sign. Garcia Venegas recalled that
they moved toward the Latino workers, ignoring the white and Black
workers.

Garcia Venegas began filming after his undocumented brother asked
agents for a warrant. In response, the footage shows, agents yanked
his brother to the ground, shoving his face into wet concrete. Garcia
Venegas kept filming until officers grabbed him too and knocked his
phone to the ground.

Other co-workers filmed what happened next, as immigration agents
twisted the 25-year-old’s arms. They repeatedly tried to take him to
the ground while he yelled, “I’m a citizen!”

Officers pulled out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to those
legally in the U.S. But the agents dismissed it as fake. Officers held
Garcia Venegas handcuffed for more than an hour. His brother was later
deported.

Garcia Venegas was so shaken that he took two weeks off of work. Soon
after he returned, he was working alone inside a nearly built house
listening to music on his headphones when he sensed someone watching
him. A masked immigration agent was standing in the bedroom doorway.

This time, agents didn’t tackle him. But they again dismissed his
REAL ID. And then they held him to check his citizenship. Garcia
Venegas says agents also held two other workers who had legal status.

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Garcia
Venegas’ detentions, or to a federal lawsuit he filed last month.
The agency has previously defended
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the agents’ conduct, saying he “physically got in between agents
and the subject” during the first incident. The footage does not
show that, and Garcia Venegas was never charged with obstruction or
any other crime.

Garcia Venegas’ lawyers at the nonprofit Institute for Justice hope
others may join his suit. After all, the reverberations of the
immigration sweeps are being felt widely. Garcia Venegas said he knows
of 15 more raids on nearby construction sites, and the industry along
his portion of the Gulf Coast is struggling for lack of workers.

Kavanaugh’s assurances hold little weight for Garcia Venegas. He’s
a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, who speaks little English and works
in construction. Even with his REAL ID and Social Security card in his
wallet, Garcia Venegas worries that immigration agents will keep
harassing him.

“If they decide they want to detain you,” he said. “You’re not
going to get out of it.”

George Retes was among the citizens arrested despite immigration
agents appearing to know his legal status. He also disappeared into
the system for days without being able to contact anyone on the
outside.

The only clue Retes’ family had at first was a brief call he managed
to make on his Apple Watch with his hands handcuffed behind his back.
He quickly told his wife that “ICE” had arrested him during a
massive raid and protest
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on the marijuana farm where he worked as a security guard.

Still, Retes’ family couldn’t find him. They called every law
enforcement agency they could think of. No one gave them any answers.

Eventually, they spotted a TikTok video showing Retes driving to work
and slowly trying to back up as he’s caught between agents and
protestors. Through the tear gas and dust, his family recognized
Retes’ car and the veteran decal on his window. The full video shows
a man — Retes — splayed on the ground surrounded by agents.

Retes’ family went to the farm, where local TV reporters were
interviewing families who couldn’t find their loved ones.

“They broke his window
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they pepper sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor,”
his sister told a reporter
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between sobs. “We don’t know what to do. We’re just asking to
let my brother go. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran,
disabled citizen. It says it on his car.”

Retes was held for three days without being given an opportunity to
make a call. His family only learned where he had been after his
release. His leg had been cut from the broken glass, Retes told
ProPublica, and lingering pepper spray burned his hands.He tried to
soothe them by filling sandwich bags with water.

Retes recalled that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t
care.” He said one DHS official laughed at him, saying he
shouldn’t have come to work that day. “They still sent me away to
jail.” He added that cases like his show Kavanaugh was “wrong
completely.”

DHS did not answer our questions about Retes. It did respond on X
after Retes wrote an op-ed
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last month in the San Francisco Chronicle. An agency post
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arrested for assault after he “became violent and refused to comply
with law enforcement.” Yet Retes had been released without any
charges. Indeed, he says he was never told why he was arrested.

The Department of Justice has encouraged agents to arrest anyone
interfering with immigration operations, twice
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enforcement to prioritize cases of those suspected of obstructing,
interfering with or assaulting immigration officials.

But the government’s claims in those cases have often not been borne
out
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Daniel Montenegro was filming a raid at a Van Nuys, California, Home
Depot with other day-laborer advocates this summer when, he told
ProPublica, he was tackled by several officers who injured his back.

Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who oversaw the LA raids
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and has since taken similar operations to cities like Sacramento
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and Chicago, tweeted out the names and photos
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Montenegro and three others, accusing them of using homemade tire
spikes to disable vehicles.

“I had no idea where that story came from,” Montenegro told
ProPublica. “I didn’t find out until we were released. People were
like, ‘We saw you on Twitter and the news and you guys are
terrorists, you were planning to slash tires.’ I never saw those
spike tire-popper things.”

Officials have not charged Montenegro or the others with any crimes.
(Bovino did not respond to a request for comment, while DHS defended
him in a statement to ProPublica: “Chief Bovino’s success in
getting the worst of the worst out of the country speaks for
itself.”)

The government’s cases are sometimes so muddied that it’s unclear
why agents actually arrested a citizen.

Andrea Velez was charged with assaulting an officer after she was
accidentally dropped off for work during a raid on street vendors in
downtown Los Angeles. She said in a federal complaint that officers
repeatedly assumed she did not speak English. Federal officers later
requested access to her phone in an attempt to prove she was colluding
with another citizen arrested that day
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who was charged with assault
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She was one of the Americans held for more than two days.

DHS did not respond to our questions about Velez, but it has
previously accused her of assaulting an officer. A federal judge has
dismissed the charges.

Other citizens also said officers accused them of crimes and suddenly
questioned their citizenship — including a man arrested after
filming Border Patrol agents
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a truck window, and a pregnant woman who tried to stop officers
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from taking her boyfriend.

The prospects for any significant reckoning over agents’ conduct,
even against citizens, are dim. The paths for suing federal agents are
even more limited than they are for local police. And that’s if
agents can even be identified. What’s more, the administration has
gutted the office that investigates allegations of abuse by agents
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“The often-inadequate guardrails that we have for state and local
government — even those guardrails are nonexistent when you’re
talking about federal overreach,” said Joanna Schwartz, a professor
at UCLA School of Law.

More than 50 members of Congress have also written to the
administration, demanding details about Americans who’ve been
detained. One is Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat. After
trying to question Noem about detained citizens, federal agents
grabbed Padilla, pulled him to the ground and handcuffed him
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defended the agents, saying they “acted appropriately.”

_Nicole Foy is ProPublica’s Ancil Payne Fellow, reporting on
immigration and labor. Do you have information or videos to share
about the administration’s immigration crackdown? Contact Nicole Foy
via email at [email protected] or on Signal at nicolefoy.27
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