ICE agents detained at least 506 U.S. citizens between January 2025 and September 2026, and roughly a dozen of them, most of them children, were removed from the country, according to a database published Tuesday by the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica.
The count is about three times the figure ProPublica reported a year ago, when its first tally in October 2025 found more than 170 Americans held by immigration officers. The federal government does not track how often its agents detain citizens, ProPublica reported, so the newsroom built its own list from court records, local news coverage, English- and Spanish-language social media, and its own interviews. The database included a case only if at least two sources confirmed it.
The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly denied that agents arrest citizens by mistake or profile people by race. In a statement to ProPublica responding to the findings, the department defended its officers, saying its operations are “highly targeted” and that anyone who obstructs agents can expect to be arrested.
ProPublica’s reporting team counted anyone held against their will for any length of time: handcuffed, held at gunpoint, or blocked from leaving. Courts treat a person as detained when they are not free to go.
More than 100 of the 506 were stopped because agents doubted they were U.S. citizens, and ProPublica found that nearly all of them were people of color. Willy Wender Aceituno, a naturalized citizen in Charlotte, North Carolina, who told the newsroom he voted for President Donald Trump twice, was pulled through his broken truck window by Border Patrol agents last November and pinned to a parking lot. DHS has said he refused commands. The ACLU is suing on his behalf.
The tally also includes at least 70 children and teenagers, about 20 of whom were handcuffed or zip-tied, despite DHS statements that ICE does not restrain children. ProPublica documented a teenager with disabilities handcuffed outside a Los Angeles school after agents mistook him for a gang suspect, and more than a dozen American children held during a raid at an Idaho horse track.
Thirty-six citizens were held a full day or longer with no way to reach a lawyer or relative. In one case, a Baltimore woman was kept for 25 days and spent Christmas apart from her 5-year-old son.
The most severe outcome in the database is removal from the United States. ProPublica identified about a dozen American children deported alongside immigrant parents, in some cases over the parents’ objections. DHS told the newsroom that parents are given the choice to take their children or leave them with a designated caregiver.
One adult citizen was also expelled. Brian Morales Garcia was in a car stopped in central Texas this spring, according to ProPublica. Officers rejected his statement that he was American and would not let him retrieve his birth certificate. He was held four days without a phone call, then sent to Mexico. He had told the officers at the outset, “I’m a citizen, it’s fine.” After he sued, he re-entered the country last month using that same birth certificate. In earlier court filings, the government disputed his citizenship.
The largest group in the database, roughly 300 people, were citizens accused of assaulting or obstructing agents, about 130 of them at protests. ProPublica searched federal court dockets for every named adult and found only 137 citizens charged with federal crimes. Nearly half of those cases were later dropped or dismissed. About three dozen people had been sentenced to prison or probation and another three dozen cases were pending as of Sept. 15. The newsroom also noted cases where protesters did assault officers, including a guilty plea for throwing cinder block pieces at an agent.
At least 63 citizens were detained while recording agents. In Brownsville, Texas, in July 2025, three siblings, including a 14-year-old, were taken into custody after they stopped to film an arrest. They have filed damage claims against the government.
Agents also entered homes without a judge’s warrant. In January 2026 in Oakdale, Minnesota, federal officers broke down the door of a family looking for a son who did not live there, briefly holding 20-year-old Jeyli Salguero, a citizen, and her mother. Agents detained her father, a TPS holder who was later released, and her undocumented sister, who was deported to El Salvador. DHS has asked a court to dismiss the family’s lawsuit, saying the home-entry policy is paused.
ProPublica showed footage and case details to former immigration officers. Darius Reeves, who ran ICE’s Baltimore field office until his retirement last year, told the newsroom he had never seen so many encounters with citizens in his career and called it “an embarrassment.” Eric Balliet, a two-decade veteran of Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol who also served in Trump’s first term, described the cases as terrible.
ProPublica calls its figure an undercount.
It included only people it could identify by name, except where DHS confirmed detentions. Witnesses estimated that more than 200 citizens were held during last fall’s Idaho raid, but the database lists the 30 the newsroom could name. ICE itself told Congress that 131 citizens were arrested for interfering with officers during Minnesota’s Operation Metro Surge, while ProPublica could catalog fewer than 100. In Illinois, DHS said there were no administrative arrests of citizens during Operation Midway Blitz, but the database shows more than 120 detained there at the height of that surge.
The count also excludes citizens shot, tackled, or pepper-sprayed without being detained, people arrested at airports and borders, and more than 30 Americans who reported racial profiling but were not clearly held.
ProPublica’s database lists cases in 32 states and Washington, D.C., including Massachusetts. Its published findings do not break out cases by national origin, so CTN could not determine how many Haitian Americans appear in the count.
Encounters reported in Haitian and Massachusetts communities match the patterns ProPublica describes. In Springfield, Ohio, home to one of the country’s largest recent Haitian communities, Beaubrun Charles Ardouin, a naturalized citizen who drives workers to their jobs, told the Springfield News-Sun that officers pulled his van over on Aug. 14 and said it was an “immigration check.” Ardouin said he identified himself as a citizen, and officers then demanded identification from his five passengers. He said they threatened to break his windows if he did not unlock the doors. All five passengers, Haitian men who told agents they had pending asylum applications, were taken into custody. A University of Dayton law professor called the stop questionable. DHS did not respond to the News-Sun’s questions.
Ardouin was not reported to have been held himself. Cases like his fall outside ProPublica’s count, which included only citizens held against their will.
In Massachusetts, ICE officers handcuffed Hugo Monteiro, a 31-year-old naturalized citizen from Revere, outside Cambridge District Court in Medford in May 2025 after mistaking him for someone else, according to Boston 25 News and The Harvard Crimson. He was released roughly 15 minutes later, once agents checked his passport. Monteiro told Boston 25 that he still supported the agency’s work.
DHS has not released its own count of citizens detained by its officers. ProPublica said it asked the department about every incident in its database.
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