Immigrants who stopped eating to protest conditions inside ICE detention faced physical restraint and invasive medical procedures imposed against their will. During 2025 and 2026, the Department of Homeland Security sought federal court authority to force treatment on at least 10 detained hunger strikers. Three people underwent involuntary procedures, two more were probably subjected to them, and five ended their hunger strikes as forced treatment approached.

One Kurdish asylum seeker held at the Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Los Fresnos, Texas, endured the longest documented period of force-feeding: nearly eight months beginning in May 2025 and ending only when the government deported him. Another hunger striker at Port Isabel was subjected to involuntary treatment, including force-feeding, for nearly six months between September 2025 and March 2026. At the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, a third detained person underwent forced procedures for nearly three months.

The other reviewed cases show how widely the threat extended. Court filings involving the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Washington and the Montgomery Processing Center near Houston indicate that two additional hunger strikers were probably subjected to forced treatment. Five more detained people ended their hunger strikes immediately before the government was expected to begin involuntary procedures.

The procedures included nasal-tube feeding, forced intravenous hydration, involuntary blood draws and urine collection. Force-feeding requires medical personnel to push a tube through a person’s nose and down the throat before pumping liquid nutrition into the stomach. The procedure can cause significant harm to the nose, esophagus and internal organs, along with lasting physical and psychological trauma.

These people had stopped eating to protest detention conditions and demand movement in unresolved immigration cases. They could not leave the facilities, choose independent doctors, control transfers or compel ICE to answer their complaints. Refusing food became one of the few remaining ways to force attention toward what was happening to them inside detention.

DHS answered by asking federal judges to authorize physical restraint and involuntary treatment. ICE officers and detention medical staff prepared declarations about the hunger strikers’ physical conditions, and federal prosecutors used those declarations to seek emergency orders. By the time DHS moved against them, some detainees were already weak, exhausted, losing weight and facing medical problems caused by prolonged food refusal.

In six reviewed proceedings, the detained immigrants had no legal representation while the government sought authority to impose treatment on them. Some also faced limited English proficiency and little familiarity with the federal court system. They confronted prosecutors, medical declarations and detention records without lawyers able to challenge ICE’s account, explain the conditions driving their protest or seek independent medical review.

The documented emergency process allowed federal judges to grant government requests before detained immigrants could object in court. Once an order was signed, detention officers could restrain them while medical workers performed procedures they had rejected. Judicial authorization gave DHS and ICE the power to enforce treatment; it did not create consent.

The Kurdish asylum seeker at Port Isabel remained trapped inside that process for nearly eight months. ICE controlled his confinement and medical access throughout the documented period in which he was subjected to force-feeding. His ordeal ended not because the conditions he protested were resolved, but because the government deported him.

Five other hunger strikers stopped refusing food as the same machinery closed in around them. They faced the prospect of guards holding them down while medical personnel inserted tubes, needles or catheters. Their protests ended under the immediate threat of physical overpowering inside facilities they could not leave.

DHS filings showed that detention control drove the government’s response. Officials warned that continuing hunger strikes could lower staff morale, generate resistance and disrupt facility operations. ICE treated detained immigrants’ refusal of food as a threat to institutional order and used federal courts to obtain the force needed to end that resistance.

Medical personnel were part of that enforcement chain. Doctors working inside ICE detention submitted declarations supporting involuntary procedures, while other medical workers performed or prepared to perform them under guard restraint. The hunger strikers’ bodies became the site where detention authority, federal prosecution and medical power converged.

United Nations special rapporteurs have condemned the forced feeding of hunger strikers as cruel and inhuman. Medical ethicist Dr. Matthew Wynia said that forcing treatment on a mentally competent person who refuses it violates medical ethics and bodily autonomy. Their conclusions describe the harm imposed on detained people whose refusal was overridden by the same government controlling their confinement.

DHS used forced treatment against hunger strikers before Trump returned to office, including during the Biden administration. Under Trump, the practice continued as immigration arrests and detention expanded, exposing more people to facilities where prolonged confinement and unresolved cases can drive detainees to hunger strikes.

For the detained immigrants, the underlying conditions remained unanswered. One man endured nearly eight months of force-feeding before deportation. Another lived under involuntary procedures for almost six months. Others entered court without lawyers or stopped protesting as guards and medical personnel prepared to restrain them. ICE never resolved the confinement conditions or legal uncertainty that drove their hunger strikes. It used court orders and medical force to silence the protest their bodies were carrying.

ICE detention strips immigrants of movement, medical autonomy, legal access, and even the right to protest what is being done to them. Americans Against ICE keeps those people at the center of the public record and exposes the agencies, courts, contractors, and medical personnel responsible for the harm.

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His mother, María Cornejo, still does not know what Delaney Hall personnel did after Edwin reported those symptoms. She does not know whether an examination occurred, who conducted it, what was documented, whether staff administered his medication, or how much time passed before anyone called for emergency help. ICE controlled Edwin’s detention. GEO Group and Delaney Hall personnel controlled his daily medical access and the response to his symptoms.

Edwin had reportedly lived in the United States for 20 years after arriving as a child. ICE detained him on June 18 while he was on his way to work. He was also the father of a 12-year-old girl who was denied a visit with him shortly before his death. ICE detention took Edwin from his job and community, then Delaney Hall separated his daughter from him before she lost her father permanently.

María said Edwin lived with diabetes, high blood pressure, and seizures. During their final call, he told her that he was not feeling well and expected to be examined. “He said his right hand and face were numb,” she recalled. The next news his family received was that an ambulance had taken him from Delaney Hall and that he was dead.

“I do not want this to go unpunished,” María said. Her demand begins with the records that can establish what happened: whether an examination occurred, what symptoms staff documented, what medication Edwin was prescribed, whether Delaney Hall administered it as directed, when emergency services were contacted, and what decisions personnel made before the ambulance arrived.

Status Coup reported being told that Delaney Hall deprived Edwin of his medication. María said she does not know whether he was receiving it. The medication-administration record can establish what was prescribed, when doses were scheduled, what staff administered, and whether any medication was missed or withheld.

Civil immigration detention stripped Edwin of medical autonomy. He could not go to a pharmacy, contact his own physician, drive to an emergency room, or remove himself from the personnel controlling his access to care. ICE placed him in detention under GEO Group’s control. GEO Group and Delaney Hall personnel then controlled his access to medication, examination, emergency transport, and outside treatment.

His daughter’s denied visit belongs in the record of what Delaney Hall took from his family. The facility controlled whether Edwin could see his child while he was alive and denied that contact shortly before his death. His daughter lost the chance to see her father, and his family lost the opportunity to witness his condition for themselves.

María says neither ICE nor GEO Group has explained Edwin’s final hours or provided her with the detention and medical information they control. His mother has been left to reconstruct her son’s death from their final phone call, an ambulance transport, and the symptoms he described before he died.

Edwin’s death follows the death of Jean Wilson Brutus after detention at Delaney Hall in December 2025. After Brutus died, immigrant-rights advocates demanded an independent investigation into medical care at the facility and accused ICE of delaying its public notice. Advocates also documented recurring ambulance activity and repeated medical emergencies at the detention center.

Brutus’s death establishes that ICE continued detaining immigrants at Delaney Hall while GEO Group continued operating the facility after public warnings about medical care, emergency response, and transparency. Edwin’s final symptoms and the unanswered record of his care remain the controlling facts in his case. According to his mother, he entered detention with diabetes, high blood pressure, and seizures. Six weeks later, he reported numbness in his face and hand and died the following day.

GEO Group operates Delaney Hall through a 15-year ICE contract valued at approximately $1 billion and designed to hold as many as 1,000 people. The federal government pays the company to confine immigrants while GEO Group controls their daily conditions and access to care. ICE chose the private corporation that held Edwin and remained responsible for the detention system in which he died.

Immigrant-rights advocates have reported that Delaney Hall denied detained people access to prescribed medication or treatment for serious health conditions. They have also described disrupted family visits, inadequate food, unsafe conditions, transfers without warning, and restricted communication with loved ones. Those reports form the institutional context surrounding Edwin’s final call and María’s unanswered questions about what personnel did after he reported numbness.

ICE detained Edwin while he was traveling to work. GEO Group held Edwin while, according to María, he lived with diabetes, high blood pressure, and seizures. He told his mother that his face and right hand were numb. Delaney Hall denied his daughter a visit. An ambulance removed him the next day, and his family still has no complete account of what personnel did after he reported those symptoms.

María wants the truth about what happened to her son while ICE detained him and GEO Group controlled his daily care. Edwin’s family is owed the complete detention and medical records, the emergency-response timeline, the names and actions of the personnel responsible for his treatment, and accountability for every decision made between his final warning and his death.

Edwin’s mother heard him describe numbness in his face and hand, and his daughter was denied the chance to see him. Americans Against ICE documents deaths in custody, private detention companies, medical-neglect allegations, and the records families are forced to fight for after ICE takes control of their loved ones.

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She was 15 when she left Honduras in 2019 with her aunt and cousin. For months, they moved north through Mexico on foot before climbing aboard La Bestia, the freight train migrants ride knowing that boarding, falling, or jumping from it can cost them their lives. Nicole made that journey because she wanted a future beyond the dangers and lost opportunities she saw around her.

After reaching the United States, Nicole reunited with her father in Texas, attended school, obtained work authorization, found employment, and entered college. Now 21 and living in New York, she works part-time in an eye doctor’s office while studying to become a teacher. She has Special Immigrant Juvenile status and deferred action, but she has waited years for the opportunity to apply for permanent residence. The life she built remains exposed to the immigration-enforcement agency now paying contractors to confirm where she lives.

When Nicole was younger, social workers visited the home where she was staying to check whether she had food, a safe place to live, and access to school. Those visits were connected to the federal system responsible for placing unaccompanied children with adult sponsors and monitoring their welfare after release. ICE has taken the recognizable form of those visits and converted it into access for immigration enforcement.

Under the Safety Verification Initiative, ICE requires contractors to visit addresses associated with unaccompanied children and young adults who entered the United States as unaccompanied children, assess conditions at the home, confirm the address listed in immigration-court records, inform the child and sponsor about their legal responsibilities, and enter the information they collect into ICE systems. The earlier social-worker visits focused on Nicole’s safety. The ICE-directed visits establish where young immigrants and the people sheltering them can be found.

That difference reaches into every part of a young immigrant’s life. These addresses belong to homes where young people study, live with relatives, eat with their families, and wait through immigration cases that consume years of their lives. When ICE sends a contractor to one of those homes, the agency converts a private living space into a verified location inside its enforcement system.

For Nicole, an unfamiliar vehicle now carries the threat that ICE has found her address. That threat reaches her education, employment, family relationships, housing stability, immigration case, and the classroom she hopes one day to lead. The home where she rebuilt her life is now part of an ICE locating system designed to identify where she and her family live.

The contractors are paid according to the number of unaccompanied children and young adults who entered the United States as unaccompanied children they successfully visit, and each company must complete at least 1,000 home visits. ICE has attached a financial incentive to locating young immigrants, confirming their addresses, documenting their households, and returning that information to the agency. The payment structure rewards companies for reaching more homes occupied by children, students, workers, sponsors, and families.

The companies ICE selected deepen the harm facing the people receiving those visits. A Scripps News review found no publicly identified child-welfare services for 12 of the 18 contractors. National Protective Services advertises fugitive recovery, locksmith services, and self-defense karate. ICE awarded the company an initial contract worth $1.2 million with a maximum value of $207 million. Severance Security Services advertises armed security, disaster response, and workplace-violence prevention. ICE awarded it an initial contract worth $4.8 million with a maximum value of $358 million.

The initial awards and contract ceilings establish the scale of the private infrastructure ICE has authorized. The agency is not sending these companies to connect Nicole and other young immigrants with housing, education, healthcare, or legal representation. ICE is sending them to verify addresses, assess household conditions, inform children and sponsors about legal responsibilities, and return updated information to an immigration-enforcement database. The companies’ security and fugitive-recovery backgrounds matter because ICE is directing them to the homes of vulnerable children and young adults under the label of safety verification.

The Department of Homeland Security describes the program as an effort to protect vulnerable children from sexual abuse and exploitation. ICE’s contract requirements establish an enforcement operation: contractors verify immigration-court addresses, inform children and sponsors about their legal responsibilities, record household information, and update ICE’s systems of record. The information gathered at those homes belongs to the agency responsible for locating, detaining, and deporting immigrants.

A March 2025 Department of Homeland Security inspector-general audit examined records for more than 448,000 children transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services between fiscal years 2019 and 2023. The audit identified more than 31,000 release addresses that were blank, undeliverable, or missing apartment numbers. It documented failures in federal recordkeeping, not the disappearance of 31,000 children.

The Trump administration responded to defective government records by sending ICE contractors to immigrant homes. Children and young adults who did not create those records, control those databases, or decide how federal agencies maintained their information are being forced to absorb the consequences through surveillance, fear, household exposure, and direct contact with immigration enforcement.

Each address directs contractors to a home where parents, sponsors, siblings, relatives, roommates, and other immigrants live. The people who agreed to shelter children are pulled into ICE scrutiny because they opened their doors to someone who needed safety. A placement record created to connect a child with a sponsor becomes a route into the sponsor’s household.

Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, described the initiative as a facade designed to help DHS find children, pressure them to leave the United States, identify the people living with them, and make collateral arrests. ICE’s contracts establish the machinery behind that warning by ordering companies to locate homes, verify addresses, assess household conditions, inform children and sponsors about legal responsibilities, and update enforcement records.

ICE is turning contact associated with child safety into an enforcement pathway in which placement records, addresses maintained in immigration-court records, and sponsorship information expose entire households to the agency. Placement records created to help children reach safety now direct ICE contractors to the homes where those children and their families live.

ICE is using records created when children needed protection to find them after they have built lives in the United States. The agency is taking information gathered through childhood placement and converting it into updated enforcement records showing where young immigrants and their families live.

Nicole followed the processes placed before her. She attended school, obtained legal protection and authorization to work, entered college, found a job, and began preparing for a career teaching children. She has spent years waiting for the immigration system to decide whether she can move toward permanent residence, while ICE builds a contractor network capable of locating her at home.

She survived the journey north at 15 because she wanted something different for her life. She crossed Mexico, rode La Bestia, reunited with her father, entered classrooms, and built a future through work and study. ICE has placed that future inside a private-contractor locating system that uses her childhood records to confirm where she lives, expose the people around her, and bring the life she built within reach of detention and deportation.

Nicole crossed countries as a child to build a future. ICE is now paying private companies to find the home where she built it. Americans Against ICE documents the enforcement systems targeting immigrant children, young adults, sponsors, and families—and keeps the people harmed by them at the center of the public record.

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Daphy Michel’s family is preparing to sue the United States and multiple other governmental and nongovernmental entities after Pennsylvania officials ruled her hypothermia death a homicide. The planned lawsuit marks a new stage in the family’s fight for justice after the Department of Homeland Security insisted that ICE had “nothing to do” with her death. Michel’s relatives are no longer waiting for the institutions involved to acknowledge responsibility voluntarily. They are preparing to move the fight into court, where the decisions surrounding her custody, release, and abandonment may finally be forced into public view.

The Allegheny County medical examiner determined that hypothermia killed the 31-year-old Haitian woman and classified the manner of death as homicide. The office identified Michel as a vulnerable adult suffering from untreated severe mental-health problems and a significant language barrier when she was released from federal custody. Pittsburgh detectives are investigating. The state now records that Michel’s death resulted from the actions of another person or persons, not from exposure treated as an impersonal accident.

Americans Against ICE documented Michel’s abandonment and death in March, before the medical examiner later ruled her death a homicide.

After a judge dismissed the charges that had kept her in a Washington County jail for approximately six months, officials transferred Michel to ICE instead of returning her safely to relatives waiting for her. ICE transported her away from her Charleroi home, fitted her with an ankle monitor, and released her alone in Pittsburgh. She was later found unresponsive after spending hours at a bus shelter in freezing conditions and died at a hospital on March 2.

Those circumstances matter now because they establish the custody-and-release chain the coming lawsuit may expose. ICE had enough authority to seize Michel after the court ordered her released, transport her farther from home, attach a surveillance device to her body, and continue monitoring her movements. It did not ensure that a woman with severe untreated mental illness and a major language barrier reached her family, entered shelter, understood where she was, or had a functioning way to call for help. The government preserved its power to track Michel while abandoning the responsibility to get her home alive.

DHS tried to close the public record through denial. The department emphasized that the sun was shining when Michel was released, that she possessed a charged phone, and that public transportation was available. Her family’s attorney, Joseph Murphy, said the phone plan had expired while she was jailed. A charged device without working service was not meaningful access to family, transportation, shelter, or emergency assistance. Daylight at the moment of release did not erase the freezing temperatures that followed or Michel’s documented inability to navigate the danger alone.

The department also called Michel an “illegal alien,” although Murphy said she entered the United States legally, received humanitarian status, and had an asylum application in progress. That label did not answer why ICE released a severely vulnerable woman without a safe handoff. It redirected scrutiny from government conduct toward whether the public considered Michel worthy of protection. Her immigration status did not diminish ICE’s responsibility to recognize her condition and release her safely.

The homicide classification now stands against DHS’s claim that ICE had no connection to what happened. ICE took custody of Michel, moved her away from home, placed her under electronic monitoring, and controlled the conditions of her release. The formal end of custody did not erase the decisions that placed her in danger, and the passage of three days did not sever those decisions from the hypothermia that killed her.

Michel’s family is preparing to force that institutional chain into court. Murphy said the expected lawsuit will target the United States and multiple other governmental and nongovernmental entities. Once filed, the complaint may compel preservation and production of records, identify the officials and contractors involved, and expose what each institution knew about Michel’s mental health, language barrier, family contacts, transportation needs, electronic monitoring, and release plan. The family is seeking more than another agency statement. It is preparing to demand answers backed by documents and sworn testimony.

The legal action may reach beyond ICE without allowing ICE to disappear. Michel spent months in county custody while hearings were repeatedly delayed. A judge dismissed the charges, and relatives expected to be contacted so they could collect her. Instead, she was transferred to federal immigration authorities and taken in the opposite direction from home. Every institution that handled her had another opportunity to recognize her vulnerability and return her safely to the people waiting for her. The lawsuit may determine who made those decisions, who failed to intervene, and who now bears legal responsibility.

Surveillance footage obtained by PublicSource preserves part of that institutional record. Michel remained at the Pittsburgh bus shelter through daylight and darkness before she was seen slumped and later lying on the ground. The footage documents the outcome of a custody-and-release chain that left a visibly vulnerable woman stranded after months of government control. It now forms part of the record surrounding the homicide ruling and her family’s pursuit of justice.

Michel’s relatives are demanding justice for a woman described by loved ones as caring and generous, someone who came from Haiti seeking safety and was expected home after the criminal charges against her were dismissed. Instead, her family learned from a hospital that she had died. DHS answered their loss with denial. The medical examiner answered with an official homicide finding. Her family is now preparing to use the law to force every responsible institution to confront the decisions that separated Daphy Michel from safety.

DHS tried to place Daphy Michel’s death beyond ICE’s responsibility because she died after her formal release. The homicide ruling changed the official record, and her family is preparing to force the institutions involved to answer in court. Daphy Michel will not be reduced to an agency denial. Her family is carrying the demand for justice into law.

Independent reporting preserves the record when government agencies deny responsibility for people harmed after passing through their custody. Support Americans Against ICE as we continue documenting Daphy Michel’s case, her family’s fight for justice, and the institutions that may soon be forced to answer.

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Prisciliano Trejo Ricano spent his 29th birthday inside an ICE detention prison telling the public that he was coughing blood morning and night. He had a severe sore throat, migraines, worsening pain, and no power to reach a hospital on his own. ICE had taken that power from him. CoreCivic controlled the prison where he was held, and every route to medication, medical evaluation, emergency transport, family contact, and outside intervention ran through the institutions holding him. Days later, Trejo was gravely ill in a Georgia hospital. ICE released him while he was critically ill, and he died on July 24.

“Here they treat you like a number or a placeholder,” Trejo wrote from Stewart Detention Center on July 10. He described coughing blood morning and night and said he still had not been treated or given medication. He wrote about crying, feeling helpless, and enduring what he called the worst feeling of his life. Those were not accusations reconstructed after his death. They were his own words from inside the prison while ICE and CoreCivic still controlled his access to care.

Trejo had lived in the United States since he was three years old and made his home in the Durham, North Carolina area. ICE arrested him in June and transferred him hundreds of miles away to the CoreCivic-run Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. That distance isolated him from the people who knew him, could recognize how quickly he was deteriorating, and would have pushed for urgent treatment. His family had to rely on calls and video chats while he described feeling sick, coughing blood, living with pain, and watching a bruise that would not heal. ICE did not merely confine Trejo. It placed him far from his support system while making him dependent on the detention system for survival.

Detention Watch Network said Trejo requested medical care on July 6 and was not taken to a hospital until July 13. By July 15, he was in a coma. DHS later produced a timeline saying he was seen for a cough and sore throat on July 10, given an over-the-counter sinus medication, treated again on July 13 with saline, an antibiotic, and pain relievers, and admitted to an emergency room on July 14. That timeline does not clear ICE or CoreCivic. It documents that a man reporting blood in his cough remained inside their detention system while the response failed to match the medical emergency unfolding in front of them.

A medical encounter is not adequate medical care. Handing cold medication to a man coughing blood does not erase the blood, and recording an appointment does not prove that staff responded with the urgency his condition demanded. ICE and CoreCivic controlled whether Trejo saw a doctor, whether specialists examined him, whether he received emergency testing, and when he could leave Stewart for a hospital. They held that control while his symptoms became impossible to dismiss. ICE and CoreCivic’s response amounted to medical neglect while Trejo’s condition deteriorated into a life-threatening emergency.

On July 16, Trejo’s family learned that he was in intensive care. They drove four to five hours to reach him and were initially stopped from seeing him because he remained in ICE custody. Even as he lay intubated and gravely ill, the government maintained control over who could enter his hospital room. His family had to wait while lawyers negotiated his release from the agency that had taken him far from home and controlled his access to treatment. ICE kept his loved ones outside while his condition worsened, then transferred responsibility to them after the medical emergency had overtaken him.

Doctors diagnosed Trejo with acute leukemia, an aggressive cancer of the blood and bone marrow. That diagnosis did not absolve the detention system that kept him confined while he reported coughing blood. It exposed the deadly cost of treating severe warning signs as something that could be managed inside a detention prison. Trejo needed urgent hospital-level evaluation, not a response calibrated to return him to confinement. ICE and CoreCivic controlled his access to care, failed to meet the emergency in front of them, and bear responsibility for the death that followed.

DHS’s response exposed the machinery of abandonment. The department said Trejo was released from ICE custody on July 16 and declared that once a person is no longer in custody, ICE is no longer responsible. That sentence reduced one continuous medical crisis to an administrative cutoff. Trejo became gravely ill under ICE control, entered the hospital after his condition deteriorated, fell into a coma, and was released while critically ill. ICE then treated the signature ending custody as though it had erased the institution’s responsibility for what happened before it.

ICE released Trejo while he was critically ill, moving the death that followed beyond its formal custody boundary. His body did not recover when the paperwork changed, and his leukemia did not reset when ICE handed responsibility to his family. The medical crisis that developed inside detention followed him into the hospital, but the agency record divided it into two events: illness while detained and death after release. Trejo’s body experienced one uninterrupted deterioration. ICE’s paperwork separated his suffering in detention from the death that followed.

CoreCivic cannot hide behind ICE, and ICE cannot hide behind CoreCivic. CoreCivic operated Stewart, controlled its internal systems, and claimed that medical staff addressed Trejo’s concerns when they were presented. ICE chose the facility, contracted with the company, retained custody authority, and remained responsible for what its detention system did to the people inside. Stewart has already accumulated a documented record of deaths, medical failures, and demands for accountability. Trejo’s death belongs inside that record, not outside it because ICE ended custody before his heart stopped.

DHS answered scrutiny of Trejo’s death by labeling him through his immigration status and criminal allegations. That language redirected attention from whether ICE provided urgent care toward whether the public considered Trejo worthy of receiving it. A detention agency does not earn the right to neglect a medical emergency because it can attach accusations to the person suffering. Coughing blood demanded urgent care whether the patient was free, jailed, documented, undocumented, charged, convicted, or accused. ICE took custody of Trejo’s body and therefore assumed responsibility for protecting his life.

Even while he was sick, Trejo used his final birthday message to speak about the other people imprisoned around him. He wrote that many were not criminals and had been taken while working or returning home. He was describing a detention machine that treated human beings as inventory, with one group arriving while another disappeared. His words about being reduced to “a number or a placeholder” became the final public record of what ICE and CoreCivic did to him. They confined him, isolated him, failed to meet the urgency of his symptoms, blocked his family while he was gravely ill, and relinquished custody only after the medical crisis had carried him from Stewart into intensive care.

Prisciliano Trejo Ricano did not disappear from ICE’s responsibility when he disappeared from its custody ledger. ICE held him while he coughed blood, and CoreCivic’s detention system neglected him while his condition worsened. His family reached him only after lawyers fought to remove the government’s control, and they received him when he was already critically ill. By ending custody before his life ended, ICE moved the death that followed beyond the official boundary of detention without erasing the harm that unfolded under its control. ICE released him to die outside its custody count, but his death remains part of what ICE detention did.

ICE detention turns human beings into numbers, buries medical neglect behind contractor walls, and narrows the public record through paperwork. Independent reporting keeps the people harmed by that system visible and preserves the truth institutions work to erase.

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Martines’ family says ICE vehicles pulled up near him on Sunday and officers began pursuing him. Gisela Ardon, who witnessed the encounter while working nearby, said she saw Martines running with two officers behind him. She described officers breaking a window, forcing him to the ground, and tackling him. His family says he ran because he was afraid.

The harm did not end when the chase stopped. Martines underwent surgery and, according to his family, cannot currently walk. His friend Ronnie Padilla said Martines remained hospitalized and in significant pain. His wife, Gracy Venegas, said she was devastated after trying unsuccessfully to reach him for hours before learning what had happened.

Martines came to the United States from Honduras seven years ago and works as a painter. His family says he had no criminal record, was not under an order to leave the country, and was pursuing legal status. Witnesses say ICE officers chased him through a Kansas City neighborhood and tackled him, leaving him with injuries that required surgery.

KMBC reported that it contacted ICE about the operation, but no agency response appeared in its report. Martines’ family is now demanding answers about why he was pursued, what force officers used, and who will be held responsible for the damage to his body and livelihood.

Elmer Omar Guevara Martines supported himself through physical labor. Now he cannot walk because of injuries his family says were caused during an ICE operation.

ICE did not just interrupt his day. It left a working man hospitalized, needing surgery, and unable to stand on his own feet.

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The women repeatedly warn that ICE or the facility may confiscate their tablets because they are speaking publicly. The recording is direct evidence created by women inside the system they are exposing. They speak while ICE controls whether they can call their children, reach their families, contact advocates, obtain medical treatment or remain connected to the outside world. The same tablet preserving their testimony is a communication tool that the prison can remove.

Larina says ICE separated her from her five-month-old daughter after she called police because her husband was beating her. Instead of receiving protection as a survivor of domestic violence, she says she was arrested and placed in immigration custody. She describes mothers inside Basile who do not know where their children are because authorities took the children and withheld information, while others cannot communicate with their families or fear that complaints will bring additional restrictions.

“I am a mother who left my five-month-old daughter when I called the police on my husband because he was hitting me,” Larina says. “And even though I was the victim, I was the one who got arrested.” Her testimony exposes family separation as more than physical distance. ICE controls whether a mother can locate her child, hear her child’s voice, participate in decisions about care or reassure an infant who cannot understand why she disappeared. When officers can remove calls or tablets as punishment, family contact becomes another instrument of custody.

Larina says she has already been ordered deported but has remained imprisoned for three months. Other women describe people waiting months for removal after their cases have ended, and they identify a Cuban woman who remained detained after winning her immigration case because the Department of Homeland Security appealed. The government calls Basile a processing center, but the women describe imprisonment without a clear endpoint.

GEO Group operates the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center for ICE. The company identifies the Basile prison as a 1,000-bed facility whose government client is U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE supplies the federal detention authority, while GEO controls daily confinement under contract. Together, they hold power over movement, food, labor, discipline, medical access, communication and the conditions under which the women must survive.

Kelly, a Venezuelan woman, says she has only one functioning kidney and that the remaining kidney is failing. She displays documentation of her surgery while explaining that the facility has not provided the testing, medication or specialist care she needs. “They don’t even take me out for tests or checkups,” she says. “They don’t give me clean water, absolutely nothing.”

Kelly describes painful urination, fluid retention and recurring kidney pain. She says she wakes each day on a hard mattress with pain near her remaining kidney and has filed complaints without receiving meaningful treatment. She also says the frozen food served inside is inappropriate for her medical condition. Her fear is direct: something could happen to her in detention because the officials controlling her medical access refuse to provide the care she needs.

ICE’s detention standards state that detained people must have access to appropriate medical, dental and mental-health care, including emergency services. A federal inspection of the South Louisiana facility produced 15 general-custody findings and 20 medical findings, documenting that the government had already identified substantial failures inside the prison. Those written requirements and inspection records do not replace Kelly’s evidence. They show that ICE and GEO operated under formal medical obligations while women inside continued describing untreated illness and dangerous neglect.

The women identify Nancy, an Ecuadorian woman who was three months pregnant, as having miscarried in her bed without receiving medical attention. They say three pregnant women were being held in the unit when the video was recorded, including one who was six months pregnant, and that they were not receiving the care they needed. The video stands on the women’s direct evidence, while the government’s medical standards and prior inspection findings show that ICE and GEO had already been placed on notice about their duty to provide emergency and continuing care.

The women then bring Brisa, a Mexican mother with two children in the United States, before the camera. She displays an amputation and says she does not understand why the procedure was performed. The women around her connect the disability to inadequate medical care and say she wants to return to Mexico to see a doctor she trusts. Although she is awaiting deportation, the women say ICE continues to hold her after the procedure.

Brisa stands before the camera displaying a permanent disability that she and the women around her connect to the medical treatment she received in custody. ICE and GEO control the clinicians, medical records, transportation, grievance system and evidence needed to establish who authorized her care and why she was left without a clear explanation. They owe Brisa an accounting of what happened to her body while she was under their control.

Another woman comes forward with extensive bruising visible across her body. The speakers identify her as Honduran and say she was beaten, placed in isolation and prevented from contacting her family while the injuries faded. They use the phrase “the moon” for the place where she was held incommunicado. From their description, it functions as segregation: a place where communication disappears and an injured woman can be hidden from anyone outside the prison.

The camera lingers on bruising across her arms and legs as another woman says an officer grabbed her by the arm while pulling her from a vehicle, leaving visible marks. Their injuries are visible, and the women say officers caused the bruising or used isolation and communication restrictions to keep those injuries from reaching their families. They say the prison answers resistance with isolation, loss of privileges and communication deprivation, including threats to place women “in the moon” or remove access to their tablets when they defend themselves or complain. They describe injured women being cut off from family so photographs and calls cannot preserve what happened, turning custody control into a way to suppress evidence.

The women also report sexual contact between staff and detained women. That contact cannot be treated as an ordinary private relationship. Staff control housing, movement, discipline, medical access, communication, labor and punishment, making sexual contact with women under their custody an abuse of custodial power.

Basile already has a documented record of closely related complaints. A 2025 civil-rights complaint described sexual harassment and abuse, physical abuse, coerced labor, medical neglect and retaliation at the facility, including claims that people who reported staff misconduct were ignored or punished. That earlier record does not validate the new video; the women validate their own emergency through their testimony and the injuries and medical evidence they display. The complaint shows that ICE and GEO had already received warnings about similar harm inside the same prison.

The women say facility staff force detained women to work for one dollar for shifts lasting more than six hours. Kelly says staff asked whether the women would work and then threatened to withhold medicine after they refused. Labor cannot be called voluntary when the employer is also the jailer and controls medication, food, communication, privileges and isolation. A woman who cannot leave, seek her own medical care or refuse orders without punishment does not negotiate with GEO as an equal worker. The women describe labor extracted through detention power.

They also describe officers mocking them and denying meaningful assistance because they speak Spanish. Larina says staff claim they do not speak Spanish when women enter the dining hall, rush them out after only a few minutes and ridicule them when they cannot understand English. Language exclusion deepens every other harm because a woman denied interpretation cannot understand a medical decision, challenge an unexplained procedure, report an assault, defend herself during discipline, navigate her immigration case or learn what happened to her child.

The women describe pests, poor hygiene, scabies, illness and a lack of cleaning supplies. They say one Cuban woman repeatedly sought medical help for a skin condition without receiving a diagnosis, while contaminated mattresses and the absence of sanitation products allowed illness to spread. These accounts sit beside an official inspection record that found extensive medical and general-custody deficiencies at Basile, showing that the prison’s failures were not hidden from federal oversight.

ICE and GEO owe answers about the force used against women displaying bruises; the isolation and communication restrictions imposed after injuries; the treatment denied to Kelly; the miscarriage the women say Nancy suffered without medical attention; the procedure that left Brisa with an amputation; the care provided to pregnant women; sexual contact by staff; labor extracted under threats; medication used as leverage; the denial of Spanish interpretation; and the continued imprisonment of women who already have removal orders or favorable decisions. They also owe every woman shown in the video immediate protection from retaliation.

Larina closes by asking the public to become their voice. She warns that the tablets may be taken because the women complained and says that, should they suddenly lose communication with their families, people outside must understand why. The women did not wait for a mainstream outlet, an ICE inspection or a GEO-approved investigation to declare their suffering worthy of a record. They documented the prison themselves, displayed their injuries, named their medical emergencies and described the children they cannot reach and the punishment used to keep evidence from leaving the facility.

The women used the only tool still connecting them to the public to expose the same ICE and GEO system that controls that tool. If the tablet disappears after they spoke, the silence will not erase the record. It will become part of the abuse they documented.

The women in this video risked retaliation to document what ICE and GEO tried to keep inside the prison: physical abuse, medical neglect, family separation, coerced labor and punishment used to silence them.

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The Trump administration is withdrawing Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of Haitians while the State Department continues to warn Americans not to travel to Haiti because of violent crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited healthcare. One part of the federal government is dismantling protection from forced return while another documents the danger awaiting people sent back.

The termination does more than close an immigration program. It removes the protection supplied by TPS, ends TPS-based employment authorization, and exposes people without another lawful status or legal safeguard to ICE arrest, detention, and removal proceedings. The administration is using an administrative deadline to remove protection and expand the population exposed to ICE enforcement.

Not every Haitian TPS holder has the same immigration circumstances. Some may have asylum claims, pending applications, another lawful status, separate employment authorization, or other defenses against removal. But for people whose protection depends on TPS, the termination removes the TPS protection that shielded them from removal. It converts people who were protected from removal and authorized to work through TPS into people newly exposed to ICE enforcement through a government decision.

According to USCIS’s latest official guidance, July 27, 2026, is the operative termination date for Haiti’s TPS designation and related benefits. Employers were instructed to use that date when reviewing TPS-based employment documents. The policy therefore reaches far beyond immigration paperwork into paychecks, rent, healthcare, transportation, childcare, and every household expense supported by lawful employment. A worker does not experience TPS termination as a technical change in federal designation; they experience it as the government placing their job, family stability, and physical safety under direct threat.

The Supreme Court cleared the path for that machinery in Mullin v. Doe, consolidated with Trump v. Miot. The Court held that the TPS statute bars judicial review of nonconstitutional challenges to decisions involving a country’s designation, extension, or termination. It also concluded that the Haitian plaintiffs’ equal-protection claim was unlikely to succeed at the preliminary-relief stage.

The decision removed the lower-court barrier that had prevented the termination from taking effect and narrowed the legal routes available to challenge DHS. It gave the executive branch greater power to withdraw protection while depriving affected families of one of the few institutions capable of interrupting that decision.

The ruling did not make Haiti safer. It did not restore functioning government authority, rebuild hospitals, dismantle armed groups, reopen roads, or reduce mass displacement. It changed who could stop the Trump administration from ending protection while those conditions remained.

The State Department’s July 10 advisory keeps Haiti at Level 4: Do Not Travel, its highest warning. The department cites violent crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited healthcare. It says the United States has extremely limited capacity to provide emergency assistance there, restricts nonessential travel by U.S. personnel away from the embassy, and bars their family members from accompanying them.

The advisory also describes widespread kidnapping, armed-group fighting, random-gunfire danger, and local law enforcement with extremely limited capacity to respond. Those are not merely the warnings of immigration advocates. They are the federal government’s own description of the country to which Haitian families may be forcibly returned.

Haiti’s humanitarian emergency has deepened alongside its security collapse. Approximately 1.4 million people had been displaced by violence and insecurity as of March 2026. Forced return does not send people into an abstract national condition. It sends them into a country where armed violence, displacement, hunger, failing infrastructure, and institutional breakdown are already consuming civilian life.

Temporary Protected Status existed because the United States recognized that safe return was not possible. Haiti first received TPS following the catastrophic 2010 earthquake. Successive administrations extended or redesignated the country as political collapse, natural disasters, economic devastation, and expanding armed-group power continued to prevent safe return.

TPS was never a declaration that people could remain permanently. It was a legal recognition that deportation into existing conditions would be unsafe. The Trump administration is withdrawing that recognition without ending the danger.

For Haitian workers, the consequences begin inside the United States. Employers may lose trained staff. Families may lose income. Parents may face detention while children remain behind. Mixed-status households may be divided among U.S. citizens, people with pending cases, and relatives whose protection depended on TPS. Communities that spent years building schools, businesses, churches, union membership, housing stability, and local support networks are now being pushed into emergency legal triage.

Springfield, Ohio, has become one visible center of that fear. The city is home to an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Haitian residents, though their immigration circumstances differ and not all hold TPS. The relevant fact is not that every Haitian resident faces the same legal deadline. It is that a large Haitian community now lives under the disruption created when the federal government withdraws protection from a substantial part of its population. That uncertainty is not collateral damage; it is part of the enforcement mechanism.

The administration terminates the protection, employers confront expiring TPS-based work authorization, and families scramble to determine whether another legal pathway exists. People without another status become vulnerable to ICE, and arrest, detention, and removal proceedings can follow. The government can then describe those arrests as routine enforcement, concealing the political decision that created the exposure in the first place.

This is how deportation machinery launders policy choices into administrative inevitability. The affected workers and families did not suddenly become dangerous, Haiti did not suddenly become stable, and their homes, jobs, children, and community ties did not disappear. The Trump administration changed their legal protection and positioned ICE to act on the vulnerability it created.

The human consequence is not limited to the person placed in removal proceedings. A parent’s detention can remove income from a household overnight. Lost work authorization can destabilize housing and healthcare. Deportation can separate spouses, divide parents from children, and send someone into a country where even U.S. officials are instructed to restrict their own movement.

The administration will present this as the expiration of a temporary program, but that language hides the deliberate sequence. TPS is temporary under federal law, yet terminating it remains an exercise of government power with foreseeable consequences. DHS knows what protection it is withdrawing, USCIS knows which employment documents depend on it, ICE knows who becomes exposed when it ends, and the State Department knows the conditions awaiting people returned to Haiti. Each agency controls one part of the machinery, while Haitian families carry the entire result.

The administration’s position requires the public to accept two incompatible messages: Haiti is unsafe enough that Americans should not enter, but safe enough for Haitians to be forced back. The government admits it cannot reliably assist its own citizens there, yet it is dismantling the protection that kept Haitian residents from being returned to those conditions. That is not protection ending because the emergency passed; it is protection ending while the emergency remains fully documented. The Trump administration is not discovering that these families suddenly became removable. It is creating the condition that makes them removable, then placing ICE behind the deadline.

Haitian families are being pushed toward ICE enforcement and forced return while the U.S. government continues to document Haiti as dangerously unstable.

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Across the documented cases, ICE, Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, DHS, and affiliated federal employers granted personnel badges, weapons, government access, supervisory power, or authority over vulnerable people. Women were required to report to officers who could influence their detention or deportation. Children entered agency-linked programs under the assumption that the adults supervising them had been screened. Partners and relatives lived beside federal employees whose positions supplied institutional credibility and, in applicable roles, access to government weapons and authority.

The Ohio Immigrant Alliance documented 59 men connected to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol, or affiliated federal roles. The record includes accusations, charges, convictions, and sentences, and each person’s legal status must be described precisely. Across those categories, 85 percent of the documented cases involved sex offenses, and nearly two-thirds involved children.

The cases followed different paths. In some, federal authority created direct access to victims. In others, the institutional failure appeared in hiring, supervision, continued employment, or the delayed removal of government power after warning signs emerged. ICE, Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, DHS, and affiliated federal employers must disclose what warning signs reached them, when they learned of them, and how long each employee retained federal authority afterward.

Andrew Golobic’s case shows how immigration-enforcement power can become leverage over a person already vulnerable to federal control. Golobic worked as an ICE deportation officer from 2006 to 2020 and spent approximately five years assigned to the Alternatives to Detention program. ICE gave him authority over reporting requirements, electronic monitoring, detention recommendations, and the movement of people under federal supervision.

A federal jury convicted Golobic of depriving a woman under his supervision of her right to bodily integrity through forced or coerced sexual activity. He was also convicted of obstructing a sex-trafficking investigation, witness tampering, and destroying records. Prosecutors said he deleted evidence after investigators approached him. In March 2025, a federal judge sentenced him to 12 years in prison.

Golobic did not encounter the woman as an ordinary civilian. He exercised authority over a person whose freedom and immigration case could be affected by his decisions. Refusing him could carry consequences connected to detention and deportation. Reporting him meant challenging an officer inside the agency controlling her supervision. ICE gave him the leverage that enlarged the coercion and made resistance more dangerous.

The documented record also reaches children placed inside agency-linked programs. Ramon Marquez served as a Customs and Border Protection officer associated with the Border Patrol Explorer Program, which brought young participants into contact with federal law-enforcement personnel and activities. The Ohio Immigrant Alliance report alleges that Marquez used that access to sexually abuse a minor participant and says investigators found inappropriate communications with another child connected to the program.

The federal role and agency-linked program allegedly created a trusted channel through which Marquez gained access to the minor participant. Parents and children encountered an officer presented through a government program as screened, credible, and safe. Border Patrol activities and facilities gave that contact institutional legitimacy that an unrelated adult would not possess.

Samuel Saxon’s case raises a different question: how long federal authority can remain in place after repeated warning signs. Saxon served as an assistant field office director in ICE’s Cincinnati office. The Ohio Immigrant Alliance report describes repeated police calls to his home and serious allegations of domestic violence against his partner. He later pleaded guilty to lying to a federal agent investigating him after a neighbor reported a domestic-violence incident. The reported violence and the federal guilty plea remain legally distinct.

ICE retained Saxon in a supervisory role during a period when police were repeatedly called to his home and serious domestic-violence allegations were reported. Violence outside an office cannot be dismissed as irrelevant when the employee commands other officers and exercises federal power over people facing detention or deportation. ICE must account for what it knew, when restrictions were imposed, whether his weapon or supervisory access was removed, and why federal authority remained in place.

These cases expose different parts of the same institutional failure. Golobic’s immigration-enforcement authority supplied direct leverage over a woman under supervision. The Border Patrol Explorer Program allegedly created trusted access to a minor participant. Saxon’s history raises questions about whether repeated warning signs produced restrictions equal to the power he retained.

Treating each case as isolated removes the employing agency from the decisions that placed authority in the person’s hands, reviewed complaints, controlled discipline, and determined whether access would continue. The men convicted of abuse were responsible for their crimes. ICE, Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection, DHS, and affiliated employers remained responsible for the authority, access, supervision, and employment decisions surrounding their personnel.

DHS presents its vetting process as comprehensive and continuous. For victims, that promise matters only when new information produces protection. Every delay in removing a badge, firearm, supervisory role, or access point leaves another woman, child, partner, detained person, or person under federal supervision exposed to someone carrying government authority.

A background investigation completed at hiring cannot protect the public when later warning signs fail to trigger restrictions or removal. Federal agencies must be able to show when weapons were taken away, database access was suspended, youth-program contact ended, custody authority was withdrawn, and outside prosecutors were notified. A written policy does not protect victims while the employee retains the tools that can enlarge the danger.

Congress sits inside that accountability chain because Congress authorizes ICE and Border Patrol budgets, staffing expansions, detention capacity, weapons, databases, youth programs, and enforcement authority. Each expansion places more people under the control of employees whose access and conduct must be independently scrutinized.

Congress has not created a transparent national system requiring public disclosure of employee arrests, qualifying charges, convictions, suspensions, removed weapons, revoked credentials, or continued employment. Lawmakers cannot continue expanding immigration-enforcement power while leaving women, children, families, and detained people dependent on disciplinary systems operating behind DHS walls.

Effective safeguards must remove the specific powers that can enlarge the danger. Qualifying violent or sexual charges should trigger independent review and immediate restrictions on firearms, badges, custody authority, database access, youth-program contact, and supervisory control. Convictions for specified violent or sexual offenses should produce enforceable removal deadlines rather than discretionary internal handling.

Allegations involving detained people, supervised participants, children, subordinates, or the use of official authority must be investigated outside the accused employee’s command structure. Congress should require public reporting showing how many DHS employees were arrested, charged, convicted, suspended, retained, terminated, or allowed to retire while investigations remained open.

A woman supervised by ICE can face detention consequences for refusing an officer who controls her case. A child entering a Border Patrol youth program encounters an adult already presented as trusted and screened. A partner reporting domestic violence confronts a federal employee whose position carries institutional credibility and supervisory power. A person without secure immigration status can fear that reporting abuse will expose an entire family to enforcement.

Federal authority changes each of those encounters. It can make refusal more dangerous, reporting more difficult, and the person carrying the badge more credible than the person harmed. A gun, government database, supervisory title, or power over detention does not sit separately from the abuse when it increases access, fear, silence, or control.

ICE and Border Patrol did not merely discover that men within their ranks were accused, charged, or convicted of sexual and violent abuse. The agencies had already put badges and guns in their hands, given them access to vulnerable people, and supplied authority capable of magnifying fear and silencing resistance. Congress funded that power without building a transparent system capable of screening dangerous men out, stripping their authority quickly, and protecting the people placed within their reach.

The Ohio Immigrant Alliance’s 59-person record exposes how badges, guns, custody authority, youth-program access, and federal credibility can enlarge the danger when ICE and Border Patrol fail to screen, supervise, restrict, and remove abusive personnel.

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Three armed impersonators allegedly used flashing lights and claimed ICE authority to abduct and assault an Oregon driver.

An Oregon driver pulled over on Highway 211 after a vehicle behind them activated flashing red-and-blue lights. The stop appeared to be law enforcement. Two masked people approached wearing tactical vests marked “POLICE.” One carried a rifle. They claimed to be ICE agents, pulled the driver from their car, searched them, and placed them inside an SUV where a third impersonator allegedly assaulted them.

The driver reportedly remained under the group’s control for approximately 15 to 20 minutes before the impersonators released them. The victim then drove to a hospital for treatment. Oregon State Police and the FBI opened an investigation, and federal authorities confirmed that the stop was not an official ICE operation.

The victim complied because the impersonators manufactured the appearance of armed federal authority. They had emergency lights, face coverings, tactical clothing, fake badges, a visible weapon, and a vehicle capable of presenting as an enforcement unit. The driver did what civilians are repeatedly told to do when armed people claiming government power order them to stop, and that obedience delivered the victim into an abduction and assault.

The Oregon abduction followed a documented pattern: criminals using ICE’s name, clothing, vehicles, and claimed federal authority to make people surrender control.

In Delaware, two masked men wearing vests marked “ICE” allegedly stopped a driver, forced him from his vehicle at gunpoint and knifepoint, struck him, and stole his wallet and money. The disguise used the same essential mechanism as the Oregon stop: masks, weapons, claimed immigration authority, and a command that the driver surrender control.

In Florida, police accused LaTrance Battle of presenting herself as an ICE agent and using law-enforcement-style credentials to convince another woman that she was being detained. Police said Battle drove the woman away and seized her phone. Authorities charged Battle with kidnapping and impersonating law enforcement.

In Philadelphia, a man invoking immigration authority allegedly entered an auto-repair business, frightened workers by yelling about immigration enforcement, zip-tied a woman, and stole cash. In Los Angeles County, two masked men in an unmarked vehicle reportedly stopped a U.S. citizen, questioned him about his surname and truck, and left when witnesses began recording.

The cases occurred separately across several states, but each used claimed immigration authority to make victims surrender control. Criminals displayed the visual signals associated with immigration enforcement. Victims recognized masks, tactical clothing, weapons, badges, emergency lights, or unmarked vehicles as signs of federal authority. The impersonators demanded obedience, and compliance gave them physical control before abduction, assault, restraint, robbery, or intimidation followed.

The disguise is believable because ICE has normalized enforcement by masked officers whose names, faces, badge numbers, and agency roles may be difficult for civilians to verify. Officers have conducted operations using tactical clothing, visible weapons, and unmarked or minimally marked vehicles. People confronted during those operations may receive immediate commands without a safe opportunity to confirm who is exercising federal power over them. Criminals do not have to reproduce a traditional federal uniform; they need only reproduce what the public has been taught an ICE operation can now look like.

The FBI has warned that people impersonating ICE agents have used claimed government authority to commit threats, robberies, kidnappings, and sexual assaults. Federal warnings recognize the danger, but warnings alone do not solve the identification crisis created when real agents conceal the same details civilians need to verify them.

Tom Homan has told drivers to comply with law enforcement while defending immigration officers’ use of vehicle stops and unmarked vehicles. The Oregon driver reportedly followed that command. They stopped for flashing lights. They obeyed masked armed people presenting themselves as officers. They surrendered control because the encounter appeared to carry federal authority.

Homan’s demand leaves out the question that now determines whether compliance is safe: How is a driver supposed to distinguish real immigration officers from armed kidnappers when both may arrive masked, armed, wearing tactical clothing, using an unmarked vehicle, and demanding immediate obedience?

A civilian who complies may be entering the control of impersonators. A civilian who hesitates may face escalation from actual federal agents expecting obedience. The government has placed the risk of making that decision on the person confronted by armed strangers, often within seconds and without a reliable national verification process. That is not a functioning public-safety system; it is a verification trap.

Federal officers demanding control over another person should display readable agency identification, verifiable credentials, and an officer identification number. Vehicle stops should provide civilians with a safe way to confirm the agency involved. The federal government should maintain a public verification channel that does not require a frightened driver to argue with armed masked people on the roadside. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security cannot continue treating concealed identity as an internal operational choice when criminals are using that concealment as a weapon against the public.

The suspicious messages the Oregon victim reportedly received after reaching the hospital raise additional questions. Someone claiming to represent a law firm allegedly offered legal assistance connected to the detention. Investigators must identify the sender and determine whether the messages had any connection to the reported abduction.

Oregon State Police and the FBI must identify the three suspects, determine whether they targeted additional drivers, and establish whether the later messages were connected to the reported abduction. Federal officials must also confront the broader danger created when criminals can imitate immigration enforcement with equipment available to the public and an appearance already normalized by ICE.

The Oregon driver obeyed flashing lights, masks, a rifle, badges, tactical vests, and claimed federal authority because the stop looked real. The people demanding compliance were not ICE agents. They were alleged kidnappers, and an enforcement disguise made believable by current ICE practices gave them control of the victim.

The Oregon abduction shows how criminals can exploit ICE’s masks, unmarked vehicles, weapons, concealed identities, and demands for obedience to make violent impersonation crimes believable.

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Green began with Lorenzo’s humanity. He described him as a good man, a family man, and a Latino man whose presence in a white van made him a target. In Green’s account, Lorenzo was not encountered by chance. He was profiled, pursued through a Latino neighborhood, and treated as “the prey of the day” because immigration officers were operating under pressure to produce arrests.

“He was being hunted,” Green said. “He was the prey of the day. He was a part of a quota that had to be met.”

That accusation identifies the mechanism Green says placed Lorenzo in danger: federal immigration enforcement turned people into numbers, enforcement quotas created targets, and racial profiling decided who would be pursued. Lorenzo’s life was reduced to a possible arrest inside an enforcement system Green says was built to count bodies rather than protect them.

Green said the pursuit ended without trial, due process, or any chance for Lorenzo to defend himself. He did not soften the killing into bureaucratic language or describe it as a tragic outcome of routine enforcement.

“Unfortunately, this ended with an extrajudicial execution,” Green said. “He was not given a fair trial. There was no due process.”

That language matters because it rejects the idea that ICE can treat Lorenzo’s death as an isolated operational incident. Green placed responsibility on the ICE system he said profiled Lorenzo, pursued him, and killed him without any court process or opportunity to defend himself.

Green then widened his indictment beyond Lorenzo’s case. He accused President Donald Trump of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” through immigration policies targeting Latino and Haitian communities.

Green described the administration’s immigration policy as an effort to erase Latino people from public life by treating them as unlawful by default and forcing entire communities to live under the threat of detention, pursuit, and removal. He pointed to Haitians being deported to a country where gangs control much of the territory as part of the same forced-displacement system.

Green also accused the federal government of covering up immigration-enforcement killings by delaying answers and withholding accountability. He pointed to the public’s continued lack of clarity in other deadly cases and said there was no justification for forcing families and communities to wait while federal agencies controlled the evidence, delayed answers, and shaped the public account.

“There’s a cover-up,” Green said.

For Lorenzo’s family, federal secrecy extends the harm beyond the killing by forcing them to fight for basic answers about how and why ICE killed him. They lost a father, then entered a system where the federal institutions responsible for the operation control what information becomes public, when it is released, and how the officer’s conduct is described.

Green said that silence must produce a political consequence. He pledged to pursue impeachment against Trump because he said the administration’s conduct had crossed from policy failure into constitutional abuse.

“The time has come for the record to be made,” Green said. “We cannot allow this kind of behavior to go unchecked.”

His impeachment pledge was not separate from Lorenzo’s death. Green tied it directly to the profiling, pursuit, killing, secrecy, and broader targeting he described. Green presented impeachment as the necessary response when the executive branch uses federal power against communities and then conceals the consequences.

Green demanded body cameras and dashboard cameras for immigration-enforcement vehicles. When he asked whether unmarked cars should carry cameras, the district attorney agreed and added that marked units should conduct traffic stops.

Without mandatory cameras and clearly marked vehicles, ICE can pursue people through neighborhoods, use deadly force, and leave families dependent on the agency’s own account.

Body cameras would record officers’ actions and crucial parts of the encounter. Dashboard cameras would document the pursuit, the position of vehicles, the conduct of officers, and the sequence leading to force. Marked units would make enforcement activity visible instead of allowing armed federal agents to move through communities without clear identification.

Green’s demands recognize that transparency cannot begin after someone is killed. It has to be built into the operation before officers make contact, initiate pursuit, or draw a weapon.

His speech also refused to let Lorenzo disappear beneath institutional language. Lorenzo remained a father, a family man, and a person whose life ended inside an enforcement system Green says selected him as prey.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s family is still owed the full truth about why he was pursued, who authorized the operation, what records exist, and why deadly force was used. Green’s speech makes clear that those answers cannot remain buried inside the same institutions responsible for the enforcement operation.

ICE killed Lorenzo. His family should not have to fight the government for the record of how it happened.

ICE killed Lorenzo, then left his family fighting for the records, evidence, and answers that should have followed the killing.

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reportedly hired and deployed David Brouillette only months after a Maine judge rejected a material claim he made in court as not credible. Brouillette’s former wife and daughter have identified him as the officer who fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during a July 13 immigration operation in Biddeford, Maine. Multiple people have also identified Brouillette from footage recorded after the shooting, although the Department of Homeland Security has not publicly confirmed his identity as the shooter.

Durán was a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant, father of a 3-year-old daughter and holder of a valid federal work permit. He was driving to work in a white Kia when ICE officers attempted to stop him after he left a Biddeford address under surveillance. An ICE officer opened fire and killed him. DHS later told Sen. Angus King’s office that Durán was not the target of the enforcement operation.

DHS has said its officers were surveilling a location associated with someone believed to have a final order of removal. The agency claimed the driver attempted to flee and that the officer fired because he feared for public safety. Immigration court records cited in reporting showed that Durán did not have a final removal order and was awaiting an initial hearing. King’s office said DHS first identified Durán as the target of the operation and later reversed itself.

ICE’s shifting explanation raises another unanswered question: what did the agency know about Brouillette before giving him federal authority and a firearm?

During an October 2025 child-support proceeding, Brouillette told Maine District Court Judge Amy Dieterich that health issues and the revocation of his driver’s license had limited his ability to earn money. In a written order the following month, Dieterich found his claim about the license not credible, rejected his request to terminate his support obligation and concluded that he was voluntarily underemployed.

Maine’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles later said it found no record of a recent license suspension or revocation connected to unpaid child support. The agency identified only a brief suspension in 2008 after Brouillette failed to provide proof of insurance following an accident.

A separate employment representation was also contradicted. A 2019 divorce settlement described Brouillette as working for the Hallowell Police Department. Police Chief Zachary Kindelan said Brouillette had applied to the department but had never been hired.

Those records matter because Brouillette reportedly joined ICE during an aggressive federal recruitment expansion. His former wife said he told her around November 2025 that ICE had hired him and that he expected to begin work within months, placing the reported hiring period close to the court order rejecting his license claim.

ICE and DHS have not publicly explained when Brouillette was hired, what background investigation was conducted, whether the judicial finding or disputed employment history was reviewed, or how the agency assessed his fitness for armed enforcement.

The public-interest issue is whether ICE examined readily discoverable information bearing on Brouillette’s credibility before sending him into an immigrant community with the power to stop vehicles, detain people and use lethal force.

Durán’s life and death remain at the center of that inquiry. He worked, supported his family and was leaving for his job when ICE transformed an operation directed at someone else into a fatal encounter. His partner, Karolina, and their young daughter arrived near the scene after the gunfire. They are now seeking answers from the federal agency whose officer killed him and whose initial explanation remains disputed.

The white Kia Durán was driving belonged to his friend Jonathan Ramirez. Ramirez said he also had no final removal order and did not believe he was the person ICE claimed to be seeking. ICE has not clearly established whose removal order justified intercepting the vehicle Durán was driving.

The evidentiary gap makes the agency’s vetting decisions even more consequential. The ICE officers involved were not recording the encounter with body cameras, and no publicly available bystander or surveillance footage has emerged showing the exact moment the shots were fired. A home-security camera captured the sound of five gunshots but not the shooting itself. The investigation may therefore depend heavily on witness testimony, physical evidence and the account given by the officer who fired.

Without footage of the gunfire, the officer’s account may carry unusual investigative weight. That makes the recent judicial credibility finding directly relevant to whether ICE adequately assessed Brouillette’s fitness for armed enforcement.

That responsibility belongs to ICE and DHS. Rapid recruitment does not suspend the government’s duty to examine whether an applicant is truthful in official proceedings, accurate about prior employment and fit to exercise coercive power. Hiring targets become a public-safety mechanism when the people recruited are sent into communities with guns and federal authority.

The Biddeford killing was the second fatal ICE shooting involving a vehicle in less than a week, following the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. ICE suspended most vehicle stops after the Maine and Houston killings. One day later, President Donald Trump directed agents to resume them.

Border czar Tom Homan later announced that ICE vehicle stops would have to be recorded by at least one officer wearing a body camera. That policy change underscored what Durán’s death had already exposed: ICE was conducting dangerous armed encounters without reliably creating an independent visual record.

Thirty-eight Democratic senators, joined by independent Sen. Angus King of Maine, demanded answers about officer identification, body-camera use, vehicle-stop practices and employee vetting. Their inquiry specifically asked whether ICE reviews family-court records containing information relevant to an applicant’s fitness for duty.

DHS responded to scrutiny of Brouillette’s identity by warning that naming ICE officers can place them and their families at risk. That response does not address the agency’s institutional responsibility. It does not explain why Durán was stopped, why DHS changed its account of whether he was the target, what evidence justified the shooting or what screening occurred before the officer was armed.

Officer safety cannot become a shield against accountability after an officer kills someone. ICE cannot publicly rely on its officer’s description of a fatal encounter while withholding the information needed to evaluate how that officer was selected, screened and deployed.

Durán’s family deserves a complete record. The public deserves to know when Brouillette was hired, what ICE examined during his background investigation, whether the court order was discovered, what training he completed, whether he remains employed and armed, and what evidence supports DHS’s account of the killing.

A federal badge does not erase a credibility record. ICE’s recruitment expansion does not excuse weak screening. When an agency sends armed officers into immigrant communities, kills a father whom DHS later acknowledged was not the operation’s target and then controls access to the evidence, its hiring decisions become part of the public record—and part of the harm.

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Ugboaja said she went into a cold sweat because she did not understand what was happening to her. She begged the officers to let her attend Mass and receive Holy Communion before they took her away. They refused. For a Catholic sister whose ministry includes serving as an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion, the denial was not a minor disruption to her schedule. It severed her from the worship she had been walking toward and placed her under armed federal control without a clear explanation of why she was being detained.

Ugboaja had built a full life of service in South Texas long before ICE interrupted her walk to church. The 56-year-old member of the Daughters of Mary Mother of Mercy is a registered nurse at South Texas Health System and a longtime healthcare worker who previously spent about a decade as a certified nursing assistant in Edinburg. She served her parish, cared for patients, held permission to work in the United States, and had complied with the immigration requirements imposed on her, according to her attorney. Her nursing career, ministry, and community service show the full life ICE disrupted while the government still retained the power to take her away.

The legal history behind her detention makes that power more disturbing. In 2019, an immigration judge denied Ugboaja’s asylum application but granted her protection from removal to Nigeria because the judge found she was likely to face torture there, according to her attorney, Carlos M. Garcia. That order protected her from removal to Nigeria, but it did not keep ICE from detaining her or the government from reportedly pursuing removal to another country.

Garcia said the government planned to remove Ugboaja to a third country instead. No destination was publicly identified. The reported plan exposed the narrowness of the protection she had spent years living under: one route back to danger had been closed, but the machinery of detention and removal remained active around her. ICE could still take her into custody, separate her from her community, and pursue another destination.

This is how legal protection can exist on paper without producing actual security. A person may win recognition that returning them to one country could expose them to torture, follow every reporting requirement, maintain work authorization, build a career, and serve a community—yet still remain within reach of officers who can interrupt an ordinary walk to church and place them back in government custody.

Ugboaja received little explanation when ICE detained her, according to her attorney. Sister Norma Pimentel, who spoke with Ugboaja during the detention, said she was distressed and needed medication that officers did not allow her to retrieve. Custody came first, while clarity, medication, worship, and the life she had been living became secondary.

Her detention became public because her parish sounded the alarm. Church officials posted about what had happened, the story spread, and members of Congress representing South Texas contacted federal officials. Ugboaja was released several hours later and returned home.

That sequence should not be mistaken for a system correcting itself. ICE had already detained her. Her release followed rapid parish attention, legal advocacy, news coverage, and intervention by elected officials. Outside pressure helped secure her freedom after ICE had already taken it away.

Most people taken into immigration custody do not have that level of institutional force gathering around their names within hours. They may not have a parish capable of generating public pressure, a lawyer immediately explaining their legal protection, or members of Congress calling federal officials. Their compliance may be just as extensive, their fear just as real, and their legal vulnerability just as severe, but their detention may remain invisible.

Ugboaja understood that imbalance when she spoke publicly for the first time after her release. She did not use the news conference only to describe what ICE had done to her. She spoke about people with some form of legal protection who follow every rule demanded of them and still live in uncertainty. Gratitude toward those who helped free her, she said, did not require silence about what happened or about what continues to happen to others.

Her decision to speak changes the center of the story. The defining fact is not simply that she returned home after several hours. Federal officers detained a woman protected from removal to Nigeria during an ordinary act of worship while the government reportedly pursued removal to a third country.

The denial of Mass and Communion made the interruption visible, but the harm extended beyond her religious life. ICE detained a woman who had complied with government requirements, held permission to work, built a nursing career, and served her community. None of that gave her security when the government placed her back in custody; public visibility, legal advocacy, parish intervention, and political pressure helped secure her release that day.

That is the broader warning carried by her case. Under a deportation system that keeps searching for another removal route, protection from one country can leave a person exposed to another. Compliance can become a permanent cycle of check-ins without security. Her case shows how freedom can hinge on whether a detention becomes visible quickly enough for lawyers, institutions, reporters, and elected officials to intervene.

Sister Leticia Ugboaja was able to stand inside her church weeks later and describe what ICE did because her detention became impossible to ignore. The people she spoke for remain inside the same machinery without a parish campaign, a press conference, a lawyer beside them, or a member of Congress forcing the government to answer.

Sister Leticia Ugboaja had court protection from removal to Nigeria, permission to work, and a record of compliance. ICE still detained her and reportedly prepared to remove her to another country. Her release followed public attention and political intervention that many immigrants never receive.

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The Trump administration is amassing what the ACLU estimates as a national deportation policing force of more than 50,000 federal, state, and local officers, operating across American communities with unprecedented money, weakened oversight, and a mandate to make as many arrests as possible. This force is not confined to the border, ports of entry, detention centers, or operations against specifically identified people. It moves through residential streets, workplaces, parking lots, schools, hospitals, courthouses, shelters, places of worship, traffic stops, immigration appointments, and the ordinary spaces people depend on to live their lives.

This is not simply a larger Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. It is an internal policing structure built from ICE and Customs and Border Protection, thousands of newly hired immigration agents, reassigned federal personnel, and state and local officers enlisted through agreements that convert ordinary police agencies into extensions of the deportation system. Congress supplied the money. Donald Trump supplied the mass-deportation mandate. Stephen Miller supplied the quota logic. DHS removed protections and weakened oversight. Together, those decisions created the scale, force, racial profiling, secrecy, and broken accountability documented across community after community.

Floridalma Sanchez-Gomez experienced that machinery in her own driveway on Florida’s eastern Treasure Coast. A Florida Highway Patrol trooper in an unmarked vehicle followed her through a largely Hispanic neighborhood in Stuart after reporting traffic violations involving tinted windows, a turn at a red light, and speeding. She pulled into her driveway, where the trooper approached with his Taser drawn, pulled the five-foot-tall asylum seeker by her shirt, pressed her against her vehicle, and issued commands in English, a language she does not speak.

Floridalma tried to comply before becoming frightened and moving toward the house. The trooper fired his Taser into her back and fired it again after she had fallen. Her brothers ran inside. Officers forced their way into the home with a crowbar and sledgehammer. Within minutes, the residential street had filled with more than a dozen state and federal officers, some carrying assault-style weapons, while a helicopter watched overhead and multiple vehicles blocked the street.

A 19-year-old U.S.-citizen neighbor was arrested for standing too close while objecting to what officers were doing. Floridalma’s 13-year-old niece returned from school to find the front door broken, federal agents on the lawn, no adult waiting for her, and members of her family gone. A neighbor described the child as wide-eyed and shaking. One of Floridalma’s brothers was deported soon afterward.

The administration can divide that sequence into the separate language of traffic enforcement, resisting an officer, immigration authority, officer safety, and interagency cooperation. The human record is more direct: a young woman was tased twice at home, armed officers overwhelmed a neighborhood, a house was broken open, a citizen observer was arrested, a child was left without her family, and responsibility was dispersed across multiple agencies.

Floridalma’s experience provides a human view of a national system. The American Civil Liberties Union reviewed more than 1,200 reported immigration-enforcement incidents during 2025 across Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, and New Mexico. The organization described those cases as only a fraction of national enforcement activity and treated its totals as a conservative floor rather than a complete count.

Even at that floor, the pattern is extensive. The ACLU identified 432 incidents involving what its methodology classified as misconduct: force or threatened force, intimidation tactics, or retaliation against people observing or documenting enforcement. The broader incident review was not limited only to conduct already adjudicated unlawful. The report documented 375 incidents involving force or threatened force, 437 involving likely racial profiling, 372 involving masked agents, 310 involving unmarked vehicles, 119 confirmed or reported injuries following force, and 16 incidents in which agents used lethal force.

Those figures do not describe scattered operational failures inside an otherwise restrained system. They show what follows when a government demands mass arrests, eliminates enforcement priorities, expands the number of participating agencies, weakens training, removes protections around sensitive locations, and fails to create meaningful accountability.

Stephen Miller reportedly pressured ICE toward a target of 3,000 arrests a day. When an official referred to agents working through a list of targets, Miller’s reported answer exposed the governing logic: “There is no list. Everyone is fair game.” Under that approach, immigration policing ceases to be directed only at particular people supported by individualized information. It becomes a dragnet in which agents enter workplaces, parking lots, roads, neighborhoods, and gathering places to determine whom they can seize.

The report describes people targeted while buying supplies, driving to work, waiting for ride-share requests, fishing, standing near home-improvement stores, working at car washes, eating at food stands, and traveling on public roads. It documented 624 enforcement incidents in everyday locations and 252 at workplaces. State agencies with little traditional connection to immigration policing were also drawn into the system. Wildlife officers checked fishing permits while federal agents checked immigration status. Highway patrol officers converted minor traffic stops into deportation pipelines. Local police gained federal immigration authority through the 287(g) program.

Congress financed that expansion at a scale the report describes as without parallel in American history. The 2025 reconciliation law directed approximately $170 billion toward immigration enforcement over four years, including $75 billion for ICE. A subsequent 2026 law added tens of billions more for ICE, CBP, and the DHS secretary. ICE used the money to hire 12,000 agents rapidly, while training was reportedly reduced from five months to 47 days and some recruits entered training before completing vetting.

The administration also diverted personnel from agencies whose primary public missions were not immigration enforcement and offered money to state and local departments willing to join. The ACLU estimates the combined force at more than 50,000 officers, including projected state and local participation through 287(g), and warns that it continues to grow. Congressional funding made that scale possible by expanding the number of officers, agencies, vehicles, tactical resources, detention systems, and local departments capable of bringing deportation power into daily American life.

Congress did not merely increase an agency budget. It gave the Trump administration the resources to redirect law enforcement across the federal government and recruit local police into a national force whose success is measured through the volume of arrests.

The force often operates while obscuring who its members are. The ACLU found hundreds of incidents involving masked agents and unmarked vehicles. It also identified 255 incidents involving officers whose clothing prominently displayed the word “POLICE,” sometimes while identifying the federal agency only in smaller print or not in a way bystanders could quickly understand.

For someone being surrounded, pulled from a car, chased through a neighborhood, or taken from a workplace, that concealment can make the event resemble an abduction. Witnesses may not know whether they are looking at ICE, Border Patrol, the FBI, state police, local officers deputized under federal authority, or a combination of agencies. Victims may be unable to identify the officers who injured or arrested them. Families may not know which institution took a loved one. Lawyers and journalists may struggle to trace responsibility through overlapping chains of command.

Masks and unmarked vehicles therefore do more than frighten communities; they obstruct identification and accountability. A government can expand its presence while making individual officers and responsible agencies harder to identify, investigate, sue, or expose.

The report documents force not only against people targeted for immigration arrest but also against witnesses, relatives, journalists, clergy, protesters, elected officials, legal observers, and bystanders. The ACLU identified 150 incidents involving people in those categories and found agents using force, intimidation, arrest threats, retaliation, and surveillance against people observing or documenting enforcement.

Witnesses are among the few restraints on a masked and mobile police force. A person filming an arrest can preserve evidence when officers’ identities are hidden. A journalist can compare an agency statement with video. A legal observer can document whether agents presented a warrant. A family member can record injuries. A protester can expose an operation officials would prefer to conduct without resistance.

Treating those people as threats protects the system from scrutiny. The ACLU documented agents photographing or filming people because they were watching enforcement and identified misconduct involving protesters, community observers, journalists, elected officials and their staff, and clergy. In one California church parking lot, a reverend who challenged an arrest was told, “The whole country is our property.”

That statement captures the administration’s claim to power. The force recognizes no meaningful boundary between the border and the interior, between an enforcement site and a school, between a deportation operation and a family driveway, or between the target of an arrest and the person documenting it. The whole country becomes an enforcement zone, and anyone present can become subject to command, intimidation, surveillance, force, or arrest.

Children were not protected from that expansion. The ACLU identified 157 incidents in which children were present or targeted and 214 children who were detained, targeted for enforcement, or subjected to law-enforcement misconduct, including 32 U.S.-citizen children. Fifty-four incidents involved agents directly interrogating or detaining children.

Agents conducted operations near schools, at school drop-offs and pickups, during traffic stops, at homes, in courthouses, and at immigration check-ins. Schools entered lockdowns because enforcement was unfolding nearby. Children watched windows smashed and parents pulled from vehicles. Some were exposed to force or chemical agents as bystanders. Others were detained alongside adults.

In Bowie, Maryland, masked agents stopped a father who had just left home to drive his children to school. His three children, ages six, seven, and eight, were inside the minivan while agents smashed a window, pulled him from the vehicle, pinned him to the ground, pressed a hand to his neck, and pointed a Taser at him. The arrest reportedly occurred one day after his wife said he had completed an immigration-supervision check-in.

The administration removed the policy that had limited immigration enforcement near schools, hospitals, shelters, places of worship, and other locations where people must be able to seek education, care, safety, and assistance without fearing arrest. It also loosened restrictions on courthouse enforcement, allowing agents to target people appearing in response to government requirements.

The practical effect is to turn compliance into vulnerability. A person who appears for an immigration appointment, attends court, seeks medical care, takes a child to school, enters a shelter, or attends worship can no longer assume that the location offers even limited protection. The government tells people to appear, then positions agents where those appearances make them easier to seize.

Racial profiling is what allows a dragnet force without individualized targets to operate. When agents are sent into parking lots, roads, workplaces, and neighborhoods to find people rather than locate specifically identified individuals, they need a substitute for evidence. The ACLU found perceived race, ethnicity, language, accent, occupation, and location repeatedly serving that function.

The report identified 437 incidents involving likely racial profiling. People were questioned or detained because they spoke Spanish, worked in construction or landscaping, waited outside a home-improvement store, drove in an area associated with immigrant communities, or appeared to officers to fit an ethnic profile. This was not incidental prejudice at the system’s edges. It was an operating practice that made indiscriminate arrest goals possible.

A dragnet built around appearance inevitably reaches citizens and people with lawful status. The ACLU identified more than 200 incidents involving U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, green-card applicants, DACA recipients, people seeking asylum, recipients of humanitarian protection, mixed-status families, longtime residents, disabled people, people with medical needs, elderly people, pregnant or nursing people, and caregivers.

The report counted 155 U.S. citizens among those detained, targeted for enforcement, or subjected to law-enforcement misconduct, including 18 Indigenous people. It also documented lawful residents, asylum seekers, DACA recipients, people with disabilities or medical needs, pregnant and nursing people, and survivors seeking humanitarian protection.

A force advertised as targeting the “worst of the worst” was operating against citizens, children, lawful residents, people complying with immigration supervision, and people whose apparent offense was being present in a place agents associated with immigrants.

The use of force was similarly expansive. The ACLU documented agents pushing, tackling, pinning, choking, tasing, chemically spraying, striking, dragging, and threatening people with weapons. It found people pulled from vehicles, windows smashed, cars boxed in or rammed, knees and hands pressed into backs and necks, chokeholds used, and guns pointed at drivers, workers, witnesses, and crowds.

The report identified 119 confirmed or reported injuries following agent force. Sixty-nine were supported by medical visits or legal documentation; 50 were self-reported. It counted 130 instances in which agents brandished weapons and 69 in which they verbally threatened weapons or force.

The incidents reviewed by the ACLU indicate that agents used force and threatened force as default tools to compel immediate compliance rather than to respond to a threat. The force arrived armed, masked, and unidentified; boxed in vehicles; broke windows; deployed chemical irritants; and escalated routine encounters into violent scenes. In some incidents, the disorder created by those tactics was then cited to defend further escalation.

In one Colorado case, agents boxed in a father’s car as he left a courthouse with his partner and their one-month-old baby. An agent pointed a gun, another smashed the driver’s window, and flying glass cut the baby’s mother as she tried to shield the infant. In Illinois, agents grabbed construction worker Ricardo Aguayo Rodriguez as he rode his bicycle home from a grocery store, pepper-sprayed him, locked an arm around his neck, and struck his head. He was hospitalized while masked agents prevented his U.S.-citizen sister from seeing him.

These cases show a system using overwhelming force to manufacture control rather than a system occasionally losing control.

The administration further protected that force by weakening the institutions meant to monitor it. DHS oversight offices were gutted because administration officials reportedly viewed them as obstacles to operations. Training was shortened while hiring accelerated. Officers from multiple agencies were deployed under blurred authority. Victims faced restricted paths to sue federal agents for constitutional violations. Congress continued financing the expansion without repairing the accountability failures that allowed abuse to recur.

A rogue-agent explanation asks whether one officer violated policy. The documented machinery raises a more consequential question: what happens when the policy environment rewards maximum arrests, removes protected locations, reduces training, encourages concealment, expands racial profiling, disperses responsibility, punishes observation, and leaves victims without effective remedies?

The answer is visible in the ACLU’s record. Force becomes ordinary. Children become acceptable witnesses and targets. Citizens become casualties of appearance-based policing. Schools and hospitals become enforcement terrain. Journalists and clergy become threats. Masks become standard. Unmarked vehicles become routine. Accountability becomes more difficult as the force becomes larger and more violent.

The report describes this system as a blueprint for authoritarianism because its machinery extends beyond deportation. It establishes a national internal-security force capable of entering cities, overwhelming local communities, suppressing protest, monitoring observers, intimidating elected officials, retaliating against witnesses, and defining political opposition as a threat.

Anti-immigrant scapegoating provides the public justification for building that machinery, while the force assembled in its name creates a broader state capacity. Once tens of thousands of officers have been funded, deployed across agency lines, and normalized as a masked presence in American communities, the same infrastructure can be used wherever the administration decides that public movement, observation, local resistance, protest, or political opposition interferes with federal power.

Trump built this force by insisting that mass deportation required unprecedented scale. Congress gave it the money. ICE enlisted local police. Federal agencies surrendered personnel. Sensitive-location protections were removed. Internal oversight was weakened. Legal accountability remained broken. Communities were left to confront armed agents whose identities and authority were often unclear.

The ACLU recommends dismantling the national deportation policing force, removing immigration agencies from DHS, restricting 287(g) deputization, ending the diversion of police into ICE operations, and restoring the ability of victims to hold federal officers and agencies legally accountable.

Those recommendations recognize that a force built through funding, recruitment, cross-agency deployment, concealment, and impunity cannot be repaired only by disciplining individual officers after people have been injured, families separated, children terrorized, and communities taught to fear every unmarked vehicle.

Floridalma Sanchez-Gomez’s driveway showed what this system looks like when it arrives. A traffic stop became a multi-agency operation in which a young woman was tased twice, a home was forced open, a citizen witness was arrested, and a child returned to a broken door and a missing family. Responsibility was dispersed across uniforms, agencies, vehicles, and chains of command.

That was not chaos surrounding the deportation force. It was the deportation force working as built.

Trump’s national deportation police force is expanding through congressional money, federal power, local-police deputization, racial profiling, and broken accountability. The people harmed are left to document what happened while masked agents and overlapping agencies make responsibility harder to trace.

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Citizens Bank has announced that it will leave the credit facilities connecting it to CoreCivic and The GEO Group, two private prison corporations that provide facilities and confinement infrastructure to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The announcement followed months of organizing outside Citizens branches and corporate offices, public pressure from customers, and municipal decisions to withdraw hundreds of millions of dollars from the bank. The De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition called the decision a victory for communities that refused to let a major financial institution continue supporting companies that profit from ICE detention.

Organizers exposed financial relationships that had remained largely hidden inside credit agreements and corporate filings. They attached a public and financial cost to Citizens’ role and helped drive the bank toward an exit from lending relationships it had maintained for years.

The detention system itself, however, is not being dismantled. Citizens said CoreCivic and GEO now require less private capital because the federal government is purchasing detention facilities directly.

On July 2, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security purchased the California City Detention Facility and the Otay Mesa Detention Center from CoreCivic for approximately $1.5 billion. California City has 2,560 beds, while Otay Mesa has 1,994. CoreCivic projected approximately $1.1 billion in net proceeds after taxes and transaction costs.

CoreCivic told investors that it expected to use part of the federal payment to repay corporate debt, including balances connected to its revolving credit facility, term loans, and senior notes. Remaining proceeds could be used for general corporate purposes, future growth, or permitted share repurchases.

The federal purchase does more than transfer ownership of two properties. Taxpayer money gives CoreCivic the ability to reduce the debt that made private bank financing necessary. Citizens can leave part of the lending structure because the federal government paid the corporation approximately $1.5 billion for detention infrastructure while the people inside remain confined by the same system.

CoreCivic said it expected to continue managing California City and Otay Mesa through its existing ICE agreements, although the contracts could be modified after the transfer. The California City management agreement runs through August 2027. The Otay Mesa agreement runs through December 2029 and includes an extension option.

DHS ownership does not mean public operation. The government can own a detention facility while paying a private corporation to staff guards, control movement, provide or deny medical care, manage food and sanitation, impose discipline, transport prisoners, and restrict access to legal services.

Changing the name on the deed does not end confinement, restore separated families, guarantee independent medical care, or create meaningful public oversight. It changes the financial structure supporting detention while leaving the human consequences in place.

An April 2024 GEO Group credit agreement identified Citizens as administrative agent, joint lead arranger, and joint bookrunner. Public reporting has also identified a GEO credit facility of approximately $550 million and a separate $500 million CoreCivic borrowing arrangement associated with Citizens.

Those credit facilities gave the companies access to money that could be used to manage debt, maintain liquidity, activate facilities, pursue government contracts, and expand detention capacity. The financial terminology may appear distant from the people imprisoned behind locked doors, but access to capital determines whether a contractor can prepare buildings, hire staff, reopen inactive facilities, absorb operating costs, and wait for federal payments.

A revolving credit facility becomes detention capacity when it helps a corporation open beds, maintain guards, transport prisoners, and continue operating while government revenue arrives.

Citizens maintained these relationships through years of criticism surrounding private immigration detention. Its exit announcement came after organizers brought the issue directly to its branches, headquarters, customers, shareholders, and municipal depositors.

The campaign included demonstrations at Citizens locations across several states, billboards, mobile advertising, a flyover banner, customer organizing, and efforts to move public deposits away from the bank. Jersey City voted to withdraw approximately $265 million. Montclair moved to remove tens of millions more.

Protest, customer action, municipal withdrawals, and reputational damage changed the cost of maintaining those relationships. Organizers exposed the financing, moved public money, intensified pressure, and forced Citizens to answer publicly for supporting corporations tied to ICE detention.

Written assurances remain necessary because Citizens has not publicly provided a final exit date, repayment timetable, or complete accounting of every service it may continue providing to CoreCivic or GEO. The announcement does not establish whether the bank will retain deposit, treasury, underwriting, advisory, or other non-credit relationships. It also does not identify whether another lender will replace Citizens.

An announced exit from credit facilities is not yet proof of complete financial separation.

The human cost behind these arrangements is visible at facilities such as GEO’s Delaney Hall detention center in Newark. People held there have raised complaints involving food, medical treatment, ventilation, hygiene, coercive labor, access to immigration proceedings, and prolonged confinement. Detainees organized a hunger and work strike while supporters protested outside and demanded freedom, timely hearings, humane treatment, and public accountability.

Those conditions are the human consequence of the financing structure and the reason the bank’s role matters.

A detention corporation’s access to credit affects its ability to keep facilities open, increase capacity, absorb operating costs, and pursue additional government contracts. Banks help turn immigration policy into physical confinement by supplying the capital needed to sustain and expand the system.

Citizens also said federal purchases of GEO facilities were anticipated, but no completed GEO sale was identified in the records reviewed for this article. The direction is already visible. DHS can reduce contractors’ need for private real estate financing by purchasing their properties outright. The companies can receive large federal payments, reduce their debt burdens, and remain in the system as paid operators.

That arrangement can make the detention infrastructure more durable. Federal ownership removes part of the financial burden from private contractors while preserving management contracts and corporate revenue. Washington is not ending the system when it purchases the properties required to imprison more people and continues paying private companies to operate them.

The unresolved questions are substantial. DHS has not publicly identified every facility it may purchase, the funding sources for those acquisitions, the terms of revised operating agreements, or the oversight standards that will govern privately managed facilities on federally owned property. Citizens has not documented the complete scope or timing of its separation from CoreCivic and GEO. It also remains unclear whether other banks will replace Citizens within those lending arrangements.

The campaign against Citizens demonstrated that sustained organizing can reach the financial institutions supporting ICE detention. Communities exposed the money trail, pressured municipalities to act, threatened the bank’s public standing, and built the pressure surrounding Citizens’ announcement that it would leave credit facilities connected to CoreCivic and GEO.

That achievement should be recognized without mistaking it for the end of the detention machinery. Citizens is leaving part of the lending structure while the federal government purchases detention properties and private contractors remain positioned to operate them. The companies can receive taxpayer-funded payments, reduce their debt, and continue earning revenue from the confinement of immigrants.

Citizens must provide written proof of the full scope and timing of its exit. DHS must disclose its acquisitions, operating contracts, expenditures, and contractor roles. CoreCivic and GEO must not be allowed to convert public payments into greater financial strength while the people harmed by detention disappear behind corporate balance sheets and government property transfers.

The bank’s retreat shows that organized resistance can make participation costly, but ending the harm requires dismantling the detention system that banks, contractors, ICE, and the federal government continue to finance and operate.

ICE detention depends on institutions willing to finance, purchase, operate, and normalize human confinement. Americans Against ICE documents those financial and institutional connections while keeping the people harmed by detention at the center of the public record.

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Federal personnel were reportedly told that the FBI would stop investigating killings involving ICE agents, shifting that work toward Homeland Security Investigations. HSI is an investigative component inside ICE, meaning the agency whose officers use fatal force could move closer to controlling the evidence, interviews, scene reconstruction, agent statements, and investigative record used to test its own account.

This is not an abstract dispute over which federal acronym receives a case. Fatal ICE encounters often begin with the agency issuing an immediate public claim that an officer faced a deadly threat. When the incident involves a vehicle, ICE can describe that vehicle as a weapon and identify the person its agents killed as the aggressor before witnesses, local investigators, forensic evidence, or independent footage are available. Renee Good’s killing showed what that power can cost, while the fatal shootings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero show why removing another layer of scrutiny now is so dangerous.

Renee Good Showed What Evidence Control Costs

After an ICE agent killed Renee Good, federal authorities controlled central evidence while Minnesota investigators were denied timely access. Her damaged SUV, recordings, witness statements, hard drives, and other materials remained under federal control for months. Minnesota ultimately sued federal agencies seeking access before prosecutors finally received substantial portions of the evidence in July.

That delay mattered because ICE’s justification depended on the claim that Renee used her vehicle against an agent. The vehicle itself was evidence. The position of the agent, the condition and movement of the SUV, recordings from the scene, witness accounts, and the agent’s statements could either support or undermine the official narrative. Yet the authorities advancing that narrative also controlled much of the material needed to test it.

Minnesota prosecutors now possess the SUV and previously withheld investigative records, allowing their review to continue. That transfer does not erase the months in which state investigators were forced to work without evidence held by the federal government. It confirms why possession matters: whoever controls the physical record controls how quickly another authority can challenge the agency’s version of a killing.

Renee’s case established the warning before the reported policy change arrived. ICE cast the woman its agent killed as the threat. Federal authorities retained the evidence. State investigators were kept outside. Federal civil-rights accountability did not move forward with the urgency demanded by a fatal shooting. By the time evidence reached Minnesota, the government’s story had already occupied the public record for months.

The Vehicle-as-a-Weapon Story Keeps Repeating

ICE later relied on closely related vehicle-threat claims after its agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine.

The three killings are not identical, and they should not be flattened into one set of facts. The repeating mechanism is the speed and consistency with which ICE portrays a vehicle as an immediate deadly weapon, followed by disputes over what agents actually faced and limited independent evidence available to the public.

That pattern matters because an agency statement can define the dead person before an investigation begins. Someone driving to work becomes a person who allegedly tried to run over an officer. Someone attempting to leave a surrounded vehicle becomes the author of the threat. The agent’s decision to fire is placed inside a self-defense frame before the public knows where each person stood, how the vehicles moved, what warnings were given, or whether officers created the danger they later invoked.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo Was Not the Target

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was a construction worker, father, and longtime Houston resident who was driving a crew to a job site when an ICE agent shot him on July 7. He was not the target of the enforcement operation. ICE said he attempted to ram an agency vehicle and drive toward an officer, but witnesses disputed whether agents were positioned as the agency claimed.

The difference between those accounts is not minor. It determines whether an agent fired to escape an unavoidable threat or whether officers surrounded a vehicle, escalated the encounter, and then used the resulting movement to justify lethal force.

No officer body-camera footage recorded Lorenzo’s shooting. Video from other sources and witness testimony therefore carry even greater importance, as does immediate access for investigators outside ICE. Houston officials and prosecutors have sought an independent accounting while witnesses central to the case remained exposed to the same immigration system whose agents were involved in the killing.

Lorenzo cannot be reduced to another name supporting a policy argument. His family lost a father who was heading to work. His coworkers became witnesses to a fatal federal shooting. His death demonstrates the human consequence when ICE supplies the accusation and families must fight for anyone outside the agency to test it.

Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero Was Not the Target

Days later, ICE agents killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. He was a young Colombian father with federal work authorization and was not the person agents were seeking. ICE again described a vehicle as the threat, while witnesses and reporting raised questions about how agents surrounded and confronted him before shots were fired.

Johan’s three-year-old daughter was inside the nearby home and, according to reporting, witnessed the shooting. No officer body-camera footage captured what happened. The agency’s public description therefore entered the record without the most direct evidence its own officers could have created.

The absence of body-camera footage in both July shootings makes independent control more essential. When agents do not record their own use of force, outside investigators must be able to secure vehicles, surveillance video, firearms, communications, forensic evidence, witness testimony, and unfiltered agent statements before the agency’s narrative hardens into the official conclusion.

HSI Is ICE

Homeland Security Investigations is an investigative component of ICE, not an outside agency reviewing ICE conduct.

That fact removes the bureaucratic camouflage from the reported change. Responsibility is not merely moving between federal offices. It is reportedly moving away from the FBI and toward an investigative branch housed inside the agency whose personnel may be implicated.

The danger is control. HSI could be positioned near the beginning of the evidence chain, determining what is collected, how witnesses are approached, which agent accounts are preserved, what material is shared, and which questions define the investigation. Even when evidence is eventually transferred elsewhere, those first decisions shape what remains available. ICE should not control investigations into killings or possible crimes committed by ICE agents, and an internal component cannot replace outside civil-rights scrutiny merely because it carries an investigative title.

What Disappears When the FBI Is Removed

Renee Good’s case does not justify treating the FBI as a reliable hero. Federal handling of her killing already demonstrated delay, exclusion, and resistance to state scrutiny.

But removing the FBI does not correct those failures. It eliminates even the formal federal route with jurisdiction to examine possible civil-rights violations by federal agents. An investigative component inside ICE cannot replace an outside authority capable of asking whether the agency’s own personnel violated the rights of the person they shot.

Evidence gathered after a fatal killing can reveal whether officers escalated the encounter, whether force was necessary, whether the person was attempting to escape rather than attack, whether an agent fired after the threat had passed, or whether the public account was false.

Removing the FBI layer narrows the investigation before the evidence is fully examined. The inquiry can remain centered on ICE’s accusation against the person killed instead of what ICE did to that person.

ICE Could Control the Story and the Evidence

ICE’s first statement after a shooting is not a neutral record. It is the agency’s defense of its officers.

If HSI then controls the investigative process, the public statement and the evidence review exist under the same institutional roof. The same agency that names the dead person as the aggressor could shape how that accusation is examined and what evidence reaches state prosecutors, families, journalists, and the public.

Renee Good’s family and Minnesota prosecutors already lived through the consequences of delayed access. Lorenzo’s family is demanding an independent investigation while witness accounts contest ICE’s justification. Johan’s family faces the same fundamental question without officer body-camera footage: who will test ICE’s story when ICE is positioned to investigate ICE?

The Public Denial Does Not Restore Oversight

DOJ and DHS publicly said their investigative relationship had not changed and that the FBI would continue investigating under agency policy. Their statement did not release the reported written instructions, identify a binding process governing the next fatal ICE killing, or guarantee independent FBI and civil-rights scrutiny when an ICE agent kills someone.

That public assurance does not replace a process that places evidence outside the agency involved, grants state authorities immediate access, preserves civil-rights jurisdiction, and prevents ICE from controlling both the accusation and the inquiry.

The Next ICE Killing Could Be Investigated by ICE

After the next fatal ICE shooting, someone must secure the scene, collect the weapons, obtain surveillance footage, preserve vehicle data, interview the agents separately, identify witnesses, examine communications, test the agency’s use-of-force claim, and decide whether evidence supports criminal or civil-rights scrutiny.

Someone must also tell the family what happened and ensure local prosecutors are not forced to wait months for evidence.

If HSI controls those decisions, ICE will be positioned to investigate a killing ICE has already defended publicly. The same institution could name the dead person as the aggressor and determine how that accusation is examined.

Renee Good’s killing showed what federal evidence control already cost: months without state access and an official narrative built around the woman an ICE agent killed. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero were then killed under disputed vehicle-threat claims while no officer body cameras recorded what happened.

Removing the FBI does not repair that system. It places the next investigation closer to the agency whose agents pulled the trigger. When ICE controls the accusation, the evidence, and the inquiry, oversight has not been transferred. It has been eliminated.

Families should not have to fight the agency that killed someone they love for access to the evidence.

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Orlin’s Law was introduced because Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported a mother without her young son without first meeting the public-safety standard the proposal would require.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced the legislation after ICE deported Wendy Hernandez Reyes to Honduras without Orlin Hernandez Reyes, her U.S.-citizen son. Wendy said she repeatedly begged officers to release her so she could care for him or deport them together. ICE removed her alone. Months later, Orlin was killed while living with the relative who had taken custody of him. He was three years old.

The bill would establish a presumption against ICE detention for parents and primary caregivers unless the agency meets the proposed public-safety standard. ICE would have to show through clear and convincing evidence that a covered parent or caregiver presents a specific threat that cannot be managed through supervised release. Under the proposal, release would become the starting point for covered parents and caregivers, and ICE would carry the burden of justifying detention.

That protection was absent when Wendy was detained while traveling to work. Local authorities in Alabama transferred her to ICE, which held her in Louisiana before deporting her on January 26. Her attorney said she had no criminal record. Her immigration status gave the government power over her movement, but it did not erase her responsibility for her child or Orlin’s need for his mother.

Wendy told officers that Orlin was a baby and that she would go wherever the government sent her as long as he could go too. She later said she continued requesting reunification through a detention-center tablet. On the day of her deportation, she said, the tablet stopped working, and she was shackled and placed on a plane without him.

In the statement announcing Orlin’s Law, Wendy said she begged officers not to take her without her son and that they refused to listen. She was not asking ICE for special treatment. She was trying to remain responsible for a toddler whose safety depended on her decisions.

Orlin was left in Florida with Samuel Maldonado Erazo, who is accused of abusing and killing him. Maldonado has been charged with murder and has pleaded not guilty. Authorities allege that Orlin suffered extensive physical abuse before his death.

The criminal charge concerns the man accused of killing Orlin. ICE remains accountable for enforcing the separation Wendy repeatedly asked it to prevent. The central government failure occurred before Orlin was killed: ICE removed the parent responsible for his safety without securing a stable outcome for him or preserving Wendy’s ability to control what happened next.

Americans Against ICE documented that failure in May, when the agency’s public response focused on blaming Wendy instead of accounting for the separation it enforced:

Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons alleged after Orlin’s death that Wendy had abandoned her son and chosen to leave him with the man accused of killing him. Jayapal’s office said Wendy’s account and court records conflict with ICE’s portrayal that s one abandoned Orlin. ICE imposed the separation and then redirected public blame toward the mother who had asked the agency to keep her child with her.

Orlin’s Law would place limits around that power before another family is broken apart. In addition to restricting detention, the bill would establish an Office of Detained Parent Coordination for parents who remain in custody. The office would help protect parental rights and coordinate across immigration detention, family courts, child-welfare systems and custody proceedings.

Those systems do not automatically move together. A parent can be held in one state while a child remains in another. Court hearings can proceed while the parent lacks transportation, documents, legal help or reliable communication. A deportation can occur before the parent has resolved who will care for the child or whether the child will travel with them.

The proposed law would require ICE to provide detained parents opportunities to make custody decisions and participate in proceedings involving their children. It would also prevent the agency from deporting a parent without their child when the parent wants the child to accompany them.

Detention does not cancel parenthood. A deportation order does not transfer a mother’s authority to immigration officers. Parents retain the responsibility to decide who cares for their children, whether remaining together is safest and how they will participate in custody or child-welfare proceedings. Orlin’s Law would treat those responsibilities as obligations ICE must respect rather than administrative inconveniences the agency can disregard.

The bill also exposes how family separation continues beyond the formal border policy most Americans remember. Separation now happens through workplace arrests, traffic stops, detention transfers and deportations carried out while children remain with relatives, enter foster care or move into unstable placements.

ICE has insisted that it does not separate families and that officers ask parents whether they want their children deported with them. The agency did not publicly explain what happened in Wendy’s case, whether officers checked on Orlin after her removal or whether child-welfare authorities were alerted. Wendy said she asked repeatedly to take him and later struggled to recover custody because ICE deported her without the documents she needed.

A policy that exists on paper does not protect a child when officers can disregard the parent’s request without an enforceable consequence. Orlin’s Law attempts to replace agency discretion with legal duties: consider supervised release, preserve parental decision-making, coordinate with other systems and do not deport a parent alone when they want their child beside them.

Jayapal introduced the bill with more than two dozen House co-sponsors and support from immigrant-rights and child-welfare organizations. She has also demanded information from the Department of Homeland Security and ICE about children separated from parents through immigration enforcement. The legislation faces a difficult path in the Republican-controlled House, and its introduction does not guarantee that it will receive a vote or become law.

Congressional difficulty does not weaken the need for the protections. It exposes the choice before lawmakers. ICE can detain and deport parents while their children remain behind, and the public record in Wendy’s case does not show that the agency ensured Orlin’s safety after removing her.

The public record cited in this case does not provide a complete accounting of how many parents and primary caregivers have been detained or deported while their children remained in the United States, how often officers refused requests for joint removal, or how frequently detained parents lost practical access to custody proceedings.

Orlin’s case shows that ICE was able to deport Wendy without her son despite her requests to remain with him, then redirect blame toward her after he was killed. The proposed law is designed to stop that government-imposed separation before another child is placed at risk.

Orlin’s Law cannot return Wendy to the moment when she begged ICE not to take her without her son, and it cannot bring Orlin back. It can require the government to justify separating another parent from another child before the harm is set in motion, making family unity the governing presumption rather than a request ICE can ignore.

Children should not lose their parents because ICE treats family unity as optional.

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When ICE agents arrested Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva at his Georgia home, his family immediately warned them that he needed medication for a medical condition. According to his sister and immigrant-rights advocates, agents first ignored the request and then allowed him to take only one medication into custody.

Arenas-Silva later called his sister from detention and told her that officials were still not giving him the medication he needed. Four days after ICE took control of his confinement, treatment, and movement, the 45-year-old Venezuelan man became unresponsive on a transport bus while being moved between two Georgia detention facilities. He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.

His family had identified the medical danger before his death, and ICE controlled every decision that followed. Arenas-Silva was arrested during what the agency described as a targeted enforcement action, taken to the privately operated Irwin County Detention Center, and later placed on a bus bound for the Folkston ICE Processing Center. Somewhere inside that chain of federal custody, a man whose family had warned that he needed medication deteriorated until he stopped responding.

ICE has said the suspected cause of death was cardiac arrest and that Arenas-Silva received medical care and was seen by medical professionals. Neither statement resolves the allegation at the center of his death. Cardiac arrest describes the heart stopping; it does not explain the underlying cause, whether missed medication contributed to his decline, or whether the death could have been prevented. A statement that medical personnel saw him does not establish that he received the specific treatment required to manage his condition.

Once ICE prevented Arenas-Silva from managing his own care, the agency became responsible for maintaining continuity of treatment. It controlled which medications entered detention with him, what was recorded during intake, whether prescriptions were verified, when doses were administered, and whether his condition was stable enough for transport. The agency must now explain what medications his family identified, what agents permitted him to bring, what clinicians documented, what treatment he received, and whether any doses were missed.

Those questions cannot be answered by repeating that care was provided. His family alleges that the treatment he needed was withheld, and his sister says she is certain he did not receive proper care. Her statement is not only an expression of grief after the fact. It reflects a warning issued at the time of arrest and repeated by Arenas-Silva himself while he remained alive in ICE custody.

ICE had notice of his reported medical need and controlled every custody decision that followed. The agency had been told that his family was trying to protect his access to medication, knew agents had controlled what he could bring into custody, and knew he was dependent on a detention system that had removed his ability to seek care independently. It nevertheless placed him into transport without publicly showing that his medical need had been addressed.

Transfer is often described as routine administration, but for detained people it is another period of total physical control. A person may be restrained, separated from clinicians, removed from an established treatment routine, and placed inside a vehicle where deterioration can go unnoticed until it becomes an emergency. ICE must disclose who approved Arenas-Silva for transport, what medical records accompanied him, whether he had received all prescribed medication, what monitoring occurred on the bus, and how much time passed between his last responsive contact and the emergency call.

Arenas-Silva remained inside one federal custody system throughout that movement. ICE may contract with private prison operators, outside medical vendors, and transportation companies, but those layers do not divide the government’s responsibility for the person it confined. Federal officials chose the detention site, authorized the transfer, and retained control over the records that now determine whether the public will learn where the chain failed.

Private detention often creates a structure in which each actor can point toward another. Facility staff can blame medical vendors, medical vendors can cite incomplete intake records, transport contractors can claim they followed instructions, and ICE can issue broad statements about care while withholding the evidence necessary to test them. Arenas-Silva did not die between unrelated institutions. He died while every part of his custody remained authorized by ICE.

The facility where he was first held carries its own record of alleged medical abuse. The federal government ended its contract with the Irwin County Detention Center in 2021 after whistleblower disclosures and public scrutiny over the treatment of detained women. A Senate investigation later found that women appeared to have undergone excessive, invasive, and often unnecessary gynecological procedures.

ICE began detaining immigrants at Irwin County again as the federal detention system expanded. That decision requires an accounting of what changed in the facility’s medical safeguards, staffing, contractor oversight, and accountability before people were returned to a site associated with such serious allegations. Arenas-Silva’s death makes that question immediate because a medically vulnerable man entered the facility, reportedly said he was not receiving necessary medication, and died before reaching the next detention center.

His death also belongs within the broader expansion of immigration confinement under the second Trump administration. More detention capacity enables more arrests and transfers, deepens reliance on private operators, and forces more medically vulnerable people through institutions designed to process human beings at scale. Expansion is not merely an increase in capacity. It increases the number of people whose medication, mobility, and survival are placed under institutional control.

Arenas-Silva has been reported as the 22nd person to die in ICE custody this year. That number shows the scale of the crisis, but it cannot replace the facts of his life and death. He was 45 years old. His family tried to protect him. He told his sister that he was not receiving what he needed. He was alive when ICE arrived at his home and dead four days later after confinement and transport under federal control.

The count matters because repeated deaths expose a system pattern, but each case requires its own record. Arenas-Silva’s death concerns medication continuity, medical clearance, detention conditions, and transport. It must remain distinct from shootings by ICE officers, deaths during enforcement operations, or other forms of immigration-related violence, even as all of them reveal the wider human cost of Trump’s enforcement machinery.

His family is demanding an independent investigation, and that demand must include preservation of the complete record. Arrest footage, intake screening, medication reconciliation forms, prescription and administration logs, clinician notes, medical requests, phone records, transfer orders, transport clearances, bus manifests, staff rosters, vehicle surveillance, emergency calls, hospital records, autopsy findings, toxicology results, internal death reviews, and contractor communications must all be secured.

Those records must establish when Arenas-Silva last received each medication, who approved his transfer, whether warning signs were documented before he boarded the bus, what the transport crew knew about his condition, when staff realized he was unresponsive, and how quickly emergency assistance was requested. An agency accused of failing to provide necessary medication cannot be the only institution controlling the evidence needed to determine whether it did so.

ICE’s public account begins with Arenas-Silva becoming unresponsive, but the relevant timeline began when his family warned agents at the door. It continued when he reportedly told his sister that he was not receiving his medication and through every intake decision, medication decision, clinical interaction, and transfer approval before his collapse.

Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva’s family did what families are told to do when someone with a medical condition is taken into custody. They informed the agents, tried to send medication with him, remained in contact, and listened when he said the treatment was not being provided. ICE had notice of his reported medical need and controlled every custody decision that followed.

His death cannot be reduced to suspected cardiac arrest, an annual count, or another press release written by the agency that confined him. ICE must release the complete medical and transportation record, submit to an independent investigation, and explain why a man whose family repeatedly warned of a medical need was placed into transfer without that need being addressed.

Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva was alive when ICE took custody of him. Four days later, he was dead after his family’s warnings, his reported medication deprivation, his confinement at Irwin County, and his transfer toward Folkston. The public record must now establish what ICE did, what it failed to do, and whether a preventable death was hidden behind the language of routine detention.

Americans Against ICE documents the raids, public seizures, detention abuse, custody deaths, family separation, and community resistance that Trump’s immigration machinery depends on the public forgetting. This work keeps the people targeted by ICE visible, connects individual acts of cruelty to the system producing them, and preserves the record when government agencies refuse to explain what their officers have done.

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An older Asian man was walking through the Las Vegas airport when plainclothes men identified by an eyewitness as federal immigration officers moved to take him into custody. Video recorded during the incident shows the man on the floor, visibly distressed, while one man in a hoodie controls his upper body and uniformed officers manage the space around them. The scene is not orderly, calm, or administrative. It shows several agents exerting concentrated physical power over an older man whose movement, safety, and access to help had been taken out of his hands.

The government may describe scenes like this through the language of enforcement, custody, and compliance, but official vocabulary does not change what happened to the man’s body. He was forced down in a heavily controlled public space and surrounded by people carrying far more power than he did. Officers determined where he could move, who could approach him, and which questions would be answered. His distress unfolded in front of travelers who were expected to accept the officers’ authority before they understood who the men were, why they had approached him, or what justified the force being used.

Black women nearby refused to accept that arrangement. They moved toward the man, raised their voices, challenged the officers, and remained present while officials tried to control the crowd. Their intervention did not depend on possessing the man’s immigration file or resolving every legal question in the terminal. They recognized the visible imbalance between one vulnerable older man and multiple officers attempting to remove him, and they refused to let that imbalance disappear into the assumption that government action must be legitimate simply because government agents were carrying it out.

Their resistance changed the conditions around the attempted seizure. The officers were no longer dealing with one isolated person while the surrounding public continued toward its gates. They were acting in front of witnesses who would not leave, lower their voices, or allow the man’s fear to be converted into background noise. The eyewitness later reported that the man boarded the flight with the other passengers. The available record does not identify every decision that produced that outcome, but it does show that the effort to take him did not continue without sustained public opposition.

That opposition matters because isolation is one of immigration enforcement’s most important tools. An agent does not need to remove someone from a crowd before making that person functionally alone. Officers can surround the target, control the available information, order witnesses backward, and rely on the social authority of uniforms to discourage questions. The person being taken may not know which agency is involved, whether they are free to leave, what authority is being claimed, how to reach an attorney, or whether anyone nearby is willing to risk helping them. When everyone else assumes that the encounter is private government business, a crowded airport becomes an ideal place to make a person disappear.

Airports intensify that power. They are designed around surveillance, restricted movement, armed authority, checkpoints, and immediate consequences for disobedience. Travelers are conditioned to comply quickly because a dispute can cost them a flight, trigger police involvement, or place them under suspicion. Plainclothes officers can exploit that environment by moving through the terminal without the public immediately understanding who they are or what they are doing. Once the older man was on the floor, the airport’s culture of obedience became part of the force being used against him.

The Las Vegas incident also belongs to the larger enforcement system Donald Trump deliberately expanded. His administration demanded far higher daily arrest numbers from ICE and treated volume as evidence of success. Once the White House made bodies in custody the central measure, agents needed people they could locate and seize quickly enough to keep the numbers moving. That pressure did not produce a narrow campaign focused only on people convicted of serious crimes. It expanded enforcement into workplaces, neighborhoods, courthouses, transit systems, airports, and other spaces where vulnerable people could be found with less preparation and fewer protections.

The detention population reflects that shift. By April 2026, more than 70% of the people held by ICE had no criminal conviction. The administration continued invoking violent criminals to justify the crackdown even as the system filled detention facilities with people who did not match the threat Trump described. Arrest quotas created an incentive to move toward the visible and reachable rather than the dangerous. Workers, parents, older people, travelers, and immigrants already listed within government systems became easier arrest inventory because they could be located, surrounded, and processed faster than the public enemies used to sell the policy.

Americans Against ICE identifies this incident as part of the broader enforcement pattern created by Trump’s arrest quotas: when ICE is pressured to produce thousands of arrests, older people, workers, travelers, and others who are visible and physically easier to overpower become convenient targets.

The older man’s humanity was never conditional on his record or legal status. The video shows what officers did to him in public, while the broader enforcement record explains why scenes like this are becoming more common. A government demanding thousands of arrests every day creates pressure to treat vulnerability as an operational advantage. People who are older, physically overmatched, linguistically isolated, alone, or accustomed to complying with authority are easier to control. The system does not have to announce that it is hunting easier prey when its incentives repeatedly drive officers toward the people least equipped to resist.

Trump’s rhetoric prepares the public to accept that result. His administration repeatedly describes immigration enforcement as a defense against criminals, invaders, and threats, encouraging Americans to assume that anyone restrained by ICE must have earned the treatment. The accusation arrives before the facts. A person’s body on the floor is offered as evidence that the person was dangerous, while the officers’ decision to use force is treated as proof that force was necessary. This circular logic protects the agency from scrutiny and turns the government’s own violence into justification for more government power.

The women who confronted the officers rejected that logic. They did not allow the man’s restraint to define him as a threat. They saw an older person in distress and responded to the immediate human reality rather than the political story Trump’s administration wants the public to impose on every immigration arrest. Their action was not naïve. It reflected an understanding that government officers can possess authority and still abuse it, that a person can be placed in custody without receiving justice, and that silence from witnesses helps official cruelty become routine.

Black women have repeatedly been expected to provide this kind of protection while receiving little institutional protection themselves. Their role in Las Vegas should not be romanticized into another story about Black women naturally carrying everyone else’s moral burden. They should not have been the only people willing to confront concentrated state power, and no society should rely on Black women to place themselves between armed officers and vulnerable strangers whenever public institutions fail. Their courage deserves recognition because they chose to act, not because the country is entitled to expect that labor from them.

The older man remains the person who absorbed the immediate harm. He was placed on the floor, physically controlled, exposed before strangers, and left dependent on witnesses he did not know. The women’s intervention matters because it responded to his vulnerability rather than using him as a symbol of their bravery. They recognized him as a person before they knew his name, nationality, or immigration history. That recognition was enough to reject the idea that officers should be allowed to remove him without questions.

Their response also reflects a broader change in how communities are reacting to ICE. More people have watched agents arrive in masks and hoodies, use unmarked vehicles, enter workplaces, wait outside courthouses, and take parents or workers without providing the surrounding public with meaningful explanations. The administration’s language no longer hides the physical reality as effectively as it once did. Neighbors are warning one another, witnesses are filming, families are demanding badge numbers and locations, and communities are gathering around people targeted by agents because they understand that the difference between an enforcement action and a disappearance can be the presence of witnesses who refuse to leave.

This resistance does not require the public to adjudicate immigration law in real time. It requires people to recognize that state power must remain answerable when it touches a human body. Witnesses can demand identification, ask whether the person is free to leave, record the conduct of officers, locate family or counsel, request interpretation, and preserve evidence that agencies might otherwise control. Those actions may not stop every detention, but they remove the privacy that allows coercion to be described later through sanitized agency language.

The Las Vegas airport scene demands answers that have not been publicly provided. The government should identify the officers and agency involved, explain why they targeted the older man, state what authority they claimed, disclose why physical restraint was used, and account for the decision to place him on the floor. It should also explain whether he was injured, whether interpretation or medical assistance was offered, and what changed before he ultimately boarded the flight. These are not technical distractions from the incident. They concern the government’s treatment of a vulnerable man whose body was controlled in a public terminal.

What the available evidence already establishes is serious enough. An older man was physically dominated and publicly humiliated while several officers controlled the space around him. The people carrying out the operation expected the airport’s culture of obedience to help them isolate him from meaningful public support. Black women broke that isolation by moving toward the man and refusing to let the officers define the scene without challenge.

Trump’s expanded immigration machinery depends on making vulnerable people easy to take and teaching everyone else to accept the seizure as normal. At the Las Vegas airport, Black women interrupted that machinery by refusing to let officers isolate a vulnerable man without witnesses, questions, or public resistance.

Americans Against ICE documents the raids, public seizures, detention abuse, custody deaths, family separation, and community resistance that Trump’s immigration machinery depends on the public forgetting. This work keeps the people targeted by ICE visible, connects individual acts of cruelty to the system producing them, and preserves the record when government agencies refuse to explain what their officers have done.

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SOURCE:

Eyewitness account and video: Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig, Cloaking Inequity.

Minnesota investigators now possess major portions of the evidence connected to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti after federal officials kept critical material from state authorities for more than six months. The transfer includes hard drives containing statements and police body-camera footage, along with the sport utility vehicle Good was driving when ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed her in January.

The handover materially changes the scope of Minnesota’s independent review. State prosecutors can now examine recorded footage, compare official accounts with witness and officer statements, inspect digital files, and evaluate physical evidence that had remained under federal control. Until this month, the agencies connected to the federal personnel involved in the killings controlled material Minnesota authorities said they needed to determine whether state criminal laws had been violated.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty publicly acknowledged the transfer on Monday, saying state officials no longer had to speculate about evidence they had not been permitted to review. Her statement identified the practical significance of the handover: prosecutors can now assess the cases through a fuller evidentiary record rather than attempting to reconstruct two killings while federal agencies retained key portions of the evidence.

That access followed months of resistance. Minnesota investigators opened independent inquiries after federal authorities refused to cooperate in the Good and Pretti cases. In March, state officials sued the Trump administration for access, alleging that the federal government was withholding evidence from authorities investigating possible violations of Minnesota criminal law committed against people within the state.

The dispute was not procedural background. It determined whether Minnesota could conduct a complete investigation independent of the agencies employing the federal agents whose conduct was under review. Body-camera footage, statements, digital records, and Good’s vehicle were not peripheral materials. They were central to reconstructing the shootings, testing official narratives, examining the use of force, and deciding whether the evidence supported criminal charges.

Renee Good’s and Alex Pretti’s families were forced to wait while federal officials controlled that record. Attorneys for Good’s family called the transfer an important step toward justice and accountability, but it came only after more than half a year without assurance that Minnesota investigators could independently review the evidence tied to her killing.

Steve Schleicher, the attorney representing Pretti’s family, said federal officials had refused to make a clear public commitment to cooperate with Minnesota authorities. He described a recent meeting in which U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen would not answer basic questions about evidence in Pretti’s case. The family was left pressing federal officials for investigative cooperation that should have followed the killing from the beginning.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said he was deeply troubled that the federal government had spent more than half a year attempting to conceal evidence from state investigators. The chronology supports that concern. The material was not missing because it had never been collected. Federal officials possessed it and controlled when Minnesota authorities would be allowed to examine it.

Good and Pretti were both U.S. citizens with no criminal records. They were shot and killed by masked federal immigration agents during Operation Metro Surge. Their deaths intensified scrutiny of federal agents’ use of force and of the systems responsible for investigating those agents afterward.

In Good’s case, Jonathan Ross returned to duty while Minnesota authorities remained without access to major evidence held by the federal government. Good’s vehicle stayed in federal possession along with footage, statements, and digital records relevant to an independent review of the shooting. That control limited the state’s ability to determine whether Ross’s actions violated Minnesota law.

The Pretti investigation involved a separate killing and a separate factual record, but the same institutional barrier. Federal authorities retained evidence while his family and state officials sought answers. In both cases, agencies connected to the agents involved controlled information outside investigators needed in order to evaluate their conduct.

The transfer now allows Minnesota prosecutors to reconstruct the events with access to evidence that had previously been unavailable to them. They can compare body-camera footage with statements, inspect digital material, examine Good’s SUV, and evaluate whether the combined record supports criminal charges. Moriarty’s statement that prosecutors no longer have to speculate about missing evidence demonstrates how deeply the withholding had constrained the earlier review.

The handover does not determine what charging decisions prosecutors will reach. It removes a major obstacle that federal officials maintained for more than six months and places a renewed obligation on Minnesota authorities to complete their review, explain their findings publicly, and determine whether the evidence supports charges against any of the agents involved.

Recent legal filings suggest the transfer may have occurred in connection with reciprocal evidence negotiations involving the prosecution of ICE agent Christian Castro, who faces charges related to the nonfatal shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. The record has not established the federal government’s full reason for releasing the Good and Pretti evidence now. What is established is that the material remained withheld through months of litigation, public criticism, and pressure from state officials and the victims’ families.

The withholding shaped the investigations long before the transfer occurred. Investigators lost time. Families waited without a complete accounting. Federal agents remained uncharged while the agencies connected to their conduct controlled the evidence required for independent state review.

The concern extends beyond these two cases. Prosecutors in Houston have also accused federal authorities of withholding information connected to the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by an ICE agent, including the identities of agents involved. That allegation reinforces the need to examine federal evidence control as a recurring obstacle to outside scrutiny of immigration-enforcement shootings.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti remain the center of this investigation. The transfer matters because Minnesota authorities can now review major evidence without relying solely on records filtered through the federal agencies whose personnel were involved. It also documents how long the families were denied that independent process.

The production of evidence does not erase the litigation Minnesota had to file, the investigative time that was lost, or the protection federal agents received while state authorities lacked access to the record. No agent has been charged in either killing. The families still do not have final answers, and federal officials have not publicly explained why the evidence remained unavailable to Minnesota for more than six months.

Minnesota now has access to evidence that federal officials withheld during the first six months of the investigations. The remaining question is whether state review produces public findings, charging decisions, and accountability for the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Federal officials kept critical evidence in the Renee Good and Alex Pretti killings from Minnesota investigators for more than six months while their families waited for answers.

Share this report to preserve the record of that obstruction and keep pressure on state and federal authorities to issue public findings and pursue meaningful accountability.

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