Federal agents detained at least 506 United States citizens between January 2025 and September 2026, according to a ProPublica investigation published on 6 October. More than 70 of them were children and teenagers. About 20 of the children were handcuffed or zip-tied, and around a dozen citizens, most of them children, were deported. You can read ProPublica's full report on Crust News.
ProPublica counted only cases it could confirm from at least two sources, with each person individually identified, and calls the total "almost certainly an undercount." In one Idaho raid, more than 200 citizens were estimated to have been detained; only 30 could be confirmed by name. Its database lists all 506.
The detail is worse than the total:
- More than 100 citizens were held after agents questioned whether they were citizens at all. Nearly all of them were people of color.
- 63 were detained while filming immigration agents at work.
- 36 were held for at least a day without access to a lawyer or their family.
- More than 300 were accused of assaulting or obstructing agents. Fewer than half were charged in federal court, and nearly half of those charges were later dropped or dismissed.
ProPublica's report opens with video from a Target store in Richfield, Minnesota, in January 2026. An employee is pushed toward an SUV, repeating: "I'm literally a U.S. citizen. I'm literally a U.S. citizen." The ICE List has identified one of the officers detaining him as Romel Flores Madlangbayan, an ICE deportation officer. A witness told the ICE List that agents tackled one employee at the store and led out a second in cuffs minutes later. The incident is logged here. Madlangbayan has been identified at two more of the arrests listed by ProPublica.
In Florida, 20-year-old Juan Carlos Lopez Gomez was arrested in April 2025 and accused of entering the country illegally. His mother brought his U.S. birth certificate to court and a judge threw the charge out. Immigration authorities kept holding him anyway. In Minnesota, during Operation Metro Surge, agents tackled Jonathan Aguilar Garcia, a Latino Target employee, and released him two hours later outside a Walmart in a different city. A federal judge found evidence of racial profiling.
"This is just terrible. I've never seen so many U.S. citizen encounters in all my years," Eric Balliet, a former DHS official, told ProPublica. The department's answer: "DHS is NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake."
For comparison, a 2021 government watchdog report found 121 detentions of potential U.S. citizens across five years, from 2015 to early 2020. This administration passed 500 in 20 months.
The pattern is the point. When agents stop people for how they look, citizens are caught as a matter of course. When filming agents leads to arrest, warning your neighbours becomes a risk. And when a citizen can be held for a day with no lawyer and no phone call, the only thing standing between any American and a cell is whether an agent believes them. Renee Good was a U.S. citizen too.
