Trump Administration Has Detained Citizens as Part of Mass Deportation Actions

A new report highlights how at least seven U.S. citizens — but likely far more — have been detained, deported or otherwise targeted by the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

According to the report from The Washington Post, at least seven U.S. citizens across the country, including children, have been detained by the federal government’s anti-immigrant operations since Trump took office. In some instances, individuals were detained despite showing identification demonstrating their citizenship status.

“As immigration officials become more indiscriminate about who they’re targeting — all while they’re pressured to deport people faster and to avoid immigration court proceedings — it creates a situation in which the possibility of illegally detaining and deporting a U.S. citizen rises immensely, because citizenship is not something that we can spot on people’s foreheads,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University, speaking to The Post.

The publication documented numerous examples of citizens being targeted, including:

• A man in Chicago who, after dining at a pizzeria following a day of submitting resumes to potential employers, was detained, handcuffed, and put into a van with other migrants, despite having his Social Security card on his person;
• A family with mixed citizenship status detained at a Border Patrol checkpoint in South Texas, as they were rushing their 10-year-old daughter — a U.S. citizen — to the hospital, resulting in their being deported to Mexico, where they currently reside in hiding;
• And a Virginia man who, while driving to his job with his coworkers, had his vehicle surrounded by armed immigration officials after they wrongly identified him as a migrant with a different name.

The U.S. government doesn’t release data on how often citizens are detained for being suspected of living in the country without legal status. The information obtained by The Post is based on media reports, research institutes and oversight agencies, suggesting that the number of citizens who have been targeted is likely far higher.

The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has also targeted noncitizen residents living legally in the U.S.

For example, the administration recently tried to justify the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelan men to a prison in El Salvador, claiming, without evidence, that the men were gang members. But a CBS News analysis published over the weekend found that, of the 238 migrants who were flown to the prison, around three-quarters have no criminal record at all.

On Sunday, a federal judge ruled that the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man from El Salvador who was included in those deportations, was “wholly lawless.” Garcia, a legal resident who lived with his wife and child in Maryland, was alleged by the Trump administration to have been a member of a gang, but later a lawyer for the Justice Department admitted that he had been deported in error. Other reports indicated that many of the men who were deported were targeted by the White House simply because they had tattoos.

In other cases, the Trump administration has targeted people who were already on the path to becoming naturalized citizens. In Sackets Harbor, New York, an entire family was recently detained by federal immigration officials despite the fact that they were regularly checking in with immigration courts and “following the immigration court process” to become citizens, according to New York Immigration Coalition president and CEO Murad Awawdeh.

The White House, including Trump himself, has expressed the desire to retaliate against any judicial review over its process of detaining and deporting people. After a finding by federal District Judge James Boasberg against the administration over how it handled the deportation of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, Trump took to Truth Social to demand action against the judge.

“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ [sic] I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump wrote last month.

Trump’s rant was followed by a rare rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts wrote in response to Trump. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”