ICE Is Detaining American Citizens. Leaders Are Looking Away. The Media Is Losing the Thread.
There is a sentence that should not need to be written in 2026 in the United States of America. The sentence is: federal immigration agents are arresting American citizens on the street, at their workplaces, and during traffic stops, holding them without access to attorneys or phone calls, and in some cases keeping them for days before releasing them — often without apology, explanation, or consequence.
This is happening. It is documented. It is the subject of a December 2025 Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee report that runs to dozens of pages of individual cases. It has generated lawsuits in multiple federal circuits. Fifty members of Congress signed a letter demanding an investigation in August 2025. And it is, in the broader arc of the news cycle, being substantially underreported — not because journalists don’t know about it, but because there are simply too many stories, and this one doesn’t fit neatly into the frames the media has built for covering immigration.
That is a problem. Because what is happening here is not an immigration story. It is a civil liberties story. It is a story about the government detaining its own citizens without cause, by color of skin, and then lying about it.
The Scale
For decades, ICE has arrested, detained, and even deported U.S. citizens — a practice the agency has acknowledged. But under the second Trump administration, this rare practice is becoming more frequent. Experts warn that “citizens are becoming increasingly vulnerable in a system moving faster and operating with fewer safeguards.” RealClearPolling
The number of people held in ICE detention on any given day increased by over 75% in one year, reaching a record 73,000 people as of mid-January 2026. ICE is now using 104 more facilities for immigration detention than at the start of 2025 — a 91% increase. Importantly, 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detention on record, and 2026 is looking to be worse. 270toWin.com
Inside that system — expanding at a pace that outstrips the agency’s ability to staff, oversee, or manage it — people are disappearing. As more people are arrested than there are beds to hold them, ICE’s detainee locator system has become unreliable and access to phones uncertain. People have been “disappearing” for days. 270toWin.com
The Faces
The Senate subcommittee’s December 2025 report is worth dwelling on, because it contains names and stories that deserve to be known.
Elzon, a New York electrician, was pulled over on his way to work by unmarked cars driven by masked DHS agents. He was detained for three days in the Metropolitan Detention Center, where he was never given a phone call or access to money his sister placed on his commissary account. Even when federal prosecutors dropped charges after video of his arrest surfaced publicly, he was still fired from his job. RealClearPolling
Leo, a construction worker, said “I’m a citizen” and “I’ve got papers” as agents handcuffed him and held him outside in the heat for hours. An agent said his ID was “fake.” Two weeks after he returned to work, he was detained again at a different job site. RealClearPolling
Julian was incarcerated in a detention facility where he was not allowed to see an attorney or speak to his family. After three days he was released on a $25,000 bond and placed under house arrest. The charges were later dismissed for lack of probable cause. “In that moment, I didn’t think I was going to survive,” he said. RealClearPolling
When Job Garcia, a U.S. citizen detained by ICE, was being transferred to another agent, he heard the first agent tell his colleague “I got another one.” Garcia asked, “Another what?” — understanding the comment to be racially charged. Jezebel
“I got another one.” This is the sound of a system that has stopped asking whether the person in front of it is a citizen before it decides to act.
ICE and CBP officials who inappropriately detain U.S. citizens frequently claim they have been assaulted by those citizens — claims which, on their face, strain credulity and are often directly refuted by video evidence. The pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched police misconduct cases: arrest first, justify later, claim assault if the video doesn’t cooperate. RealClearPolling
The Lie
On October 30, 2025, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed in an interview: “No American citizens have been arrested or detained. We focus on those who are here illegally.” RealClearPolling
This was not a misstatement. By October 2025, the Senate subcommittee had already collected dozens of documented cases. Noem knew. The administration knew. They said it anyway.
DHS published a fact sheet on its own website titled “DHS Debunks New York Times False Reporting: DHS Does NOT Deport U.S. Citizens.” The fact sheet claimed that any allegations of subprime detention conditions were false, that all detainees receive proper meals and medical treatment, and characterized each documented citizen detention as a situation where the citizen in question was “violent,” “obstructing,” or “resisting.” Race to the WH
Every single one. In every case. The citizen was at fault. The agents were not.
This is not credible. It would not be credible if one case were characterized this way. It is preposterous when the administration applies it to every documented instance across dozens of cases in multiple states.
The Congressional Response — and Its Limits
In August 2025, fifty members of Congress signed a letter demanding investigations, noting that the agency has repeatedly refused to attempt to verify people’s citizenship or ignored citizens’ attempts to prove their status. RealClearPolling
Democrats attempted to include an amendment in Trump’s big budget bill that would have prevented ICE from using appropriated funds to detain or deport U.S. citizens. House Republicans killed it. “The fact that Democrats feel the need to even introduce an amendment that says ICE cannot deport U.S. citizens is bats**t crazy,” said Rep. Ted Lieu. Ballotpedia
He is correct that it is crazy. He is incorrect that the craziness lies in the introduction of the amendment. The craziness lies in its defeat. House Republicans voted against a measure that said simply: do not arrest American citizens. They voted against it. That vote happened. It did not become a major news story.
Why Leaders Aren’t Leading
The problem with coverage of this issue is structural. The news cycle on immigration runs on the large dramatic numbers — the record deportation figures, the Alligator Alcatraz spectacle, the Supreme Court TPS ruling, the border crossing data. The individual citizen detention stories require sustained investigative attention that is hard to maintain when the news fire hose never stops.
And the political calculus is brutal. Democrats who focus on wrongful detention of U.S. citizens risk being reframed as “soft on immigration enforcement.” The administration has proven extraordinarily effective at turning any objection to its methods into an accusation that the objector supports “illegal immigration.” The framing is dishonest — the people being detained in many of these cases are citizens — but dishonest framing has proven politically effective, and Democratic leaders know it.
So they sign letters. They hold roundtables. They introduce amendments that get defeated. They do not do the thing that might actually change the story: go to where the detentions are happening, stand next to the people it is happening to, and refuse to leave the frame.
The Fourth Amendment Is Not an Inconvenience
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. It was written specifically to prevent the kind of warrantless, stop-and-detain enforcement that the colonial British used against American colonists. The parallel is not subtle. It was the animating grievance of the American Revolution.
The same Republican Party that invokes the Founding Fathers in virtually every speech about constitutional principles has built a detention apparatus that operates in routine violation of the document those Founders wrote. The same movement that screams about government overreach when a health department requires a mask has said nothing — nothing of consequence — about masked, unmarked federal agents pulling American citizens out of their cars on their way to work.
The media is not covering it adequately. The leaders are not fighting for it loudly enough. The system is moving faster than the oversight can track. And the people being detained — disproportionately Latino, disproportionately working class, disproportionately in states where the political incentive to protect them is weakest — are navigating it alone, one $25,000 bond at a time.
“I voted for Donald Trump, but not for this,” one detained citizen said. “I don’t think Americans, or anyone, should live like this.” RealClearPolling
He’s right. The question is whether anyone with actual power will say it as clearly as he did, and then do something about it.