The Trump administration has a set of lines it repeats whenever someone asks whether its immigration agents are grabbing American citizens:

"DHS is NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake."

"There are no 'indiscriminate' stops."

"ICE does not zip tie or restrain children."

On October 6, 2026, ProPublica published the receipts. Its reporters went looking for every case they could find of an immigration agent holding a U.S. citizen since this administration began in January 2025. They found more than 500 — 506 by the count at the top of the story.

That is not one bad day or one rogue agent. It is a pattern that runs month after month, city after city, and the government's answer to every one of them has been to say it didn't happen.

What ProPublica counted

ProPublica counted anyone that immigration agents held against their will for any amount of time — handcuffed, held at gunpoint, or simply not allowed to leave. That's the same test courts use for whether someone has been detained. Among the more than 500 cases:

• More than 100 Americans were held after agents questioned whether they were citizens. Nearly all of them were people of color.
• At least 70 American children and teens were detained. Some were handcuffed.
• More than 300 Americans were detained for supposedly assaulting or getting in the way of agents. Fewer than half were ever charged in federal court, and many of those cases were dropped or thrown out.
• At least 63 Americans were detained while filming agents.
• 36 Americans were held for at least a day without being able to call a lawyer or their family.
• Roughly a dozen citizens were deported, most of them children.

And ProPublica says its number is an undercount. One example: witnesses estimated that more than 200 citizens were detained in a single Idaho raid last fall, but ProPublica only counted the 30 it could identify by name.

This is the second time the newsroom has had to do this work. It ran a tally last year too, because, as it put it, it was doing "what the government hasn't."

The government's denials, next to the cases

The story lays the administration's own statements beside the people it says don't exist.

"No administrative arrests of U.S. citizens." That's what Homeland Security said about Operation Midway Blitz, the immigration surge in Chicago last fall. It added that "ICE has significant protections in place to ensure U.S. citizens are not arrested, detained, or mistakenly removed." ProPublica found agents detained more than 120 citizens in Illinois during the height of that surge alone.

"Mistakenly removed." In April 2026, agents stopped a man in Texas. He told them, "I'm a citizen, it's fine." He was deported four days later.

The other cases read like a list of things the government says it doesn't do:

• In January 2025, agents held a 21-year-old citizen at gunpoint and handcuffed him during a raid at the Philadelphia car wash where he worked.
• In April 2025, a 20-year-old was held in a Florida jail for more than 24 hours even though he had proof he was a citizen.
• In June 2025, a man who is a citizen of both the U.S. and Mexico was picked up at work in California and held for four days without access to a lawyer or his family.
• In December 2025, an American in Baltimore was picked up and held for 25 days, unable to see her 5-year-old son over Christmas.
• In January 2026, hours after Renee Good was killed, agents tackled and handcuffed a school staffer in Minneapolis. "I feel lucky to be alive," he said.
• In May 2026, a New York teenager was thrown to the ground, left bloodied, and then dropped off in a neighborhood he didn't know.

ProPublica showed many of these cases to people who used to do this job. "This is just terrible," said Eric Balliet, who spent more than two decades at Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, including during Trump's first term. Darius Reeves, who ran ICE's Baltimore office before retiring last year, said: "I've never seen so many U.S. citizen encounters in all my years. It's an embarrassment."

Confronted with all of it, Homeland Security defended its agents' conduct. "DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted. We do our due diligence," the department told ProPublica.

Republicans in Congress paid for this

None of this runs on its own. It runs on money and on a Congress that has decided not to ask questions.

In June, Republicans pushed nearly $70 billion more for ICE and Border Patrol through both chambers. In the Senate, 52 Republicans voted for it. In the House it passed by just two votes, and not one Republican voted no — which means every single Republican yes was the deciding vote.

When members have been asked directly about citizens being swept up, the answer has been a shrug. Addison McDowell, who sits on the House subcommittee that oversees Native American affairs, said "there will be mistakes" when asked about ICE detaining Native American citizens, and that it's "not going to be a perfect process."

More than 500 cases is not a process with a few mistakes. It is the process. And every Republican who voted to pour more money into it, with no new rules on how agents treat the people they stop, owns what it is doing to Americans — including the children it handcuffed and the citizens it deported.

What the record shows

ProPublica identified more than 500 U.S. citizens held by immigration agents since January 2025 — at least 70 of them children and teens, more than 100 held because agents doubted they were citizens, and roughly a dozen deported. Homeland Security has said again and again that it does not arrest citizens by mistake or restrain children, and when shown the cases it defended its agents' conduct. Republicans in Congress voted this year to give the same agencies nearly $70 billion more.

Source

More Than 500 U.S. Citizens Have Been Detained, Including Handcuffed or Held at Gunpoint, in Trump's Immigration Crackdown — ProPublica, October 6, 2026