ICE Killings Are Part of a Pattern of Hundreds of Civil Rights Violations by Agency Under Trump, Says ACLU Report

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is facing intense scrutiny once again after agents killed at least two people during arrests in less than two weeks.

But the author of a report out Thursday from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) tells Common Dreams that this rash of violence is just "the tip of the iceberg" in a much broader campaign by immigration agents that has been indiscriminate, violent, and lawless.

Naureen Shah, one of the authors of the ACLU report, said that these killings were part of a "much, much bigger pattern, where ICE agents and the agents who are working with them have threatened to use force and used force in a way we've never seen from these agencies, in their history."

The report examined more than 1,200 immigration enforcement actions by the Trump administration in 2025 across eight states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, and New Mexico—in what the organization called "the first in-depth civil rights review of immigration enforcement actions throughout 2025."

In more than a third of the cases, it found examples of misconduct, including excessive force, intimidation, and racial profiling.

The report detailed how agents have used extreme force as a "default" tool. On 418 occasions, agents pushed, shoved, tackled, or pinned people to the ground.

In many cases, the report said force was used to "coerce immediate compliance rather than to respond to a threat." Often, it found, that force was excessive and potentially deadly.

In one exemplary case, Border Patrol agents reportedly grabbed Ricardo Aguayo Rodriguez, a 54-year-old construction worker who is the father of two deaf teenagers, as he was riding his bicycle home from the grocery store in Illinois.

According to the report: "Agents grabbed him in a stranger’s driveway, pepper-sprayed him, locked an arm around his neck, and struck his head. Video captures him gasping, 'Por favor, amigo.' While he was hospitalized with head wounds, masked agents barred his US citizen sister from seeing him at the hospital."

Threats of force and the brandishing of weapons were also commonplace, appearing in at least 128 cases.

In Hawthorne, California, masked agents surrounded the truck of US citizen Cary Lopez Alvarado, who was nine months pregnant. After she called 911, an agent asked her, "Do you want to get killed?" before shoving her into the side of her truck, pressing her stomach against it.

Children were detained, targeted, or subjected to misconduct in 214 cases, the report found. At least 32 of them were US citizens.

A father in Colorado was detained after a court visit, with agents using their vehicles to box his car in at a traffic stop.

"One agent pointed a gun at them as he approached the vehicle, and another smashed the driver’s side window while his US citizen partner screamed there was a baby in the car. Glass cut her as she shielded their 1-month-old infant,' the report said.

The report also identified racial profiling as an "operating practice," with agents routinely stopping people without prior information to question them about their legal status. At least 437 cases were identified that likely involved racial profiling.

Often these cases involved agents targeting certain workplaces and occupations where many immigrants worked and stopping people based on appearance, spoken language, and location.

In Arizona, agents followed a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe in an unmarked van for several minutes before jumping out to tackle and arrest him for “suspicious activity." They then took him to an immigration facility where he was deprived of food and water.

When they attempted to prove his citizenship by showing a tribal ID, driver's license, and state identification, agents said his documentation "seemed fake" and claimed he was an "illegal." He was detained for nearly a day before being released.

The report makes clear that no place or person was off limits for immigration agents. More than half the observed cases occurred in public spaces like streets, bus stops, stores, and gas stations. Hundreds of other cases involved individuals being targeted at their places of work.

Under the Trump administration, agents have routinely operated at “sensitive” sites previously deemed off limits, like schools, places of worship, shelters, and courthouses in a reversal of previous policies.

And while the administration has portrayed its mass deportation campaign as part of a fight against illegal immigration, more than 200 incidents involved US citizens or people with other forms of legal immigration status being detained, targeted, or subjected to alleged misconduct.

The report identified 150 incidents affecting at least 782 protesters, legal observers, journalists, elected officials or staff members, and clergy, many of whom faced retaliation, verbal abuse, and intimidation while attempting to document the actions of agents, a protected right under the First Amendment.

“Street arrests have always been part of what ICE did, but never at the scale that we have now,” Shah told Common Dreams. “We never had a situation in this country’s modern history where civil arrests were taking place habitually in grocery store parking lots, at bus stops, at gas stations because the public safety imperative just wasn’t there.”

“They’re often in plain clothes, sometimes they’re masked, they’re heavily militarized, it’s scary looking, and it sends fear in all these communities,” she said. “If you’ve got these agents out there constantly trolling for people they believe are immigrants, you know, that means all of us are exposed to those agents.”

The report examined just a fraction of the more than 400,000 immigration arrests that took place in 2025. The vast majority of those arrested have not been convicted of crimes, and most of those who have were convicted of nonviolent offenses.

ICE agents have shot and killed two men in vehicle stops over the past ten days—neither of whom was the intended target of the operation—while two other men died during an ICE operation or in the agency’s custody.

As scrutiny of the agency intensified this week, the Department of Homeland Security briefly announced it was suspending vehicle stops, only for President Donald Trump to order the policy to continue.

Through recent spending bills, the Republican-controlled US Congress has more than tripled ICE's budget, providing roughly $240 billion for immigration enforcement over the next four years.

According to the report, ICE has used these funds to hire at least 12,000 agents and send them out into the field with limited training and vetting, while diverting another 25,000 personnel from other agencies.

The ACLU describes this as part of an effort to create a "national deportation policing force" of more than 50,000 agents.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has pushed for a quota of 3,000 immigration arrests per day and has emphasized to ICE personnel that when carrying out deportations, "there is no list" of people to be targeted and "everyone is fair game."

Administration officials have hinted that with ICE's newfound wealth of resources, the public can expect even more aggressive tactics in the months to come.

"You ain’t seen shit yet," said Trump's border czar Tom Homan at a border security expo in May. "This year will be a good year. Mass deportations are coming."