Senate Report Shares Stories of US Citizens Assaulted, Unconstitutionally Detained by DHS

Despite US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's claim that "no American citizens have been arrested or detained" as part of the Trump administration's violent and widely condemned immigration operations, ProPublica has tracked more than 170 cases, and a Senate report released Tuesday shares the stories of 22 of them.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released Unchecked Authority: Examining the Trump Administration's Extrajudicial Immigration Detentions of US Citizens ahead of a public forum with House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Ranking Member Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and five Americans unconstitutionally detained by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents.

"While the second Trump administration has been marked by brazen lawlessness in many areas, the daily drumbeat of shocking stories detailing the behavior of federal immigration officials has been particularly chilling," the report states.

"The subcommittee's findings add to a growing body of evidence that the Trump administration is seeking to build a nationwide paramilitary force with vast resources that lawlessly detains citizens based on its own whims—an effort which has a number of unfortunate and obvious historical parallels," the publication continues.

"They couldn't even agree who had authority over me because none of them did. I was never arrested. Never charged. Never given an explanation. Never given an apology."

The report also notes that the testimonies included "represent only a subset of the likely hundreds of American citizens who have been unlawfully detained," and "also do not account for the many green-card holders, visa recipients, and others who have been captured and whose immigration status may cause them to be subject to even more severe treatment and harsher conditions than the appalling experiences of the Americans documented herein."

On June 8, when Cary Lopez Alvarado—a 23-year-old born and raised in Los Angeles County, California—was taking lunch to her husband, who was providing maintenance services on private property, masked immigration agents targeted him and her cousin in a work truck. Lopez Alvarado, who was pregnant, approached and took a video of the scene, where agents tried to pry open the vehicle's doors and threatened to break a window.

According to the report:

Cary tried again to tell the agents to stop, but, before she could finish her sentence, the officer put his hands on her and shoved her into the side of the truck. Two other agents immediately rushed over to further detain her. Cary knelt and clutched her mid-section to shield her baby from the assault. "I wasn't resisting at all," Cary recalled. "I can't fight back; I'm pregnant." The officers yanked her up and placed handcuffs around her wrists, all the while shoving her stomach against the truck. Her cousin attempted to intervene; "Be careful. Don't you see she’s pregnant?" he pleaded. At this point, Cary became dizzy from the altercation. When she regained awareness, she saw three agents on top of her cousin and several more in the process of throwing her husband on the ground. Then, the agents began kicking the back of the unoccupied work truck. A viral photo shows Cary, handcuffed and heavily pregnant, being led by a masked agent into a car.

The document also details the experience of Dayanne Figueroa, a first-generation Mexican American and working mom to a 6-year-old in Chicago, Illinois. When she was driving down a residential street to work on the morning of October 10, an unmarked, silver Dodge Durango SUV with blacked-out windows rammed into the side of her car. She reached for her phone to call local police, "but within seconds, two masked men in camouflage leapt out of the Durango and ran over to Dayanne's black Mercedes-Benz; one raised a gun in Dayanne's direction, and the other had an assault rifle strapped around his shoulder," the report says.

"Moments later, a third armed and masked agent appeared. Two of the men ripped open Dayanne's car door and grabbed her," the report continues, noting that bystanders recorded videos. "Two agents forcibly dragged her out of her car by her legs, ripping both shoes off, slamming her to the concrete, and digging their knees into her body to restrain her, directly over the site of her recent surgery. The agents flipped over Dayanne—who stands at 4 feet 11 inches and weighs 120 pounds—and put her in handcuffs, cinching them so tight that Dayanne has since suffered nerve damage to her wrists. Three agents carried Dayanne to an unmarked, red SUV and threw her inside, while a fourth agent reached into her car and grabbed her laptop, purse, and cellphone."

They initially took her to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Broadview, where federal agents have violently responded to protesters and held immigrants in "horrific and inhumane conditions." She was then brought to a Federal Bureau of Investigation facility in another Chicago suburb, Lombard, where she started urinating blood. That afternoon, she was eventually released to paramedics. Figueroa recalled that "they couldn't even agree who had authority over me because none of them did. I was never arrested. Never charged. Never given an explanation. Never given an apology."

While Figueroa's young child was not part of her encounter with federal agents, the report stresses that when children are involved in ICE and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents' interactions, "they are treated with reckless disregard."

For example, a now-6-year-old Massachusetts girl on the autism spectrum, called M. in the report, "was separated from her parents by ICE agents in an apparent attempt to lure her parents to leave private property so they could be apprehended" in September.

"M. was violently ill upon being returned to her family and had to be treated in the emergency room, miss school for a week, and has continued to struggle with nightmares," according to the document. It also notes that "her father has a pending asylum case and her mother has a pending request to obtain a legal status."

In a Tuesday statement announcing the report, Blumenthal said that "Americans should have a hard time recognizing our great nation in these stomach-turning, heartbreaking stories of brutal assaults on our fellow citizens."

"Masked ICE and CPB agents chillingly seizing Americans isn't the nation we know and cherish," he added. "Totalitarian tactics have no place in our democracy. I hope that elevating stories of abhorrent abuse will reinforce our resolve to preserve democratic rights."

Tuesday's public forum at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, is scheduled for 3:00 pm local time and set to feature testimony from Figueroa and four others, including Wilmer Chavarria, a school superintendent from Vermont, and Javier Ramirez, a Californian who was assaulted by DHS agents and denied adequate treatment for diabetes while being held for four days.

The other two participants are also from California: George Retes is a US Army veteran who missed his daughter's birthday after being violently arrested and detained during a raid at his job site, and Andrea Velez was falsely charged with assaulting an officer during an immigration raid she encountered on her way to work in Los Angeles.

"I served my country. I wore the uniform," Retes has warned. "If it can happen to me, it can happen to any one of us."