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racial profiling
ICE Killings Are Part of a Pattern of Hundreds of Civil Rights Violations by Agency Under Trump, Says ACLU Report
One of the report authors said it showed how under the Trump administration, federal agents have “used force in a way we’ve never seen from these agencies, in their history.”
Jul 16, 2026
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."
Our new report is the first in-depth civil rights review of immigration enforcement actions throughout 2025 in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, and New Mexico.Read more about how we’re exposing the deportation machine’s depravity.
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— ACLU (@aclu.org) July 16, 2026 at 10:01 AM
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."
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Report Details Trump Effort to Quietly Lay Groundwork to 'Steal Future Elections'
"It seems one of the ways this effort will take shape is, as with DHS's deportation efforts, to racially profile voters and try to invalidate their votes by pretending they're not citizens," said one critic.
Apr 28, 2026
President Donald Trump is using the US Department of Homeland Security to quietly assert federal control over elections in at least eight states, according to an investigation out Monday from Reuters.
Under the US Constitution, elections are run by states, rather than the federal government. But under Trump, who has called on Republicans to "nationalize" voting in Democratic strongholds, DHS—which typically handles issues of counterterrorism, immigration, and national security—along with other executive agencies, has launched what Reuters described as "a wider-than-known federal push into the machinery and conduct of US elections."
"Trump administration officials and investigators have fanned out across the country, seeking confidential records, pressing for access to voting equipment, and reexamining voter-fraud cases that courts and bipartisan reviews have already rejected," the report continued.
Branko Marcetic, a writer for Jacobin, said that the revelations showed that "Trump's push to steal future elections by taking federal control of them is quietly gaining steam."
In Ohio, DHS agents have called local boards of elections in at least six counties, requesting immediate access to data about specific voters, including registration forms, voting histories, and other confidential data, citing unspecified "investigations." Though Ohio leans red, all of the requests were made in counties that either had competitive elections coming up in 2026 or were solidly Democratic.
The Nevada secretary of state received a request from the FBI for voter information as part of an investigation into the 2020 election, which Trump has continued to claim was marred by fraud that cost him a victory despite evidence to the contrary. He never fulfilled the request because those records did not exist.
In Arizona, the state senate complied with a similar subpoena for records related to its report on an audit of the 2020 election, while DHS requested information related to the state attorney general's fraud probe.
In Colorado, Jeff Small, a lobbyist with connections to the White House who claimed to be working on behalf of Stephen Miller, the president's homeland security adviser, called 10 county clerks to request access to Dominion voting machines, which were at the center of Trump's fraud conspiracy theories.
Later, some of those clerks received the same request from a person who identified themselves as a senior official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which oversees election security. The clerks said they did not comply with these requests, which some said would violate state law.
These efforts follow a high-profile January raid by the FBI on an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize hundreds of boxes of ballots, tabulator tapes, and voter roll information from the 2020 election. Trump has directly influenced the investigation, speaking with FBI agents about it the day after dispatching Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to take part.
According to Reuters, election officials in many other states are bracing for similar investigations and raids into their operations.
“There is an intimidation factor,” said Amy Burgans, the Republican clerk and treasurer of Douglas County, Nevada. “It puts the question in the back of your mind... Who’s going to be next?”
As Republican chances of prevailing in the 2026 midterms appear grim, Trump has suggested on multiple occasions that elections be "canceled," something he has no power to do.
He has thus far failed in his efforts to pass the SAVE America Act through the Senate, which would require every voter to reregister and provide documents proving their citizenship, a measure experts say would likely disenfranchise millions of eligible voters.
But Reuters' investigation has revealed efforts to achieve similar ends by contacting states to compare their voter rolls with federal citizenship databases.
This happened in Missouri, where Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins shared publicly available voter roll data with federal authorities, who handed back lists of potential noncitizens flagged for removal.
Clerks in several of Missouri's counties said that most of the individuals flagged in the federal screenings were US citizens who'd been naturalized.
Clinton Jenkins, the Republican clerk for Miller County, said none of the names of people identified by the review had voted illegally. Rather, he suggested that federal authorities were targeting people who seemed to be of Hispanic and Latino heritage.
"It looks like if you have too many vowels in your name, you show up on a list,” Jenkins said.
"They are doing this through DHS, which it's clear by now this administration views as its own personal police force," Marcetic said.
"It seems one of the ways this effort will take shape is, as with DHS's deportation efforts, to racially profile voters and try to invalidate their votes by pretending they're not citizens," he added.
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Beware Brett Kavanaugh: Trump's Favorite Justice
It’s frightening but indisputable: The future of American law may rest in his ideological, incompetent hands.
Apr 08, 2026
If I asked you to name the most unpopular Supreme Court justice, you might choose the venal Clarence Thomas or the perpetually enraged Samuel Alito. In either event, you’d be wrong. Americans’ least popular member of the high tribunal is Brett “I like beer” Kavanaugh. Poll after poll has shown Kavanaugh taking the honor since his nomination in 2018.
Kavanaugh also holds the honor of being President Donald Trump’s favorite justice, an accolade he earned with his dissenting opinion from the court’s February invalidation of Trump’s worldwide “reciprocal tariffs.” Kavanaugh is now poised to deliberate on pending voting rights cases and a ruling on birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. It’s frightening but indisputable: The future of American law may rest in his ideological, incompetent hands.
Kavanaugh’s initial low public standing stemmed from his snarling televised response to the testimony of psychologist Cristine Blasey Ford, who credibly accused him during his confirmation hearing of sexually assaulting her at a boozy high school party. Declaring his innocence and choking back tears, Kavanaugh described the allegations as “a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump [and] millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.” Trump quickly came to his embattled nominee’s rescue in a tweet posted hours after the hearing, calling his testimony “powerful, honest, and riveting.”
Long before Senate Republicans approved his nomination by a vote of 50-48, Kavanaugh had built a well-earned reputation as a credentialed and loyal Republican hitman, highlighted by his decision to join Ken Starr’s Office of Independent Counsel in 1997 to assist in the investigations that eventually led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
Since taking his place on the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh has proven a reliable Trump flunky. But unlike Thomas and Alito, he’s also proven to be an intellectual lightweight.
While in Starr’s service, Kavanaugh penned a lurid memorandum that suggested 10 questions for prosecutors to ask Clinton about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky when he testified before a federal grand jury. Among them:
- “If Monica Lewinsky says that you ejaculated into her mouth on two occasions in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?”
- “If Monica Lewinsky says that on several occasions you had her give [you] oral sex, made her stop, and then ejaculated into the sink in the bathroom off the Oval Office, would she be lying?”
- “If Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trashcan in your secretary’s office, would she b[e] lying?”
After a brief stint in private practice, Kavanaugh joined the GOP’s legal team in the run-up to the Supreme Court’s infamous Bush v. Gore decision, which handed the presidency to George W. Bush. In 2001, he was rewarded with an associate’s position in the White House counsel’s office, and two years later he was nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Senate Democrats were alarmed at the thought of an enrobed Kavanaugh, and they managed to put the nominee through two confirmation hearings. “As I look through all of the different issues that you have been involved in as an attorney in public service and the private sector, it seems that you are the Zelig or Forrest Gump of Republican politics,” the normally mild-mannered Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) remarked in 2004. “You show up at every scene of the crime. You are somehow or another deeply involved, whether it is Elian Gonzalez or the Starr Report, you are there.” In the end, the Democrats failed to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation in 2006.
During his 12 years on the circuit court, Kavanaugh won praise from right-wing advocacy organizations for a record of overtly pro-business rulings that routinely undercut federal regulations on air quality, consumer protections, and other issues.
Since taking his place on the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh has proven a reliable Trump flunky. But unlike Thomas and Alito, he’s also proven to be an intellectual lightweight, penning few consequential majority opinions of his own and generally following the lead of Chief Justice John Roberts, with whom he voted more than 95% of the time in his first few years on the court.
Recently, however, Kavanaugh has begun to break with Roberts to more closely align with Trump—sometimes to comical effects.
Consider the interim “shadow docket” ruling issued last September, Noem v. Perdomo. The court’s decision lifted a lower-court injunction that had barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Los Angeles from detaining suspected undocumented immigrants based solely on their ethnicity, language, geographic location, and occupations. Like most shadow docket decisions, the Perdomo order was bare-bones, comprising a single paragraph that failed to explain the court’s rationale, but permitted litigation to continue in the lower courts. Kavanaugh, however, took it upon himself to write a 10-page concurrence filled with misstatements of fact and law, in which he argued without evidence that because 10% of people in the Los Angeles region are illegally present, the “totality of circumstances”—including race, location, and language—indicated a high probability that such stops would enable ICE to fulfill its important core mission.
He also added, again without evidence, that any such detentions would be basically benign, reasoning:
The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.
The concurrence was widely panned as authorizing violations of the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of individualized suspicion and probable cause—which soon became known as “Kavanaugh stops.” The criticism became so intense that Kavanaugh was compelled to add a footnote to his concurring opinion in the court’s December shadow docket ruling that struck down the deployment of the National Guard in Chicago (Trump v. Illinois). “The Fourth Amendment requires,” he wrote,
that immigration stops must be based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, stops must be brief, arrests must be based on probable cause, and officers must not employ excessive force. Moreover, the officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity.
The mea culpa did little to restore Kavanaugh’s jurisprudential standing or dignity. In February, his career hit a humiliating low when Chief Justice Roberts publicly rebuked him for essentially cutting and pasting the Trump administration’s arguments for tariffs into his dissenting opinion.
It’s not easy to imagine Kavanaugh sinking much lower than he already has, but one thing remains constant: Trump’s favorite Supreme Court justice has no business casting votes on the most powerful judicial body in the world.
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Jayapal Demands Kristi Noem 'Be Fired, Resign, or Be Impeached'—and DHS 'Dismantled'
“I gave her an opportunity to answer for her agents’ lawlessness,” Jayapal said of the secretary of homeland security. “Instead, what we heard from her was excuses, deflections, and flat-out lies.”
Mar 05, 2026
Surrounded by people who have accused the Department of Homeland Security of violating their civil rights, Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Wednesday demanded that Secretary Kristi Noem be removed from her role as head of the agency.
"Today in the House Judiciary Committee, I questioned Secretary Noem. I gave her an opportunity to answer for her agents' lawlessness and the trauma that her personnel have inflicted on immigrants and citizens alike," Jayapal (D-Wash.) said at a news conference outside the Capitol building. "Instead, what we heard from her was excuses, deflections, and flat-out lies."
Jayapal grilled Noem on Wednesday during her second day of testimony before Congress, accusing her agency of “unlawfully detaining US citizens in violation of the Fourth Amendment."
An investigation published by ProPublica in October found that at least 170 citizens had been arrested or detained by immigration agents, and many more have been reported since.
The congresswoman said that after months of denying, despite the mountain of evidence, that any US citizens had been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Noem finally acknowledged the detention of 18 US citizens by ICE in a letter sent Tuesday.
Jayapal then revealed that four other citizens, "who were not even included" in Noem's letter, were in the hearing room.
She read the story of Patricia O'Keefe, who she said "was monitoring ICE agents when they deployed pepper spray into her car vent without provocation."
"They smashed her car windows, pulled her and her friend out, arrested them for 'obstruction,' and detained them," Jayapal explained. "Patricia saw an entire area dedicated to detaining US citizens."
"An ICE agent also said, 'You guys have to stop obstructing us. That's why that lesbian bitch is dead,' referring to Renee Good," who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis in January. "ICE detained Patricia for over eight hours," Jayapal said.
She relayed the stories of the other citizens in the room, who she said had been detained for several hours for monitoring agents or peacefully protesting.
One was kept in leg irons for six hours after attempting to monitor agents from his car. Another was hit with a pepper ball while protesting and denied medical treatment or the ability to change out of clothes that were coated with dangerous chemicals. Another observer was chased down by agents and had firearms pointed at him before the situation was defused by local police, though he was detained for six hours.
Noting Noem's previous statements that ICE can arrest citizens if they are obstructing law enforcement or if there is "probable cause," Jayapal then asked the people she'd invited about the circumstances of their detention.
All of them responded that they were not charged with any crime after their encounters, that they were not questioned about their citizenship, and that they were all exercising their First Amendment rights.
Asked if she had anything to say to the four individuals or "the millions of American citizens across the country that are watching this and horrified at what your department is doing," Noem responded that “context is critical in each of these situations, to know the full range of what happened in each of these situations before and after the incident and their arrest.”
Jayapal reiterated: "Secretary, not a single one was charged with a crime, and they were detained."
Elsewhere during the hearing, Noem doubled down on her agency's most controversial tactics.
After Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) showed the secretary videos of citizens being violently dragged out of their homes and cars in arrests by agents without judicial warrants, Noem defended the agency’s practice, which experts have said violates the constitutional protection against unlawful search and seizure.
Other questions she evaded. When Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) asked her point-blank if she believed Good and Alex Pretti, whom ICE agents "shot in the face and killed," were "domestic terrorists" as Noem and others in the Trump administration claimed without evidence, the secretary repeatedly refused to correct the record, as ICE's acting director Todd Lyons did during a hearing last month.
Following Wednesday's hearing, Jayapal said Noem's responses "only further cemented my belief that she needs to resign, be fired, or be impeached."
"She refused to accept responsibility for the actions of ICE and [Customs and Border Protection], for the arrests of US citizens, for the deaths of 40 immigrants in ICE custody, for the kidnapping and the disappearances of children like Liam Ramos, and for the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in the streets of Minnesota," Jayapal said. "It is a terrible shame that she could not do any of that."
Noem's appearance on Capitol Hill comes as DHS has been partially shut down for nearly three weeks, with Democrats demanding reforms to the agency's conduct in exchange for full funding.
Republicans have thus far refused to budge on demands that agents obtain judicial warrants before entering homes and private spaces, stop wearing masks to conceal their identities, and rein in the practice of “roving patrols” that have often taken the form of indiscriminate arrests rife with racial profiling.
She said Noem's testimony also affirmed her belief that "DHS, ICE, and CBP need to be dismantled."
"There is no reason for them to operate in this way with zero accountability and no way to ensure that they actually protect our residents rather than terrorize them," Jayapal said. "That is why I have refused to give another cent to these agencies without significant reforms."
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The Supreme Court's Pro-Trump Immigration Rulings Threaten Decades of Progress
The sitting members should consider what kind of legacy they wish to leave for future generations before siding blindly with our most autocratic president in history.
Feb 18, 2026
The justices on the Supreme Court should not favor the president who appointed them because checks and balances demand that they uphold the law without passion or prejudice. The current Supreme Court has increasingly shown a pattern of siding with the Trump administration—a result made predictable by the court’s conservative majority. Immigration cases have, with rare exception, aligned along these partisan lines.
On June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court sidestepped the question of birthright citizenship and overruled lower court decisions that sought to protect it. The original plaintiffs filed suit to enjoin the enforcement of the executive order that identifies circumstances in which a person born in the United States is not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” thereby restricting the constitutionally guaranteed bestowal of birthright citizenship. The Trump administration petitioned the Supreme Court, which granted review. The plaintiffs argued that the executive order violates the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, as well as sections 1 and 201 of the Nationality Act of 1940—the constitutional guarantee that birth on US soil confers citizenship.
Before the case reached the Supreme Court, the district court entered universal injunctions barring the application of the executive order to anyone, thereby preserving birthright citizenship, and the appellate court denied the government’s request to postpone the granted relief. In its application to the Supreme Court, the government argued that federal courts lacked equitable authority to issue universal injunctions under the Judiciary Act of 1789, attacking the district court’s authority in order to preserve the president’s propensity to overstep his. The Supreme Court granted the government's application and held that Congress has not granted federal courts authority to universally enjoin the enforcement of an executive order. Reaching all the way back to pre-Revolution English law and the Founding Fathers, the Supreme Court reasoned that no such authority exists. Their reasoning reads as petulant and arbitrary, an invocation of ancient doctrine to narrow modern rights.
On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court granted an application for stay by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The decision states that the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizes immigration officers to interrogate any alien (or person believed to be an alien) as to “his right to be or to remain in the United States.” They also found that they may briefly detain individuals if they have a “reasonable suspicion” that he or she is an alien illegally present in the United States, based on the “totality of the particular circumstances.”
The Supreme Court’s deep bias in favor of Trump administration policies gestures toward a reversal, through immigration cases, of the trenchant progress in civil rights litigation that the Warren Court and subsequent courts have made.
The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the law, however, takes tremendous liberties with the letter of these laws, essentially recognizing ethnicity as a basis for reasonable suspicion. Specifically, the California District Court enjoined immigration officers from making investigative stops based on, among other factors, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, and race or ethnicity. In a nutshell, the lower court forbade immigration enforcement from racially profiling Latine Angelenos. The Supreme Court overruled the lower court, reasoning that, while ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion, it can be a relevant factor when considered along with other salient factors. This argument is internally incoherent and contradictory, suggesting that racial bias is at once insufficient and persuasive evidence. Citing the myriad “significant economic and social problems” caused by “illegal” immigration, the Supreme Court sided with DHS, finding that the government would suffer irreparable injury from the injunction. The relevance of socioeconomic problems to the question of racial profiling and potential excessive force in the execution thereof is tenuous at best.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissenting opinion, in which Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined. She argued that “we should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,“ as it would be a loss to our constitutional freedom.
On December 23, 2025, however, the Supreme Court issued an noticeably restrained opinion upholding a lower court’s temporary restraining order (TRO), which barred the deployment of the National Guard in Illinois. The court found that, under the Posse Comitatus Act, the military is prohibited from executing the laws, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress. The decision further stated that, before the president can federalize the guard under 10 USC §12406(3), he must have statutory or constitutional authority to execute the laws with the regular military and must be unable with those forces to perform that function.
The Supreme Court’s deep bias in favor of Trump administration policies gestures toward a reversal, through immigration cases, of the trenchant progress in civil rights litigation that the Warren Court and subsequent courts have made. The sitting members should consider what kind of legacy they wish to leave for future generations before siding blindly with our most autocratic president in history. Political expediency may be convenient in the short term, but history will judge harshly those who twisted our most sacred liberties to the advantage of an advantageous few, rather than standing with the people our Constitution was written to protect.
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Database of Court Filings Shows ‘Startling Pattern of Abuse’ by Federal Agents Against Citizens in Minnesota
A new database of sworn affidavits filed by the ACLU shows masked agents detaining citizens based on race without warrants, ignoring IDs, and pointing weapons at them.
Feb 05, 2026
Federal agents deployed to Minnesota by the Trump administration are systematically violating the rights of US citizens and lawful residents, according to more than two dozen sworn affidavits made available this week as part of a class action lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security.
The suit was filed last month by the ACLU of Minnesota and partnered law firms, which said that as part of President Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge, "masked federal agents in the thousands are violently stopping and arresting countless Minnesotans based on nothing more than their race and perceived ethnicity, irrespective of their citizenship or immigration status, or their personal circumstances.”
The case was launched by three plaintiffs, which include 20-year-old Mubashir Khalif Hussein, a Somali-born US citizen whose brutal arrest and detention was caught on video in December. He was placed into a headlock by masked agents and brought to an ICE office, where he said he was left in shackles for an hour and a half before being released miles from his home in the freezing cold.
The plaintiffs called it just one example of a "startling pattern of abuse spearheaded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that is fundamentally altering civic life in the Twin Cities and the state of Minnesota."
On Thursday, the online legal policy journal Just Security published a searchable database of the 29 sworn declarations filed so far as part of the case. Nearly all of them were filed by US citizens, while a few others were permanent legal residents or had pending legal status.
The statements detail numerous allegations that agents violated their basic constitutional rights, including by detaining them without showing a warrant; targeting Somali and Latino individuals based on their appearances; ignoring identifying documents that could prove their legal residency or citizenship; restraining them violently; and pointing weapons at them during searches.
Last year, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration's claim that when deciding whether to stop someone as part of "roving patrols," agents had the right to consider certain factors, including “the type of work one does,” a person’s use of Spanish or accented English, or their “apparent race or ethnicity."
While critics described it as an invitation to blatant and unconstitutional racial profiling and invasions of privacy, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion that the practice should not prove burdensome to those legally in the US: “If the person is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter,” he said.
Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and the co-editor-in-chief of Just Security, said that the “sworn affidavits show how, on the ground, this is simply not how ICE operates.”
"They did not identify themselves, and they did not present a warrant. They just opened my car door and started yanking me out of the car. I kept saying over and over that I was a US citizen."
One 33-year-old Latino citizen who was born in the US was driving to Menards on January 10 when he suddenly found himself boxed in by two cars at a stoplight. Before he knew it, he said agents were banging aggressively on his windows and one had started pointing a gun at him. When he put his vehicle in park, he said the doors opened automatically.
"When the doors unlocked, the agents did not ask me anything, they did not identify themselves, and they did not present a warrant. They just opened my car door and started yanking me out of the car," he said. "I kept saying over and over that I was a US citizen."
“Once they did get my seatbelt off and finally [pulled] me out of the car, they threw me to the ground and pinned me,” he continued. “They were pulling on my arms so tight to put on the handcuffs. They ripped my jacket, and it was torn up. My wallet fell on the ground. I was still repeating that I am a US citizen. I repeated it over and over. They never asked for or looked at my identification.”
The agents hauled the man into their car and began driving him around and interrogating him for about 20 minutes. He said the first question they asked him was his name.
"It seemed if they were going to violently arrest me before even looking at my identification, that they should have known who I was," the victim said.
Agents eventually realized they'd been searching for another person with the same name and birthdate. They drove their captive behind a warehouse, where nobody could see, and released him. But another agent had taken his car from the intersection. An agent said he'd only give it back if the agent could scan his face, which he did.
“I felt traumatized. My arm hurt, I had bruises from the handcuffs. They were so tight that half of my hand was numb for a few days. I guess it stopped the circulation to my hands while I was handcuffed. I had cuts on my face and hands,” the victim said. “Since this happened to me, I have to pass through that spot every time I drive to work. I keep going back to it and reliving it in my mind.”
According to the database, at least five other US citizens, lawful residents, or legal asylum seekers also claimed in court that they'd had weapons pointed at them by agents during their stops.
Two other US citizens and one lawful permanent resident detailed being subject to physical force during stops.
One 53-year-old Somali man, a US citizen since 2008, said he was physically grabbed and dragged from his car, handcuffed, and pinned against the vehicle by masked agents.
"One officer pressed his knee into my back," he said. When I screamed out in pain, another officer put his elbow into my neck, and one of the officers yelled at me, ‘Shut the fuck up, son of a bitch!’ One of the officers responded, ‘Why don’t you go back to your country?’"
"I believe that I was stopped solely because of the color of my skin and our appearance, including wearing a hijab."
One 22-year-old Somali-American citizen who was born in Minnesota said that on January 21, five agents hopped out of their car with multiple guns drawn as she was on her way to work.
She said they demanded to see proof of her citizenship, but rejected her valid ID, claiming it was fake. They demanded to see her passport, which US citizens are not required to carry under US law. The agents told her they did not believe she was a US citizen because of her “accent.”
"I believe that I was stopped solely because of the color of my skin and our appearance, including wearing a hijab," she said. "It was clear that the ICE agents did not know who I was when they stopped me. I had not violated any traffic laws, and the vehicle I was driving was registered to my mother, who is a United States citizen."
It's one of at least five cases in the database in which agents dismissed proof of a citizen or legal resident's status.
There have also been many other documented instances, including some caught on video, in which agents have detained a citizen or legal resident or refused to let them go because they believed the person's “accent” did not sound American.
All 29 of those who filed affidavits in the case have alleged unconstitutional racial profiling.
One 25-year-old Somali man, a US citizen born in Atlanta, said a group of masked agents accosted him and his mother while he was shoveling snow.
He said they were joined by a pair of unmasked men who appeared to be livestreaming and helped the agents to box him in. He later identified one of them as a right-wing YouTube influencer named Ben Bergquam.
Even though the vast majority of Somalis living in the US are citizens, he said the agents and the streamers were laughing and referring to him and his mother as "illegal aliens."
"I was unsure if I was going to be seriously injured or killed."
At least 12 people in the lawsuit have filed sworn testimony stating that agents forced them to stop while they were driving.
In one case, a Hispanic US citizen said that after following him for a few blocks, agents put on their lights and "rammed" his car off the road.
"An agent came up to my window, asking if I was a citizen. I was furious. I told them I was a citizen and they damaged my car," he said. "Instead of apologizing, they demanded that I produce documents to prove I was a US citizen. I was too angry. I told them again that I was a US citizen and I didn't have to prove it to them."
He said the episode lasted 45-60 minutes, with agents repeatedly demanding his ID, name, and place of birth. Eventually, he says, they confirmed his citizenship by taking photos and videos of him and scanning his license plate.
He said agents told him they would pay for the damages to his car, but that they drove away without providing any insurance information.
"Even though I am a United States citizen and I was carrying proof of my citizenship with me, ICE agents didn't believe me," he said. "I felt intense fear and shock. I was unsure if I was going to be seriously injured or killed."
The affidavits were filed as part of the case Hussen v. Noem, which claims that agents have violated Minnesotans' rights to equal protection and against unreasonable searches and seizures. A hearing is scheduled to take place later this month.
“The government can’t stop and arrest people based on the color of their skin, or arrest people with no probable cause,” said Kate Huddleston, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “These kinds of police-state tactics are contrary to the basic principles of liberty and equality that remain a bedrock of our legal system and our country.”
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Abolish ICE—and DHS Too
The reality is that while ICE’s violence has become more public, what we are seeing today is not a deviation from how it has always acted. For ICE, mass surveillance, assaults, arrests, prolonged detainment, and killings of citizens and noncitizens alike are normal.
Jan 21, 2026
On a September morning, armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents broke in and raided the home of 15-year-old Marie Justeen Mancha while her mother was running an errand. They blocked the door, accused her of being an “illegal,” and questioned Marie about her and her mother’s legal status. They are both US citizens.
This break-in was part of a widespread sweep targeting Hispanic communities in southeast Georgia. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) accused ICE of using “Gestapo-like” tactics to trample “on the constitutional rights of every person of Hispanic descent who was unfortunate to be in their way.”
SPLC filed a class-action lawsuit against ICE on behalf of five US citizens. In addition to compensation for property damages, the lawsuit sought a court order to stop ICE from conducting similar raids in the future.
Sound familiar? That occurred in 2006—20 years ago.
ICE is not broken. It is not reformable. It must be abolished.
The reality is that while ICE’s violence has become more public, what we are seeing today is not a deviation from how it has always acted. For ICE, mass surveillance, assaults, arrests, prolonged detainment, and killings of citizens and noncitizens alike are normal.
Between 2015 and 2021, ICE agents were involved in at least 59 shootings across 26 states and two US territories. At least 24 people were injured and 23 were killed.
A 2018 Los Angeles Times review of ICE activities found more than 1,500 cases of the agency wrongfully arresting and targeting US citizens for deportation and prolonged detainment. This includes Davino Watson, a US citizen, who was illegally detained by ICE in 2008 and spent 1,273 days in their custody. The agency faced no consequences for this grave injustice.
Between 1994 and 2019, the average daily population of detained immigrants grew from 7,000 to 50,000. In December 2025, the number was nearly 66,000—the highest level ever recorded. While President Donald Trump alleges that ICE is “removing some of the most violent criminals in the World from our Country,” 73% of those arrested by ICE have no criminal convictions.
ICE is not broken. It is not reformable. It must be abolished.
Abolish ICE
ICE has always relied on violent tactics, racial profiling, and increasingly invasive surveillance technology. It has faced persistent criticism from activists, nonprofits, and news outlets for its discriminatory practices. Yet, over the years, ICE has only become more aggressive.
There are many reasons for this: first, ICE agents, like other officers, have qualified immunity to prosecution. If they are involved in a potentially criminal incident, that case is reviewed by ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility. This office lacks the authority to discipline agents. Instead, any suggestion on disciplinary measures goes back to the agent’s supervisor, who then decides whether to administer it. If they do, the ICE agent can still appeal. This triggers a lengthy process that can take years to resolve.
Second, most of their work targets undocumented immigrants and people of color—populations that are both exceedingly vulnerable to police violence and to have their suffering ignored by America’s white-dominated political institutions.
Turns out, state-sanctioned violence—not healthcare, welfare, education, or housing—has broad bipartisan support.
Third, ICE operates according to the immigration-control strategy known as “attrition through enforcement.” The goal is to compel undocumented immigrants to self-deport by making their lives increasingly more difficult. This is accomplished by limiting their access to jobs, housing, and social services; utilizing aggressive policing methods (e.g. workplace raids, home surveillance, coercion, ruses, and targeting family and friends); as well as public displays of state-sanctioned violence. This is why the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) launched an aerial and ground assault on a Chicago apartment building in November 2025. For DHS and ICE, the more violent they become, the more likely that immigrants in the US will self-deport. That violence will also deter people from entering the country in the first place. Violence and state terror are core components of ICE’s formal policing strategy.
Fourth, ICE has been strongly and consistently supported by both Democrats and Republicans. Between 2003 and 2024, ICE’s annual budget grew from $3.3 billion to $9.6 billion. As part of the One Big Beautiful Act (OBBA), Congress allocated $75 billion to ICE over four years, approximately $18.7 billion per year. Even now, despite growing public outcry against ICE, Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), refuse to commit to defunding the agency. Turns out, state-sanctioned violence—not healthcare, welfare, education, or housing—has broad bipartisan support.
Fifth, but perhaps most importantly, is the reason why ICE and DHS were initially created. As the Department of Justice (DOJ) noted in 2004, “The primary mission of ICE is to prevent acts of terrorism by targeting the people, money, and materials that support terrorists and criminal activities.” Under DHS, immigration control is first and foremost about counterterrorism.
This is why ICE has such broad and invasive policing powers; why Republicans have insisted for years that terrorists are entering the country via the US-Mexico border; why the Trump administration designated groups like Tren de Aragua and La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) as terrorist organizations; and why Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Czar Tom Homan have been so quick to label Renee Nicole Good a “domestic terrorist.”
It's also why simply abolishing ICE doesn’t go far enough. DHS must be abolished too.
Abolish DHS
For the Bush administration, DHS “would make Americans safer” by creating a department “whose primary mission is to protect the American homeland.” To this end, DHS “would unify authority over major federal security operations related to our borders” thereby “allowing a single government entity to manage entry into the United States. It would ensure that all aspects of border control, including the issuing of visas, are informed by a central information-sharing clearinghouse and compatible databases.”
Importantly, for DHS, the goal of defending “the American homeland” is about more than protecting US citizens, preventing destruction of property, or policing criminal offenses. It is about protecting the identity of America.
As President George W. Bush noted in his 9/11 address, “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.” A month later, he remarked that, “The [9/11] attack took place on American soil, but it was an attack on the heart and soul of the civilized world.” In the same speech, he announced the establishment of the Office of Homeland Security.
We must completely sever immigration services from a national security apparatus designed to police all immigrants as potential terrorists.
DHS was created to protect “our way of life” and “our freedom.” To defend “the heart and soul” of America. This sentiment is echoed by Trump’s DHS: “Protect your homeland, defend your culture.” More recently, on January 9, DHS posted on Twitter-X, “We’ll have our home again.”
From its inception, DHS has been tied to an image of the “homeland” as continuously under existential and physical threat from invaders both at our gates and already here. A key rationale for integrating immigration enforcement and control agencies within DHS was that the 9/11 hijackers entered the US legally. They were, as President Trump would describe them, “the enemy within.” This is still the rationale with which DHS and ICE currently operate. Anyone who threatens “civilizational erasure” and the loss of America’s Christian, English-speaking, and Western identity is a legitimate target of surveillance and violence.
Abolishing ICE is insufficient. We must completely sever immigration services from a national security apparatus designed to police all immigrants as potential terrorists. Abolishing DHS is necessary. This does not, however, entail dissolving all its agencies, most of which predate the department. Some, like the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that processes asylum requests and issues visas, should be preserved and transferred to a department better suited to serving immigrant communities.
One might object that abolishing DHS would make America vulnerable to terrorism; however, three points are worth emphasizing: First, prior to DHS, the US already had counterterrorism measures. For instance, the CIA reported to President Bill Clinton in December 1998 about a potential terrorist attack in the US that might involve hijacking an aircraft. White House Counterterrorism Chief Richard Clark testified that the Bush national security team was not sufficiently concerned about that information.
Second, since 9/11, the majority of terrorist attacks have been thwarted by traditional law enforcement tools. In recent years, most cases of terrorism stem from domestic threats, predominantly “white supremacist and anti-government extremist individuals and groups.” Yet, DHS has been slow to acknowledge and properly tackle these threats.
Third, as an organization, DHS was always flawed. It was hastily put together using arbitrary and questionable criteria. Moreover, as former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff acknowledged, because the entire purpose of the department is preventing terrorism, DHS officials inevitably feel pressured to exaggerate the threats facing the nation. This “security theater” creates more public fear that results in greater government spending on oftentimes expensive and wasteful preventative measures.
Even at the time of DHS’s founding, there were concerns that the US was creating an all-encompassing domestic surveillance apparatus that would eventually undermine civil liberties and endanger the public. Seth Stodder, who served in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) under President Bush and DHS under President Barack Obama, had largely dismissed such concerns. He argued that the Constitution would ultimately safeguard Americans. Now he recognizes the threat: “To suddenly see DHS become this kind of mechanism of authoritarian intimidation and incipient fascism [under the Trump administration] is disorienting, and frightening. It makes me think that maybe DHS was a bad idea.”
But arguably the Trump administration’s disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law have only made the problems of DHS and ICE more blatant. They didn’t become a mechanism of authoritarian intimidation under Trump—they always were.
Now is the time for action. For the sake of all those who have been assaulted, wrongfully detained, and killed, we must abolish ICE and DHS.
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Trump's DHS Sued to End Lawless Stops and Arrests in Minnesota
"ICE and CBP's practices are both illegal and morally reprehensible," said an ACLU of Minnesota staff attorney. "No one, including federal agents, is above the law.”
Jan 15, 2026
The ACLU on Thursday filed a class action lawsuit aimed at ending "a startling pattern of abuse spearheaded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that is fundamentally altering civic life in the Twin Cities and the state of Minnesota."
The thousands of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents sent to Minneapolis and Saint Paul by President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have been documented engaging in violent and even unlawful activities, including at least two shootings.
"Masked federal agents in the thousands are violently stopping and arresting countless Minnesotans based on nothing more than their race and perceived ethnicity irrespective of their citizenship or immigration status, or their personal circumstances," says the complaint, filed in the District of Minnesota.
The state and national ACLU along with Covington & Burling, Greene Espel, and Robins Kaplan filed the suit on behalf of three US citizens in Minnesota and similarly situated people. According to the complaint:
Plaintiffs seek injunctive relief to halt three unlawful policies and practices. First, federal agents are stopping people to question them about immigration status without reasonable suspicion of removability—and particularly targeting those they perceive to be Somali or Latino. Second, federal agents are arresting people for immigration reasons without warrants and without probable cause to believe that they are removable, outrageously including US citizens (who plainly cannot be detained for civil immigration purposes) and individuals with immigration status. And third, federal agents are making warrantless arrests without probable cause to believe the person is a flight risk.
"ICE and CBP's practices are both illegal and morally reprehensible," said Catherine Ahlin-Halverson, staff attorney with the ACLU of Minnesota, in a statement. "Federal agents' conduct—sweeping up Minnesotans through racial profiling and unlawful arrests—is a grave violation of Minnesotans' most fundamental rights, and it has spread fear among immigrant communities and neighborhoods. No one, including federal agents, is above the law."
The three people named in the complaint are Mubashir Khalif Hussen, Mahamed Eydarus, and Javier Doe. Hussen is a 20-year-old man of Somali descent whose "family came to the United States as refugees, and he grew up in this country," the document explains. He lives in Minneapolis, and "works as a manager at a mental health services provider in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood," where he encountered ICE agents while walking to lunch last month.
According to the ACLU, Hussen told the masked agents that he was a US citizen, but they refused to look at his identification. Instead, they put him in a vehicle and drove him to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where he was shackled and fingerprinted. After showing a photo of his passport card, he was eventually freed.
"At no time did any officer ask me whether I was a citizen or if I had any immigration status," Hussen said in a statement. "They did not ask for any identifying information, nor did they ask about my ties to the community, how long I had lived in the Twin Cities, my family in Minnesota, or anything else about my circumstances."
The complaint stresses that "at the center of DHS' campaign are Somali and Latino people, who are being targeted for stops and arrests based on racial profiling motivated by prejudice."
Trump and others in his administration have repeatedly attacked Somali immigrants and their descendants in Minnesota—including when the president said during a racist tirade at a December Cabinet meeting that "we're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country."
Kate Huddleston, senior staff attorney with the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, emphasized that "the government can't stop and arrest people based on the color of their skin, or arrest people with no probable cause... These kinds of police-state tactics are contrary to the basic principles of liberty and equality that remain a bedrock of our legal system and our country."
As the Trump administration has flooded the Twin Cities with federal agents, Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey has told ICE to "get the fuck out" of Minneapolis; his city, Saint Paul, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison have filed a lawsuit against the same agencies and leaders targeted by the ACLU suit; and Democrats in the House of Representatives have introduced articles of impeachment against Noem.
Democratic US Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee whose congressional district includes Minneapolis, said Wednesday that "we will not stop fighting until we achieve real justice and accountability. That must begin with impeaching Kristi Noem and ensuring no federal agent can act as a judge, jury, and executioner on our streets."
Omar's remarks in Washington, DC came a week after ICE officer Jonathan Ross fatally shot legal observer Renee Good in Minneapolis, and hours before a federal officer shot and wounded a man in the city during a traffic stop.
"The massive presence of ICE agents as part of Operation Metro Surge has disrupted civic life in the Twin Cities. Minnesotans are at risk of being stopped by ICE while going to work or shopping for groceries," said Greene Espel attorney Kshithij Shrinath. "We will continue to stand with our community and the rule of law."
The president has responded to protests against his immigration operation in Minnesota by threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act so he can send in troops—which Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, called "unnecessary, irresponsible, and dangerous."
"The real risk to people's safety comes from ICE and other federal agents' violence against our communities, and the killing of Renee Good starkly shows what happens when ICE operates without accountability," Shamsi said. "What's needed now is not federal escalation, but deescalation. Congress must demand these mass federal law enforcement forces leave Minneapolis and refuse to fund ICE and CBP until the administration backs down."
While Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who caucuses with Democrats, said Thursday that "the American people do not want Trump's domestic army," referring to ICE, some Democratic members have signaled that they won't seek to freeze money for the agency ahead of a January 30 deadline for funding the government.
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'Where Were You Born?' ICE Conducting Show-Me-Your-Papers Stops in Minnesota Neighborhoods
"I was scared. I was devastated," said a Somali-American citizen who was accosted by ICE as part of what the agent called a "citizen check." No such thing exists in American law.
Jan 13, 2026
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agents deployed to Minnesota are pulling many nonwhite residents aside and asking them to prove their citizenship, according to several reports and multiple videos posted to social media this week amid the Trump administration's surge of immigration agents to Minneapolis.
There is no federal law requiring US citizens to carry proof of their citizenship, and immigration agents are barred from carrying out indiscriminate searches unless they have reasonable suspicion to believe that someone is in the country without authorization.
And yet, one video, posted on Sunday by a Somali resident of Minneapolis, a US citizen named Nimco Omar, shows a group of agents accosting her and asking her to show her identification as part of what they said was a "citizen check."
Omar said she was on a walk when masked agents who "looked like soldiers" approached her and began questioning her.
The video shows one of the agents asking Omar, "Do you have an ID on you, ma'am?"
She replied: "I don't need an ID to walk around in my city. This is my city."
"OK, do you have some ID, then, please?" the officer asked. "If not, we're going to put you in the vehicle, and we're going to ID you."
Omar responded: "I am a US citizen. I don't need to carry around an ID in my home. This is my home."
After being repeatedly asked, "Where were you born?" Omar replied simply, "Minneapolis is my home."
The agent then told her: "We're doing an immigration check. We're doing a citizen check."
Another agent then pulled out his cellphone and, without asking, appeared to snap a picture of Omar, likely to run through a facial recognition application that ICE has used to verify the status of people it detains—including citizens.
Omar continued to hold her ground, telling the agents: "I’m a US citizen. I don’t have to identify myself. I belong here—and it doesn’t matter where I was born.” After failing to get an answer, the agents then walked away.
"I was scared. I was devastated. I never imagined that something like this could happen to me in the United States," Omar wrote in a social media post documenting the encounter. "As a community member who grew up here, who built a life here, and who calls Minnesota home, I want to be clear: This is not acceptable. This is not something we should ever normalize. This is not what the United States of America is supposed to look like."
The scene was just the latest report of immigration agents conducting what Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said was "unlawful racial profiling by DHS agents" in a lawsuit against the agency filed Monday by the state of Minnesota. Illinois filed a similar but separate suit Monday.
"We're doing a citizen check."
Since last week, when ICE agent Jonathan Ross was filmed fatally shooting 37-year-old Renee Good in a Minneapolis neighborhood—which Vice President JD Vance said in a press conference occurred during "door-to-door" sweeps by ICE in search of undocumented migrants—several other similar cases have been documented in which immigration agents have approached nonwhite US citizens demanding they prove their citizenship.
In another case, on the same day of Good's shooting, a Somali Uber driver was pulled over outside the Minneapolis airport and asked to prove his citizenship. One of the agents told the driver he did not believe the driver's claim to be a citizen because "I can hear you don’t have the same accent as me," and asked the man where he was born repeatedly.
It mirrored another case from December in which another Somali man, a US citizen identified only as Mubashir, was tackled to the ground by immigration agents who refused to accept his government-issued Real ID as proof of citizenship.
Outcry over that case prompted Gregory Bovino, the commander at large of the US Border Patrol, who has taken part in several stops and raids as part of the Trump administration's operation in Minneapolis, to falsely claim that US citizens "must carry immigration documents" under the Immigration and Nationality Act.
About 83% of Somalis living in the US are citizens, according to census data. However, Minneapolis' large Somali population—which has an even higher rate of US citizenship—has been used as a justification by President Donald Trump to flood the city with immigration agents. In recent months, the president has referred to Somalis as “garbage” and called for them all to be deported from the country.
But Somalis have not been the only targets of arbitrary "citizenship" checks in recent days.
Another video, filmed on the day of Good's shooting, showed agents pinning a Hispanic Target employee, 17-year-old Jonathan Aguilar Garcia, to the ground, along with another employee, after asking him whether he was a US citizen. Even after shouting multiple times that he was a citizen and showing his government ID, Garcia was reportedly taken to an undisclosed location for hours with no notice given to his family about where he was or when he'd return.
In another case, detailed in the Minnesota lawsuit, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents "approached a team of four Minneapolis Public Works employees, working in Minneapolis and wearing city uniforms and badges. The agents asked the three nonwhite city employees for identification and questioned each of them about their citizenship and place of birth. The agents did not ask to see any identification or ask any questions of the fourth employee, who was white."
Four members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, who were homeless and living under a bridge, were also reportedly detained last week and have still not yet been located. The tribe's president has directed members to declare their tribal affiliation when encountering immigration officers, which makes them US citizens and therefore not subject to immigration enforcement.
"DHS said they were 'highly targeted' and go after 'the worst of the worst,'" said the Democrats on the House Committee on Homeland Security in a post on social media responding to agents' questioning of Omar. "In reality, DHS is indiscriminately profiling Black and brown American citizens.
They urged readers: "Protect yourself and your neighbors and film everything."
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For People of Color, Citizenship Offers No Protection Against ICE’s Techno Terrorism
The only thing that definitively clears suspicion for ICE is biometric identification. The presumption is that people may lie, documents may be forged, but biometric scans are objective and certain. People are guilty until an algorithm proves them innocent.
Dec 20, 2025
On December 9, Mubashir, a Minneapolis man who has chosen to only disclose his first name, was wrongly arrested by Immigration and Custom Enforcement for the crime of stepping “outside as a Somali American.” During his lunch break, masked men tackled him onto the ground, dragged him across the road, choked, and restrained him. Mubashir insisted that he was a US citizen. He repeatedly offered to show the men his digital passport, as well as to provide his name and date of birth to prove his citizenship. The agents refused.
Instead, they forced him to undergo a facial recognition scan to prove his identity. After several failed attempts to scan his face, he was arrested and taken to a detainment center. Mubashir was held for several hours without medical assistance or water, until eventually he was given the opportunity to present his passport. He was released after being subjected to fingerprint scanning.
Mubashir’s case is horrifying, but it’s becoming a common occurrence in President Donald Trump’s America. In April, Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez was arrested, detained. and threatened with deportation after “biometrics indicated he was not a citizen.” This, despite his insistence that he was a US-born citizen and offering his Real ID as proof. Lopez-Gomez was eventually released once his story gained national news coverage.
Another example: two ICE agents stopped Jesus Gutiérrez after he exited a Chicago gym. He didn’t have any identification on him, but he told officers he was a US citizen. Agents took a facial scan using the app Mobile Fortify to determine his legal status. While Gutiérrez wasn’t arrested, the experience left him traumatized.
Somehow, for the Trump administration, a voter ID is enough to prove one’s citizenship at the ballot box, but a Real ID is not enough proof if masked men randomly assault and question you about your legal status on the street.
In each of these cases, a person of color is stopped without probable cause or justification, forced to undergo biometric scans, and has their freedom left to the discretion of an algorithm.
These technologies function to silence those whose rights are being violated. Mubashir, Lopez-Gomez, and Gutiérrez all insisted that they were citizens—they all told the truth. However, for those agents, their words, even their state and federal documentation, were insufficient. Under ICE’s technologically driven terrorism, the only thing that definitively clears suspicion is biometric identification. The presumption is that people may lie, documents may be forged, but biometric scans are objective and certain. People are guilty until an algorithm proves them innocent.
However, biometric scanners are far from precision tools. Several of the problems with these technologies are spelled out in the Biometric Technology Report jointly submitted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). According to the report, factors such as “facial features, expressions, obstructions, exposure, and image quality” can all influence the results of biometric scanners. Moreover, a “key challenge” for facial recognition algorithms is that they are more likely to err “when comparing images of two people who look comparatively similar,” such as family members. These algorithms also “yield consistently higher false positive match rates when applied to racial minorities.” This is the algorithmic bias problem.
DHS, as a co-author of the report, is clearly aware of these problems. Yet, they still choose to prioritize these algorithms when confronting people they merely suspect of being undocumented—a feature that is impossible to tell simply by looking at a person.
This choice, however, is strategic. DHS and ICE are using these algorithms to help minimize their own responsibility. If Mubashir is arrested, it’s because the biometric scan was inconclusive. If Lopez-Gomez is detained, it’s because the algorithm says so. If Gutiérrez is released, it’s because the algorithm cleared him. The responsibility for the arrests, threats, and psychological harms these people experience has now been offshored onto an algorithm that cannot be held accountable.
After all, if the algorithm incorrectly identifies you as being undocumented, who do you appeal to? Even if the system is wrong, it’s now the voice of the accused against a voiceless algorithm. Unless an actual person is finally willing to listen to you, your words and documents won’t matter. Unless the press—an institution that is constantly under attack by the Trump administration—raises the alarm on your behalf, you may find yourself detained for weeks.
Even if someone speaks out after they’re released, DHS simply denies any wrongdoing. Despite more than 170 confirmed cases of US citizens being kidnapped by ICE agents, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem still claims that “we have never once detained or deported an American citizen. We have not held them or charged them. When we find their identity, then that is when they are released.”
What’s interesting here is this notion that “their identity” must be found, as if it’s some grand mystery that requires an entire array of surveillance and identification technologies. As if this problem hasn’t already been solved by the invention of identification documents. Somehow, for the Trump administration, a voter ID is enough to prove one’s citizenship at the ballot box, but a Real ID is not enough proof if masked men randomly assault and question you about your legal status on the street.
DHS claims that biometrics “help enable operational missions, both to support national security and public safety, and deliver benefits and services with greater efficiency and accuracy.” The reality is that these technologies widen the scope of who is vulnerable to ICE’s secret police. So long as the algorithm legitimizes the agent’s racial profiling, anyone can become a legitimate target of state violence. This violence has already been judicially legitimized by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s absurd ruling that immigration agents can deliberately target people on the basis of race, language, employment, or location.
The threat of biometric and surveillance technologies is only growing larger. DHS is still heavily investing in more invasive technologies that target undocumented immigrants and citizens alike. This will be a different struggle, but there are things we can do right now. First, we need to support independent news organizations that work to keep the public informed. The extent to which we know about many of these technologies is due entirely to the incredible work being done by journalists.
Second, we need to build tools and networks to support each other. This includes developing our own technologies to warn people about ICE raids, such as the website “People over Papers” and the “ICEBlock” app. Recording and posting pictures of ICE’s cruelty to popular social media sites is also incredibly important. The people who recorded Mubashir’s illegal arrest helped his story become national news.
Third, we need to put more pressure on Democrats to curb this violence. Democratic candidates running in 2026 are already integrating calls to “Abolish ICE” into their platforms. There is also movement at the state and federal level to stop ICE kidnappings. This includes bills like California’s SB 805 and SB 627 and Illinois’ HB1312, as well as HR 4456 and HR 4843. Even the recent House Homeland Security Committee saw Democrats holding Noem responsible for ICE’s abuses. These are positive steps, but more work is still needed.
While the road will be daunting, together, we can keep each other safe.
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