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ICE Enforcement

How many U.S. citizens have actually been wrongfully detained, deported, or killed by immigration enforcement since 2025 — and how the enforcement surge is hitting the legal workforce that grows, builds, and processes much of what the country eats and lives in. Plainly, with sources.

Last updated September 29, 2026

Terms

ICE
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the DHS agency that arrests and detains people for civil immigration violations. A separate agency, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), also conducts enforcement operations; this page notes which agency is involved in each case.
287(g) program
A federal program that deputizes local police and sheriff's departments to perform immigration-enforcement functions. Its rapid 2025–2026 expansion is a major reason enforcement now reaches communities ICE itself doesn't have agents in.
Humanitarian parole
A legal status letting people from specific countries (here, mainly Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) live and work in the U.S. temporarily without a visa. The Trump administration's 2025 termination of these programs stripped work authorization from hundreds of thousands of people who had been here legally.

U.S. citizens: wrongfully detained

More than 170 documented cases of ICE detaining U.S. citizens have been reported since 2025, and roughly 1,400 habeas corpus petitions challenging ICE detention have been filed in the Southern District of California alone since January 2025. Named cases include:

Peter Sean BrownFL sheriff, held on ICE detainer — court ruled unlawful
Jensy MachadoVA — held at gunpoint, mistaken identity
Juan Carlos Lopez-GomezFL — held 30 hrs on a facial-recognition error
Job GarciaFiled $1M federal claim for unlawful detention
Raffy Shy, 79Naturalized citizen, held 12 hrs; seeking $50M

DHS disputes the framing of several of these cases directly: it says its operations are "highly targeted" with predetermined subjects, and that specific individuals named in press reports were held for "interference," "resisting arrest," or "assaulting a law enforcement officer" rather than being detained over their immigration status alone. We cover that pushback in full in "Nonpartisan, plainly" below.

U.S. citizens killed in enforcement encounters

At least three U.S. citizens have been killed during immigration-enforcement operations since 2025, two by ICE and one by CBP officers operating alongside ICE during the same enforcement surge:

Ruben Ray Martinez, 23South Padre Island, TX — Mar. 15, 2025, ICE HSI agent
Renée Nicole Good, 37Minneapolis, MN — Jan. 7, 2026, ICE agent
Alex Pretti, 37Minneapolis, MN — Jan. 24, 2026, CBP officers

Body-camera footage in the Martinez case did not corroborate ICE's claim that he had rammed his car into agents; ICE's involvement wasn't publicly known until a February 2026 Freedom of Information Act request. Minneapolis's police chief said there was "nothing to indicate" Good was the target of any investigation; an autopsy found she was shot in the head while unarmed. Witnesses to the Pretti shooting say he was trying to help a protester being pepper-sprayed and didn't resist; DHS says the officer acted in self-defense. A fourth case, the December 31, 2025 killing of Keith Porter Jr. by an off-duty ICE agent in Los Angeles, is genuinely disputed and different in kind: it stemmed from a personal dispute over celebratory gunfire at the officer's own apartment complex, not a field enforcement operation, and no charges have been filed as of this writing.

U.S. citizen children, deported

Two 12-year-old American twin sisters were deported to Guatemala along with their mother, despite a request that they be allowed to stay in Florida with their grandmother; a court later ordered ICE to bring them back. Separately, a federal judge in Louisiana said he had a "strong suspicion" that the government had deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen born in Louisiana along with her mother and sister "with no meaningful process," and ordered a hearing to find out.

The due-process right actually at stake

There's no Sixth Amendment right to a criminal jury trial here — deportation has been legally classified as a civil matter, not a criminal punishment, since the 1890s. What is well-settled, and what's actually being narrowed, is the Fifth Amendment's due process guarantee: the Supreme Court held in Yamataya v. Fisher (1903) that noncitizens on U.S. soil are entitled to notice and "an opportunity to be heard" before the government can remove them, and that guarantee has been reaffirmed for well over a century. The current fight is over how much of a hearing that requires, and who gets to decide — an immigration judge, or an immigration officer alone:

1903Yamataya v. Fisher: SCOTUS holds noncitizens are entitled to due process before removal
Jan. 20, 2025Executive order expands expedited removal nationwide — no judge, no hearing
Aug. 29, 2025D.C. district judge stays the expansion, calling the process “woefully inadequate”
2026D.C. Circuit (2–1) reverses the stay; dissent calls it a due process violation
Feb. 6, 20265th Circuit (Buenrostro-Mendez): mandatory detention statute applies broadly, no bond hearing required
Jul. 2, 20265th Circuit: Constitution still requires a bond hearing within 90 days regardless
Sept. 29, 2026SCOTUS lets third-country deportations resume without a chance to object; argument set for Dec. 2026

The government's own court filings go further than defending these specific policies: in briefing over mandatory detention, the Trump administration has argued that migrants detained over alleged criminal activity have no due process rights at all. That's a broader claim than the courts considering these cases have accepted so far — even the rulings that have gone the government's way, like the D.C. Circuit's expedited-removal decision, found that some notice and opportunity to respond exists, not that none is required. The dissenting judge in that case wrote that without being told the two-year continuous-presence rule that could serve as their defense, people subject to expedited removal are "simply left to hope that the immigration officer will conclude that they have met their burden."

By the numbers

Documented cases of ICE detaining U.S. citizens since 2025
170+
People who died in ICE custody in 2025 (agency's own count)
33
Construction cost of the labor shortage, per year
$10B

MALDEF/court filings; ICE detainee death reports via NBC News; Fortune, citing homebuilder industry data. Independent trackers (Human Rights Watch, the SF Chronicle) report higher 2026 death counts than ICE's own delayed reporting; the discrepancy is disputed and unresolved.

Who's actually being swept up: the legal workforce

Green card status doesn't protect against detention — ICE can and does detain lawful permanent residents it believes are deportable, and a June 23, 2026 Supreme Court ruling (Blanche v. Lau, 6–3) made it easier for border officers to deny reentry to returning green card holders by lowering the evidence standard the government must meet. The 287(g) program that deputizes local police for immigration enforcement has expanded to more than 200 jurisdictions since 2025.

The clearest numbers on legal workers losing status come from the 2025 termination of humanitarian parole programs: more than 530,000 people who had been living and working in the U.S. legally lost their work authorization. Of the roughly 740,000 people who had been employed under these programs, more than 30,000 worked on farms and about 90,000 worked in manufacturing, including meatpacking and food processing. Major employers, including Walmart and JBS, began terminating workers who lost authorization following the policy change.

The food supply and farm-cost impact

The workforce

  • About half the hired crop workforce nationally lacks legal status, per USDA's Economic Research Service.
  • California grows over a third of U.S. vegetables and three-quarters of its fruits and nuts with this workforce.
  • Texas dairy farmers report workers not showing up to milk cows because of raid fears — including workers who are here legally.
  • The Labor Department has itself warned of a possible food-supply disruption tied to the raids.

The projected cost

  • Lettuce up 32.1%, whole milk up 9.0%, landscaping up 10.8% (12 months ending June 2026) — all well above the 2.6% core inflation rate, per a compilation of federal price data.
  • An economist's model (Francesc Ortega, CUNY, via the immigration-reform group FWD.us) projects a 14.5% rise in food, beverage, and tobacco prices from 2024–2028 tied to these policies.
  • A dairy-industry-commissioned model found a complete loss of immigrant dairy labor would raise a gallon of milk from about $3.37 to roughly $6.40 and cut economic output by $32.1 billion.

The construction cost impact

The workforce

  • Immigrants make up about 35% of the U.S. construction workforce, per the Associated General Contractors of America.
  • 28% of construction firms reported workforce disruptions tied to ICE activity within a six-month span.
  • Undocumented-worker employment fell 7.5% in areas where ICE conducted raids — construction was the hardest-hit industry.
  • In the Carolinas, Georgia, Texas, and Alabama, 45–57% of firms reported feeling an impact.

The cost

  • The shortage adds about two months to typical construction timelines.
  • It costs builders and consumers an estimated $10 billion a year and cuts annual housing production by roughly 19,000 homes.
  • Some markets have seen framing-cost increases of 25–50%.
  • One Alabama project alone faced roughly $84,000 in delay costs, including $4,000 a day in damages.

Nonpartisan, plainly

The U.S. citizen detention and killing cases above are drawn from court filings, medical examiner findings, body-camera footage, and named eyewitness accounts — not just advocacy claims. But DHS disputes the framing of the detention cases specifically, saying its operations are targeted and that named individuals were held over obstruction or violence, not immigration status alone; we've included that pushback rather than presenting only one side. The economic figures on food and construction costs come from three different kinds of sources with three different incentives: independent government data (USDA, the Labor Department), industry trade groups that benefit from a larger immigrant labor supply (NMPF, NAHB, AGC), and immigration advocacy organizations that oppose the enforcement policy (America's Voice, FWD.us). None of that makes the underlying price and employment data wrong, but readers should weigh a dairy trade group's estimate of milk prices the same way they'd weigh any interested party's number — alongside, not instead of, the independent data. We're not taking a position on immigration enforcement policy itself. These are the facts as currently reported, plainly, with sources to check yourself — and this is an unusually fast-moving, heavily litigated area, so expect these numbers to keep changing.

Talking points

These are the questions we think you should ask those who are running for office and will represent you.

  1. What specific safeguards should exist to prevent U.S. citizens from being detained or deported by immigration enforcement, and who should be held accountable when it happens anyway?
  2. Should Congress expand a legal pathway (like H-2A) for farm and food-processing workers instead of relying on enforcement against an undocumented workforce the industry depends on?
  3. Do you support the 287(g) program's expansion, and should local police be doing federal immigration enforcement at all?
  4. If enforcement raises food and housing costs, as multiple industry and independent estimates suggest, what's your plan to offset that for consumers?

Read more

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