“The federal surge, which took place after Trump signed an executive order declaring a crime emergency in the nation’s capital, brought with it a spike in immigration-related arrests. But despite the pretense of curbing and targeting violent crime, more than 80 percent of the 1,100 people arrested for immigration offenses had no prior criminal record. And according to United States District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Beryl A. Howell, many of these warrantless immigration arrests may have been unlawful.
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her determination that the DHS has, in fact, adopted an unlawful policy and practice of conducting warrantless immigration arrests without probable cause that runs counter to federal law and “well-settled constitutional principles,” and reveals an “abandonment of the probable cause standard.””
https://reason.com/2025/12/04/federal-judge-confirms-what-we-already-knew-dhs-is-breaking-its-own-rules-in-d-c-immigration-arrests/
“A Florida immigration enforcement dashboard was quietly edited to remove evidence of arrests of U.S. citizens after a local media outlet asked about the arrests.
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the database used to show 21 U.S. citizens were arrested and charged. Additionally, nine other U.S
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“We know that U.S. citizens are being arrested in Florida right now because we see stories like this one that are super-suspect and a civil rights nightmare,” Kennedy continues. “Then we see a dashboard put out by the state of Florida where they had like 30 arrests, and when the press gets a hold of it, that number drops to zero and there’s no explanation given. I think that’s weird.””
https://reason.com/2025/10/24/florida-scrubs-arrests-of-u-s-citizens-from-immigration-enforcement-data/
“For the past two weeks, Juan Barbosa Gomez has been in federal immigration detention, but he doesn’t show up on ICE’s online detainee locator. His family says he has valid work permit and no criminal record.
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For the past two weeks, Barbosa, a 60-year-old grandfather from Mexico, has been incarcerated in the federal immigration detention system, and his family says there’s been a terrible mistake. They say he has a valid work visa and no criminal record. He’s lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years, working as a welder.
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Barbosa’s family has been unable to secure his release or even find out any information on his case. He’s been transferred to three different detention facilities in under two weeks and doesn’t show up on ICE’s online detainee locator. The transfers made it difficult for his family to keep track of him or keep his commissary fund filled, and more importantly, it has short-circuited their attempts to find an immigration attorney to look at his case.
Barbosa isn’t the only such alleged wrongful ICE arrest in Portland. The local TV news outlet KOIN 6 reported that another Portland-area grandfather, Victor Cruz, was arrested by ICE officers on October 14 despite having Temporary Protected Status, a valid work permit, and no criminal record.
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To handle the surge of tens of thousands of detainees, the administration is relying on a secretive network of federal, state, and local lockups. To encourage detainees to self-deport, the administration holds them in miserable conditions and shuttles them between facilities, making it hard for them to mount a legal defense. This raises massive constitutional issues: People are being imprisoned for weeks without transparency, without adequate access to legal counsel or means to challenge their detention, and without basic information on the case against them.
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“His grandson is six years old, and he’s trying to figure out how to navigate through this difficult time, with his grandmother in distress and his whole family right now really going through a hard time,” Smith-Mason says. “It’s a really, really hard time trying to deal with that and keep normalcy for him as well, especially because grandpa has been a constant in his life since the day he came home from the hospital.””
https://reason.com/2025/10/30/a-portland-family-says-their-dad-was-wrongly-arrested-by-ice-now-hes-lost-in-immigration-detention/
“Venegas isn’t the only U.S. citizen to run afoul of the increased emphasis on immigration enforcement. Just days ago, according to 16-year-old Arnoldo Bazan, ICE officers in an unmarked car and without uniform insignia beat and choked him in Houston. He was finally released but his father was deported.
Two weeks ago, ProPublica reported it had found more than 170 cases of “agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests.” In some cases, U.S. citizens were initially accused of assaulting or impeding officers, but charges were rarely brought, suggesting there was little substance to the accusations. “Our count found a handful of citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.”
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The problem with emphasizing mass arrests without warrants of supposedly foreign-looking people over targeted actions is that the government doesn’t just drive up the numbers; it scoops up many people who have every right to be where they are and do what they’re doing without being molested by agents of the state.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/31/ices-mass-arrests-ensnare-u-s-citizens-and-show-no-signs-of-stopping/
“The president deployed nearly 2,000 law enforcement officers into a city supposedly teeming with criminals. And yet the effort netted some 380 arrests in 10 days, and many of the charges the administration has bragged about are for low-level nonviolent offenses, such as possession of narcotics or carrying a pistol without a license.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/19/trumps-ineffective-d-c-crackdown-nearly-2000-officers-made-fewer-than-400-arrests-in-10-days/
“Trump administration officials admitted that Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil was arrested without a warrant.”
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“The attorneys argued that the Department of Homeland Security wasn’t required to get a warrant because they had reason to believe that Khalil was likely to “escape” before one would be obtained.”
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“Khalil is far from the first legal resident to face deportation for pro-Palestine speech. Last month Rubio said that he had cancelled around 300 student visas. “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not become a social activist that tears up our university campuses,” Rubio told reporters. “And if we’ve given you a visa and you decide to do that, we’re going to take it away””
https://reason.com/2025/04/28/trump-administration-admits-ice-arrested-mahmoud-khalil-without-a-warrant/
“An indictment..alleges that Trump, with the help of his body man Walt Nauta, flouted a subpoena requiring him to surrender highly sensitive documents that he kept in unsecured locations at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida — and that the men concealed this from federal officials as well as Trump’s own attorneys. The documents allegedly contained national defense information, including plans to attack an unidentified foreign country, and US nuclear weapons capabilities.”
“A Jan. 6 defendant wanted on misdemeanor charges opened fire at sheriff’s deputies..as they checked on him ahead of his expected arrest, leading to a lengthy standoff”https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/20/jan-6-defendant-fired-on-deputies-00093158
” Believers in boogaloo ideology — a focus on visible gun ownership, with some advocating for a violent civil war against the federal government — have shown up to protests in Minneapolis, Las Vegas, and other cities, sometimes wearing Hawaiian shirts (based on a movement in-joke) and carrying large guns.”
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“members of the boogaloo movement are unlikely to be the majority of those arrested at either the protests or the violence. In Minneapolis, Seattle, Cleveland, Dallas, Atlanta, and elsewhere, the majority of those arrested during the protests and violence haven’t been outside agitators traveling the country to start fights and cause violence. Rather, they’ve been people largely from the same places where they are arrested.”