US citizens arrested by ICE
Executive summary
Yes — while federal immigration law and ICE policy do not authorize the deportation of U.S. citizens, U.S. citizens have been arrested, detained and in rare historical cases nearly deported after encounters with ICE and related federal agents; recent reporting and oversight documents show multiple high‑profile incidents in late 2025–January 2026 that have reignited legal and political fights over those practices [1] [2] [3]. The pattern has prompted lawsuits, congressional calls for investigations and criticism that aggressive enforcement tactics are sweeping up citizens along with noncitizens [4] [5] [6].
1. What the law and ICE policy say — and the practical gap
By statute ICE’s civil immigration authority is meant to apply to noncitizens and agency policy states it should not arrest U.S. citizens for immigration purposes, but that formal legal limits do not eliminate field errors: experts and the agency itself distinguish between judicial warrants (harder to get) and administrative “warrants” or internal authorizations that ICE uses in practice, and attorneys say those administrative mechanisms and record errors have allowed citizens to be detained [7] [1] [8].
2. Recent, visible incidents that forced the debate back into the open
Since December 2025 and into January 2026 multiple widely reported cases illustrate the problem: Dulce Consuelo Díaz Morales was held 25 days by ICE despite counsel saying she had a U.S. birth certificate and was later released while a judge reviewed her case [2]; videos and reporting from Minneapolis show U.S. citizens detained and, in one case, the fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen by an ICE agent that spurred protests and further detentions of bystanders and monitors [7] [9] [10].
3. Patterns from oversight, lawsuits and advocacy groups
A December 2025 Senate subcommittee report and complaints filed in multiple jurisdictions documented recurring patterns — mistaken identity, warrantless stops, “at‑large” and roving patrol tactics, and arbitrary detentions — leading advocacy groups and lawmakers to argue ICE has repeatedly detained U.S. citizens or ignored citizenship claims in the field [8] [4] [5]. The ACLU’s lawsuit in Minnesota alleges suspicionless stops, warrantless arrests and racial profiling that included at least one named U.S. citizen plaintiff [5].
4. Scale, who is affected, and conditions in custody
National civil‑society reporting finds the system grew dramatically in 2025 and detention practices hardened, with ICE holding many more people with no criminal record and expanding facilities — a context in which wrongful detentions of citizens, while numerically smaller than overall arrests, can have severe consequences; detainees and journalists have described harsh conditions, pressured interrogations and limited access to counsel for those briefly held [11] [10] [3].
5. Drivers, incentives and competing narratives
Policy drivers include rapid hiring and directives to increase removals, plus reliance on policing precedents (such as Whren reasoning) that allow traffic or technical stops to become pretexts for immigration enforcement; critics argue those incentives convert routine encounters into grounds for detention and create room for racial profiling, while defenders frame the operations as lawful interior enforcement and necessary to meet administration priorities [12] [11] [13]. Political motivations and rhetoric — cited by plaintiffs and some lawmakers — are explicitly alleged as contributing to discriminatory targeting in recent suits and public statements [5] [6].
6. Accountability, legal remedies and what remains unknown
Congressional letters, lawsuits and calls for internal DHS investigations are underway, and legal advocates point to existing remedies — habeas petitions, federal litigation, and administrative complaints — but significant questions remain about how often citizens are wrongly detained nationwide, how administrative “warrants” are used in practice, and whether ICE’s training and oversight will change; reporting establishes incidents and patterns but does not yet provide a comprehensive national tally or final determinations in many pending cases [4] [8] [1].