Your U.S. Citizenship Will Not Protect You
The video is chilling: A masked law-enforcement officer yanks an 18-year-old girl out of the passenger side of a car parked on a residential street in a Chicago suburb while she screams, “I am not resisting!” The officer throws her to the ground and puts his knee on her back as he handcuffs her. The person recording the video repeatedly yells at the agents that the teen is a U.S. citizen. The girl, whom local media has identified only as Evelyn, was reportedly monitoring U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in the area with a group of friends earlier this month, CBS News reported. Evelyn and her two friends were detained for hours before being released without charges, according to her family.
Scenes like this have been taking place all over Chicago in recent weeks. While immigrants have borne the brunt of ICE’s reign of terror in the city and surrounding areas over the past month, American citizens like Evelyn have been caught in the dragnet, showing the extent of state-sanctioned violence under the Trump administration and how little regard immigration-enforcement agents have for the rule of law.
“We’re seeing U.S. citizens thrown to the ground,” says Maribel Hernandez-Rivera, national director of immigrant community strategies at the ACLU. “We are seeing U.S. citizens having physical problems because their ribs were broken, because they didn’t have medication while they were detained, and so on.”
When federal agents stormed a residential apartment in South Shore during a widely condemned overnight raid on September 30, four of the children detained were U.S. citizens, a Homeland Security spokesperson told CNN. Another teenager, a 15-year-old boy, was also arrested last week in the East Side following community pushback against ICE agents conducting raids there. He was held in custody for five hours without being able to notify his family, according to his lawyers. “Federal agents provided no information about his whereabouts, no phone call, no explanation for the arrest,” attorney Antonio Romanucci, who represents the family, told NBC5 Chicago. “His mother’s terror was amplified by her son’s heart condition and the complete absence of any information from authorities.”
Maria Greeley, a Latina born in Illinois, says federal agents stopped her after she finished a restaurant shift in early October, zip-tying her arms behind her back and questioning her for an hour. She told the Chicago Tribune that the three officers told her her passport was not real and that she “didn’t look like” her surname. (Greeley is adopted.)
Last week, Debbie Brockman, a WGN-TV producer, was arrested by ICE in Chicago’s Lincoln Square and spent seven hours in federal custody before being released without charges, according to her legal team. Two workers at Concordia Cemetery also allege that immigration agents pepper-sprayed them and detained them for hours after they tried to help a man struggling in the Des Plaines River whom officers were attempting to arrest.
“Zip ties behind our backs, shackles on our ankles. We were just in custody until they came with the transport,” David Eichler, one of the workers, told WGN9. “If this happened to me, a U.S. citizen, who’s to say what they’ll do to somebody else?”
ICE raids Walgreens in Chicago—older white agent tackles Black man to the ground—arrests him for "running."
— LongTime????FirstTime???????? (@LongTimeHistory) October 14, 2025
"He's a U.S. citizen! He's American!" a woman yells. "He's my brother-in-law!"
Store location was forced to close "because of everything with ICE"—manager told the rest… pic.twitter.com/9HS1qfoPPg
In a statement to The Cut, DHS denied that it is detaining U.S. citizens while alleging that those who have been arrested either obstructed or assaulted law-enforcement agents first. In Evelyn’s case, DHS claimed that the footage was from a separate arrest unrelated to immigration that took place a year ago; local police and media reports contradict this account.
Similar incidents have been happening all over the country as recently as this week. Now, we’re finally starting to grasp the scale of the issue: A recent ProPublica report found more than 170 cases in which immigration-enforcement agents have detained U.S. citizens during the first nine months of Trump’s presidency. The tally, which the outlet says is likely an undercount, included nearly 20 children, two of whom were cancer patients.
ICE and other immigration agencies have always had wide latitude to conduct their operations. According to Hernandez-Rivera, officers can detain American citizens in narrow circumstances, including if they have reasonable suspicion that someone is in the country without authorization. “But if they arrest somebody by mistake, they must release that person immediately,” Hernandez-Rivera says.
There’s a long history of Homeland Security detaining U.S. citizens under both Republican and Democratic administrations, and sometimes even deporting them. While immigration agencies are not required to track how many American citizens they’ve had encounters with, a 2021 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, the most recent data available, found that ICE arrested 674 “potential” American citizens, detained 121, and removed 70 between October 2015 and March 2020.
What’s different under Trump 2.0 is the volume and speed with which ICE agents are detaining U.S. citizens compared to previous years. Hernandez-Rivera attributes the uptick to the large-scale, indiscriminate operations ICE is conducting in communities suspected of housing undocumented immigrants all across the country, rather than targeted raids that rely on intelligence reports to go after specific individuals. Trump has tapped other federal agencies to join immigration operations and expanded agreements with state and local officials to the point where “it is no longer just immigration officers enforcing immigration law,” Hernandez-Rivera says. As these agencies try to meet the White House’s quota of 3,000 daily immigration arrests nationwide, she says, “We’re also seeing this administration has a disregard for our constitutional protections.”
In practice, this enforcement blitz includes racial profiling. In a legal challenge filed earlier this summer, five people — two of whom are American citizens — who were detained during raids in Los Angeles said agents arrested individuals based on their perceived race or ethnicity. The lawsuit argued that this constituted a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which confers people the right to privacy against unreasonable searches and seizures. A federal court agreed, saying there was a “mountain of evidence” supporting the plaintiffs’ claims and ruling that immigration agents can’t rely on factors such as race, accents, location, or someone’s job to meet the standard of “individualized suspicion.”
The Supreme Court paused that ruling in September, however, and allowed immigration agents to continue detaining people based on those factors as the case plays out. In his concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh endorsed the idea that crude stereotypes about immigrants are a reasonable basis for detaining someone and went to great lengths to minimize the impact of detention. “If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter,” he wrote. “Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings.” Kavanaugh’s ahistorical analysis downplays the impact of these incidents. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, one of the plaintiffs attempted to show agents documents proving his citizenship. They refused to believe him. “The agent said the ID was insufficient, ‘grabbed [his] arm,’ escorted him to a vehicle, and drove him to a ‘warehouse area’ for further questioning,” she wrote. In what world does that qualify as a “brief” encounter?
Hernandez-Rivera agrees that Kavanaugh’s view is not rooted in people’s real-life experiences with ICE. “It’s not a mere inconvenience. It’s a violation of our constitutional rights,” she says. “It goes to show the lack of understanding of the lived experience of people like myself, a Latina with an accent, who could be at a specific location, and now I could be a target.”
Though there’s no legal requirement for Americans to carry any document that proves their citizenship, people can be prepared for an encounter like this by having their Real ID or passport on hand, Hernandez-Rivera says. She adds that people should choose an emergency contact and show them where to access documents proving their citizenship. During an encounter with ICE, she recommends repeatedly stating, “I am a U.S. citizen,” and for people who are witnessing the interaction to document it with video or in writing. If arrested, a person should ask to speak to an attorney or their emergency contact and otherwise remain silent. The right to not consent to warrantless searches still applies here, she says. In a scenario where ICE refuses to accept someone’s proof of citizenship and declines to release them, it’s critical to involve an attorney. And there are other ways of applying pressure, such as reaching out to members of Congress, the media, and legal groups.
For many of us, the looming threat of being detained by ICE, regardless of immigration status, is not theoretical. When my parents — who, like many people in Puerto Rico, are U.S. citizens but don’t speak English — visited me earlier this year, I gave them specific instructions to remember whenever they ventured outside without me: Carry your passport. Share your location. Call immediately if you have any interaction with law enforcement, no matter how small. These are warnings I had never issued in the decade-plus I’ve been living Stateside, and it felt like an overreaction at the time. My fears were clearly not unfounded. The violent systems that are terrorizing immigrant communities are primed to do the same to anyone who fits ICE’s profile.
This post has been updated.
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