Not by mistake
Hypocrisy Democracy graphic. Data: ProPublica, Oct. 6, 2026.
Here is a sentence from your government, capital letters theirs: “DHS is NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake.”
Read it twice. Then read what ProPublica published on Tuesday.
Reporters tallied every case they could find of an immigration agent holding an American citizen since January 2025. The count runs through September 2026. The number is 506.
So DHS has a point. If it is not a mistake, it is something else.
The count
ProPublica counted anyone held against their will by immigration agents, whether handcuffed, held at gunpoint, or otherwise not free to leave. That is the same line courts use for “detained.” A case made the list only with at least two sources.
What is in the 506:
- More than a hundred Americans held after agents questioned their citizenship. Nearly all were people of color.
- At least 70 American children and teens. About 20 were handcuffed or zip-tied.
- More than 300 accused of assaulting or obstructing agents. Fewer than half were charged in federal court.
- At least 63 detained while recording.
- 36 held for at least a day without being able to reach a lawyer or family.
- Roughly a dozen citizens deported, mostly children.
Of the 137 citizens actually charged with federal crimes, nearly half saw the charges dropped or dismissed, as of September 15.
And it is an undercount. Witnesses estimate more than 200 citizens were detained in one Idaho raid. ProPublica could identify 30, so it counted 30. The government does not track these cases at all. A newsroom had to.
The worst of the worst
You were promised something different.
On December 23, 2025, DHS put out a release on the year’s “worst of the worst.” In it, Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin praised agents for working “to remove the worst of the worst from American neighborhoods” and promised, “If you come to our country and break our laws, we will find you, arrest you, and deport you,” per DHS.
The same release’s own subhead says 70% of all ICE arrests are of people convicted or charged with a crime in the U.S. By the department’s own math, three in ten are not. And that is before you count the citizens.
Now meet some of the people who were not the worst of the worst.
Brian Morales Garcia. Stopped in central Texas this spring, he told officers, “I’m a citizen, it’s fine.” They would not let him get his birth certificate. He was held four days without a call to a lawyer or anyone else, then deported to Mexico. He got back into the country last month, after suing, using that birth certificate. DHS disputed his citizenship in earlier court filings and did not answer ProPublica’s questions.
Willy Wender Aceituno. A naturalized citizen in Charlotte who voted for Donald Trump twice. Last November, Border Patrol agents broke his truck window, pulled him out, and threw him onto the pavement, even as he and bystanders said he had already proved his citizenship to other agents. DHS says he “refused to comply.” His verdict: “ICE isn’t looking for criminals. They’re looking for Latinos.”
A 17-year-old in McMinnville, Oregon, on his lunch break. Agents broke his car window. On video he says, “I’m a U.S. citizen.” An agent answers, “I don’t care.”
A woman in Baltimore held for 25 days, unable to see her 5-year-old son over Christmas.
Three siblings in Brownsville, Texas, including a 14-year-old, detained after they stopped to film an arrest.
If this is the worst of the worst, the bar is a lunch break.
The denial department
Here is how DHS has described all this, per ProPublica: “There are no ‘indiscriminate’ stops.” Allegations of “racial profiling are disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE.” “ICE does not zip tie or restrain children.”
During Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, DHS said there were “no administrative arrests of U.S. citizens.” ProPublica found agents detained more than 120 citizens in Illinois during the height of the surge.
Asked about the findings, DHS said its operations are “highly targeted. We do our due diligence.”
The people who used to run these agencies are not buying it. Eric Balliet spent more than two decades at Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, including in Trump’s first administration. His reaction: “This is just terrible.” Darius Reeves, who ran ICE’s Baltimore office before retiring last year: “I’ve never seen so many U.S. citizen encounters in all my years. It’s an embarrassment.”
When the retired ICE boss calls it an embarrassment, the “fake news” excuse is out of stock.
The red costume: small government, big door
Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, official portrait. Photo: U.S. Department of Homeland Security (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
If you came up on the Fourth Amendment and “don’t tread on me,” this section is for you.
An ICE memo revealed by a whistleblower showed agents forcing their way into homes on administrative warrants that no judge signed, per ProPublica. Jeyli Salguero, 20, says agents broke into her family’s Minnesota home looking for a brother who does not live there. “The first thing I yelled when I stepped out of my room was that I was a U.S. citizen and I had the right to record,” she said. “That’s when they snatched my phone.” DHS, asked to dismiss her lawsuit, says it has “paused” the policy.
Then there is your phone. ProPublica reports that top DHS officials, including former Secretary Kristi Noem, claimed filming ICE agents was interfering with arrests. At least 63 citizens were detained while recording.
And your face. DHS cites a concurring opinion from Justice Brett Kavanaugh saying agents can consider factors like “apparent ethnicity” when making stops. Aceituno says his U.S.-born daughter now carries her passport at college. “My daughter’s white friends aren’t carrying their passports.”
Constitutional conservatism, now with a skin-tone exception.
We have been here before. In Armed Integrity, the same “integrity” crowd floated ICE at the polls. In Cheat Like Hell, the “nationwide” noncitizen voter-fraud hunt posted 160 arrests. That hunt has been running since January 2025. Over roughly the same stretch, immigration agents detained 506 citizens. The voter-fraud dragnet produced 160 arrests. The street dragnet held more than three times as many Americans.
The blue costume: the deporter-in-chief and the missing spreadsheet
President Barack Obama, official portrait, 2012. Photo: Pete Souza, The White House (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Democrats, before you get comfortable.
In March 2014, Janet Murguía, head of the nation’s largest Latino advocacy group, called Barack Obama the “deporter-in-chief,” per NPR. PolitiFact counted nearly 1.6 million deportations by then under DHS’s stricter definition. That was not a Republican talking point. It came from his own coalition.
Citizens got caught then, too. The GAO found ICE arrested at least 674 people its own data flagged as potential U.S. citizens from fiscal 2015 through March 2020, detained 121, and removed 70. Fiscal 2015 and 2016, both Obama years, account for 263 of those arrests.
GAO also found ICE did not even know how often it was doing this, because officers were not required to update the citizenship field. It called for better tracking in July 2021. Democrats then ran DHS until January 2025. Today, per ProPublica, the government still does not track these cases.
Both parties had the warning. Neither wanted the number badly enough to count it.
Both costumes
Fair is fair. Immigration agents do have legal authority to hold an American in limited cases: reasonable suspicion that someone is here illegally, or alleged interference with officers. ProPublica found some protesters did assault agents, including one who pleaded guilty to throwing pieces of cinder block. Not every name on the list is a saint.
But the scale is the story. The red costume is “the worst of the worst” stitched onto a Target employee shouting “I’m literally a U.S. citizen” on video. The blue costume is a party that now discovers civil liberties, after its own president was called deporter-in-chief by his own allies and its own DHS left the GAO’s tracking advice sitting on the shelf.
You do not need a costume for this one. You need your birth certificate, apparently. Carry it. Then call your member of Congress and ask why nobody is counting.
Receipts
- ProPublica, October 6, 2026. The 506 count, its categories, the methodology and two-source rule, the Idaho undercount, the 137 federal charges, the Morales Garcia, Aceituno, McMinnville, Baltimore, Brownsville, and Salguero cases, DHS’s denials and response, Balliet and Reeves, the Midway Blitz claim, the whistleblower memo, the filming claims, and the Kavanaugh concurrence.
- DHS, December 23, 2025. The “worst of the worst” release, the “find you, arrest you, and deport you” line, and the 70% subhead.
- GAO, GAO-21-487, July 2021. The 674 arrests, 121 detentions, and 70 removals of potential citizens, the by-year table, and ICE’s tracking gap.
- NPR, March 4, 2014. Murguía’s “deporter-in-chief” line.
- PolitiFact, March 17, 2014. Nearly 1.6 million deportations under Obama by that point.
- Hypocrisy Democracy, Armed Integrity and Cheat Like Hell. ICE at the polls and the 160-arrest noncitizen-fraud hunt.
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Originally published on Substack.