Human Impact Project

On October 19, 2025, more than 200 officers from roughly 14 federal and local agencies raided La Catedral Arena, a horse track in Wilder, Idaho, under a warrant covering only five gambling suspects. About 400 attendees, including children as young as 7, were zip-tied and detained for hours; 105 people were taken into ICE custody and five were arrested on gambling charges. Lead plaintiff Juana Rodriguez, a U.S. citizen, said she was restrained for nearly four hours while holding her 3-year-old son. Anabel Romero said her children, among more than a dozen American minors detained, remain deeply shaken, with her 7-year-old son later warning his older sister ahead of another race, 'Watch out for ICE, make sure you have your phone to film — I'll come save you.' A lawsuit alleges officers used racial epithets and denied food, water, and medical care; four protesters were also arrested, with most charges later dropped. U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill ordered 15-16 detainees released, ruling mandatory detention violated due process, and awarded about $87,000 in attorneys' fees.

In 2025, immigration agents handcuffed a 15-year-old U.S. citizen with disabilities outside a school in Los Angeles, saying they had mistaken the teen for an alleged gang member. The Department of Homeland Security has stated that ICE does not restrain or zip-tie children, but this incident is among dozens documented cases of American children being detained, some of them handcuffed, during immigration enforcement operations. The case is cited as part of a broader pattern of more than 500 U.S. citizens who have been arrested or detained by ICE.

Last summer, three siblings in Brownsville, Texas, stopped to film an immigration arrest and were themselves detained after agents tried to seize their phones. One sibling, a young teenager, said agents tackled him to the ground, causing sharp knee pain, and separated him from his mother, a green card holder, amid fear she would be taken away. The siblings have filed claims for damages against the government.

Jeyli Salguero, 20, said armed federal agents broke through her family's front door in Minnesota without a judicial warrant while searching for her brother, who did not live there. Salguero said she told agents she was a U.S. citizen with the right to record, after which agents took her phone. Agents released Salguero and her mother after about half an hour but detained her father, who had temporary protected status, and her undocumented sister, who was later deported to El Salvador; her father was later released from detention. Salguero is one of several plaintiffs suing the government over warrantless home entries.

In January, hours after Renee Good's killing, immigration agents tackled and handcuffed a school staff member in Minneapolis. "I feel lucky to be alive," he recalled, describing the encounter as terrifying.

In December, a U.S. citizen in Baltimore was detained by immigration agents and held for 25 days, preventing her from seeing her 5-year-old son over Christmas.

In November, immigration agents took an 18-year-old U.S. citizen off the street and eventually left him in the woods.

In April, a 20-year-old U.S. citizen was held in a Florida jail for more than 24 hours despite having proof of his citizenship.

During a Sept. 4 ICE raid in Dover, N.J., a Honduran man was picked up on his way to work, loaded into a van, and taken with nine other detained men to a warehouse in nearby Roxbury, where they were handcuffed and held in a parking lot for hours. Frightened, he signed deportation papers and said he regretted it the next morning; NPR later located him in Honduras, where he had been deported, and he requested anonymity out of fear for loved ones still in the U.S. During the same raid, a 59-year-old worker was cornered against a wall by two masked ICE agents in footage that later circulated on social media. His daughter recognized him in the video and received a disoriented call from him afterward saying he was handcuffed somewhere she believed was the Roxbury warehouse; she has not been able to reach him since and asked not to be named for fear of being targeted.

Orville Etoria, a Jamaican man transferred by the United States to Eswatini under its third-country deportation program, described in a deposition being held in extreme isolation during his first weeks at Matsapha Correctional Complex, a maximum-security prison. He said he was barred from communicating with anyone outside the prison for two and a half weeks, confined to his cell except to be fed, and treated 'as if we were violent, even though we had done nothing wrong,' until guards came to see the US government's portrayal of detainees as false.

Tesfay T., a 35-year-old Ethiopian man who had been imprisoned and tortured in Ethiopia and later kidnapped and tortured again in Mexico, fled to the United States and spent more than a year in immigration detention after crossing the border irregularly. An immigration judge denied his asylum claim but granted him 'withholding of removal' because of the likelihood he would be tortured again if returned to Ethiopia. In February 2026, while his lawyer was pursuing a habeas corpus petition for his release, an ICE officer told him to sign a voluntary departure form and said, 'I don't care, I'm going to sign it myself' when Tesfay refused and asked to speak with his attorney. He was then flown to Cameroon chained at his wrists, legs, and stomach for the entire journey, denied the ability to stand or use a bathroom without restraints, and was not told his destination until after landing.

Luis Caiza, an asylum seeker from Ecuador with a work permit and no criminal record, was pulled from his car and thrown to the ground during a traffic stop in Maple Grove, Minnesota, part of ICE's Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities. His wife, Marjorie Flores, said officers kneed and kicked him while he was down, then pulled her from the car, threw her onto the icy street, and pointed a weapon at her as she pleaded that their three children, Camila, Sneyder, and Emilio, were at home. Caiza has since been held for nearly 10 months at the Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico, where he has described tooth infections, inadequate food, lack of clean clothing, and severe delays receiving legal mail. He said video calls with his children have become too painful to continue. His attorney, Danielle Molliver, disputes a judge's finding that he is a flight risk due to prior DWIs and has filed a second petition challenging his prolonged detention while his asylum appeal, which he recently lost, remains pending. Flores now works three jobs totaling 93 hours a week to support their children.

A 17-year-old U.S. citizen was detained in Oregon during his lunch break after immigration agents broke his car window. Video reviewed by ProPublica captured the teenager telling an agent he was a U.S. citizen, to which the agent responded, "I don't care."

Daury Baez Seri, a DACA recipient who grew up in Boston after arriving from the Dominican Republic at age six, was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection for more than 24 hours at Logan International Airport. He was returning from a gaming convention in Puerto Rico when his flight was diverted to Bermuda due to a medical emergency onboard, inadvertently turning a domestic flight into an international one. His attorney, Todd Pomerleau, said Baez Seri was not allowed to call a lawyer while detained and has no criminal record. He was released from custody late Wednesday evening.

Oscar Bracamontes Trinidad, a Medford, Oregon father of five, was detained by ICE agents while at work and later deported to Mexico. His wife, Margarita Bracamontes Torres, said she wasn't notified of his arrest until hours later, by which point he was already being transported to Tacoma, Washington, and said ICE paperwork falsely stated he was picked up at an ICE facility rather than his workplace. Oscar was held in Tacoma for about 30 days before being transferred to a detention facility in Natchez, Mississippi, making visits impossible; the family ultimately decided not to fight his case in detention, which could have taken six months to a year, and he returned to Mexico. Margarita said their children struggled emotionally during his detention, and she is now raising money to relocate the family to Mexico while they pursue an I-130 petition to return to the U.S.

Luis Arreguin, 54, a Fresno man who has lived in the U.S. since he was five years old, was detained by ICE agents around 5 a.m. on Oct. 1 while driving to work on Manning Avenue, according to his daughter, Elaina Salazar. Salazar says agents acted without a warrant based on a tip, and told her father they knew he hadn't done anything wrong. She describes him as loving and hardworking, and says he was in the process of obtaining citizenship before his detention. Arreguin has high blood pressure that has been elevated for days and is being held at an ICE facility in McFarland, where Salazar visits him three times a week. His detention came amid a surge of roughly two dozen ICE arrests reported across Fresno and Madera counties that advocates have called an "election surge."

Melanie Tinoco, a 29-year-old mother of two from Ecuador who fled in 2024 after mafia threats, was arrested by Boston police at a Target over an alleged shoplifting incident her family calls a misunderstanding involving Uber Eats shopping. She has a pending asylum application, a valid work permit, and no prior criminal record. After being released from the District 4 police station, plainclothes ICE agents detained her outside without showing identification or a warrant, according to her husband Martin Gurfinkiel, who witnessed the arrest. She has since been held at the Burlington ICE processing center, where her family says agents injured her wrists and she has struggled to access her prescribed anxiety medication, reporting sleepless nights and panic attacks. Her husband is now caring alone for their two children, including a 7-year-old son with autism who has struggled emotionally without her. Her attorneys have filed a federal habeas petition seeking her release, citing her scheduled 2027 immigration court hearing and alleging a possible violation of Boston's Trust Act limiting police cooperation with ICE.

Ahmed Soliman, a gay man in his early 30s who fled Egypt as a child and grew up in Phoenix and Tucson, had won a judge's ruling protecting him from deportation to Egypt over fears of persecution based on his sexuality and family history. Despite this ruling and a pending habeas petition, ICE transferred him to Louisiana and deported him in April 2026 to a decommissioned hotel in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, under a $7.5 million third-country removal deal that has sent at least 66 people there since November 2025. Guards confiscated detainees' phones, and police pointed rifles at Soliman and forced him to his knees when he tried to film the forced removal of other detainees to Ethiopia. Amnesty International reported he was bound and beaten by police upon arrival, and after he spoke to journalists about conditions at the facility, he was arrested on property-damage accusations, blindfolded, beaten, and pushed down a staircase before being transferred to a prison in Malabo. He and another detainee from Eritrea went missing for more than a week, with attorneys unable to confirm charges or his location and fearing retaliation for his media interviews. A federal judge later ruled his deportation unlawful and ordered the U.S. government to facilitate his return.

Yasmani Noel Moreno de Armas, a 31-year-old Cuban who arrived in Florida by raft in 2016 under the 'Wet Foot, Dry Foot' policy and ran a small trucking business between Miami and Tampa to help support his parents near Orlando, was detained by ICE in West Palm Beach on May 11, 2025, after his green card bid under the Cuban Adjustment Act was denied. He was held for about a year before being deported in late July/August 2026 not to Cuba but to the Central African Republic on a roughly 21-22 hour shackled flight, learning his destination only hours into the trip. Moreno, who manages diabetes and asthma, said the flight left him ill and triggered an anxiety attack. He is now confined at the Maison Confort lodging in Bangui alongside migrants from Afghanistan, Vietnam and Russia, without a passport, visa or legal status, suffering stomach problems and allergies, and says he was kidnapped twice by armed men he believed were security forces, with family and a fellow detainee paying about $100 for his release. A Cuban embassy representative told him Cuba would not take him back because he left as a 'rafter' migrant, and he fears returning there given a past imprisonment for trying to flee. 'They brought us here illegally,' he said, adding his parents 'went crazy, crying and yelling' when he told them where he was; his attorney is negotiating with federal officials for his return.

Jeffrey Jarquín, a 35-year-old Nicaraguan exile who was a prominent figure in the 2018 anti-government protests in Nicaragua, was deported from the U.S. back to Nicaragua, where he was immediately imprisoned again at El Modelo, the same maximum-security prison where he had previously been tortured and detained following the protests. Jarquín had fled to the U.S. and was living in Miami while seeking asylum when he was detained by immigration authorities and held at the Alligator Alcatraz detention facility in the Florida Everglades. A Louisiana court rejected his asylum case in July, leading to his deportation. His U.S. lawyer, Osley Sallent, confirmed the deportation, and a family member said Jarquín was taken back to the prison upon landing in Managua.