Human Impact Project

Adam Mohamed Abdullah, a 31-year-old Somali auto mechanic and asylum seeker living in St. Paul, was arrested by masked federal agents on December 12, 2025 during 'Operation Metro Surge,' despite holding a work permit, Social Security number, a pending asylum application, and no criminal record beyond two parking tickets, and despite regularly attending ICE check-ins. He was moved through detention facilities in Minnesota, Kentucky and Louisiana over roughly nine months before being transferred to Guantánamo Bay's Camp Six in late August alongside fellow Minnesotans Hassan Abdi Abtidoon and Abdullahi Jamal Abdi. His attorney, Marc Prokosch, said communication with him was limited and possibly not confidential, calling the use of the base a 'political scare tactic,' a characterization Sen. Tina Smith echoed after DHS described the group as having serious criminal histories without presenting evidence specific to Abdullah. Abdullah began a hunger strike over lack of information, after which he said guards beat him and placed him in a freezing solitary cell; while detained, his mother died after authorities denied his request for an international call and voluntary departure to see her. The ACLU sued the federal government over its use of Guantánamo for civil immigration detention, with a hearing set for October 14. Abdullah and the other two men were flown through Kenya and deported to Somalia around September 25, 2026.

A federal judge in Maryland, Stephanie Gallagher, has now held the Trump administration in contempt twice in two months in the same case over the repeated deportation of a young asylum seeker identified in court documents as E.L.A. He was first deported in March 2026 after missing two biometrics appointments, even though U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services never formally closed his asylum case as is standard practice. After being returned to the U.S. in August 2026 to pursue his claim, he was deported again on September 1, just three weeks after DHS issued internal guidance meant to prevent such removals, violating a third court order. His attorneys said he was left in El Salvador without his belongings, money, or a phone, still wearing a detention jumpsuit; the case stems from a 2019 class-action lawsuit, J.O.P. v. DHS, protecting the asylum rights of immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as unaccompanied minors.

A Peruvian man identified in court filings as "John Doe," who has judicial protections against deportation to Peru, has been held in ICE custody in Massachusetts since July. After a federal appeals court struck down the Trump administration's third-country removal policy, a Department of Justice attorney argued the ruling wasn't yet in effect and sought to transfer Doe to another facility to put him on a flight to the Central African Republic. Doe's attorneys, including Mary Holper, obtained an emergency clarification from the appeals court reaffirming the policy was dissolved immediately, and a judge declined to lift the stay barring his removal, though he remains in detention. DHS General Counsel James Percival publicly maintained the policy remained in effect, and the Justice Department has since appealed the underlying ruling to the Supreme Court, while flight data showed ICE charter planes continued flying to African countries used for third-country removals after the court's order.

A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, later followed by a permanent injunction, requiring ICE to improve conditions at its 26 Federal Plaza detention facility in Manhattan. Detainees, including Sergio Alberto Barco Mercado, who filed a complaint after mass arrests at the site, were reportedly held on floors without beds, given only two meals a day, and denied hygiene products and access to legal counsel. The court found that ICE willfully violated prior orders and kept detainees in overcrowded rooms without adequate bedding, hygiene supplies, or proper temperature control. The rulings required ICE to provide sleeping mats, hygiene products, and legal access to those held at the facility.

A witness described being followed by immigration officers from a Medford store to Emigrant Lake in July before he and a companion were taken into custody. His account was presented as evidence in a federal hearing examining whether ICE officers in the Rogue Valley complied with a February court order requiring individualized assessments before warrantless arrests. Government attorneys have disputed the allegations, and the judge has not yet ruled on the claims.

A Medford man testified in federal court that immigration officers surrounded his vehicle when he arrived at work in June, broke a window and handcuffed him before releasing him after determining he was not the person they were seeking. He told the court he had an active asylum application at the time. His testimony was presented as evidence in a hearing where lawyers argued ICE officers failed to comply with a February court order requiring individual assessments of flight risk before warrantless arrests.

Leonardo 'Leo' Garcia Venegas, a 25-year-old U.S.-born citizen of Mexican descent working construction in Baldwin County, Alabama, was detained by immigration agents multiple times beginning in May 2025 despite presenting a valid Alabama REAL ID. In the first incident, armed agents raided a Foley construction site, tackled his undocumented brother, and held Garcia Venegas handcuffed for over an hour after he began filming and asserted his citizenship; his brother was later deported. Weeks later, agents detained him again at another job site, again dismissing his ID as fake despite him also providing his Social Security card. In a third encounter, officers followed him home, pulled him from his vehicle, tackled him, and shackled him. Never charged with a crime, Garcia Venegas testified before Congress saying 'I don't feel free,' and filed a federal lawsuit with the Institute for Justice against DHS officials, including Tom Homan and Kristi Noem, alleging Fourth Amendment violations, assault, battery, and false arrest. A federal judge in the Southern District of Alabama denied the government's motion to dismiss and temporarily halted warrantless construction-site raids, a ruling Garcia Venegas called 'a huge blow to lawless enforcement practices.'

A 34-year-old Venezuelan man known only as JCCV, who lives in The Dalles, Oregon with his family and had a pending immigration application, testified he was detained by ICE agents who mistakenly believed he was his brother and never checked his identification. He was transported to a detention facility in Portland and held for multiple days, during which agents pressured him to sign a voluntary self-deportation document written in English, a language he cannot read, without explaining what it meant. His testimony was part of a federal court hearing examining whether ICE has continued making warrantless arrests in Oregon despite a February injunction requiring warrants and flight-risk assessments before arrests.

A Latino man identified in court filings as J.M.R. alleges ICE agents pulled him from his car, threw him to the ground and shocked him with a Taser before detaining him. A federal judge later ruled his detention unlawful and ordered his release. He is among the named plaintiffs in a proposed federal class-action lawsuit, Guzmán v. DHS, filed Sept. 9 in U.S. District Court in Maryland challenging alleged warrantless ICE arrests.

Samuel Guzmán, a 24-year-old U.S. citizen born in Maryland who spent part of his childhood in Mexico and lives in Anne Arundel County, was surrounded and handcuffed by masked ICE agents near a 7-Eleven in Annapolis one Sunday in June while driving to his restaurant job. He said he repeatedly told officers he was born in the country, and that one officer asked him, 'If you are an American citizen, why don't you speak better English?' He was held for more than an hour alongside other Latino individuals and said he worried about a co-worker who lived nearby. Guzmán is now the lead plaintiff in a proposed federal class-action lawsuit, Guzmán v. DHS, filed September 9, 2026 in U.S. District Court in Maryland by immigrant rights group CASA. He is joined by three other Maryland residents from Prince George's, Montgomery and Wicomico counties who say they were similarly arrested without warrants or probable cause. The lawsuit alleges ICE adopted an 'arrest first, ask questions later' policy targeting people perceived to be Brown or Black immigrants without individualized assessments, and asks a federal judge to declare such warrantless arrests unconstitutional.

More than 60 federal agents raided the Nutrition Bar Confectioners plant in Cato, New York in September 2025, herding roughly 160 workers into a breakroom and arresting 57 of about 100 people questioned, including pregnant women and mothers of young children. Body camera footage later released in a lawsuit showed agents breaking down a locked bathroom stall door to remove a female employee and separating workers by citizenship status, with some told they would be arrested if they asked for an attorney. Argentina Juarez-Lopez, 50, invoked her right to counsel, but an agent falsely claimed she confessed without one; a federal judge called the conduct 'grossly negligent' and suppressed the evidence, yet she was deported after her case was dismissed. Juana Castillo Avelar, a mother of three U.S. citizen children who had lived in the U.S. over 20 years, was granted $9,000 bond but was deported before ICE would release her, based on a false claim she had appealed. Only five of the 57 arrested faced criminal charges, mostly for illegal reentry, and no charges have been filed against the company. The New York Civil Liberties Union and the Worker Justice Center of New York filed a lawsuit alleging officers lacked arrest warrants, exceeded search warrant authority, and violated workers' Fourth Amendment rights; one deported plaintiff has since been allowed to reenter the country while attorneys for another seek his return.

An Iranian woman in her early thirties, a pro-democracy activist who said she had been threatened by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, fled Iran, crossed the Darién Gap, and arrived in the U.S. at the end of 2024, where a judge granted her legal protection from being deported back to Iran after finding she had credible fear of persecution. Despite that protection, she was deported on June 12, 2026, from Louisiana to the Central African Republic on a flight carrying roughly two dozen migrants from countries including Jordan, Armenia, Turkey, Georgia, and Afghanistan, under the Trump administration's third-country deportation agreements. Her attorney, Emily Trostle, said she was left in a country where she has no status, no connection, and no support network. She now lives in isolation, afraid to leave her apartment, and says local police have extorted her for cash. Her family said she could be killed if ever returned to Iran, and she fears execution if her situation changes once her temporary visa expires. Two other Iranian women originally scheduled for the same flight, whose asylum claims had been denied under a transit rule later vacated by a California federal court, received emergency court orders temporarily halting their removal.

A teenage asylum seeker identified in court records as E.L.A., now 19, was deported to El Salvador for a second time, prompting a federal judge to hold the Department of Homeland Security in contempt on September 25 for violating three separate court orders in the class-action case J.O.P. v. DHS. He had first been removed in March 2026 after missing biometrics appointments in April and October 2025, then returned to the U.S. in June after class counsel arranged for his asylum case to proceed. A July 29 court order found the government had breached the settlement, but he was deported again in September, less than three weeks after DHS issued internal guidance meant to prevent such removals.

Daniel, an 18-year-old, was arrested by ICE officers while sitting as a passenger in a parked car outside a 7-Eleven convenience store in Colorado. Officers pulled a weapon, smashed the car window, and beat him, leaving him with a broken wrist, a laceration to his hand, multiple cuts on his face and forehead, and an eye swollen shut for days. Arrest records show ICE agents did not know who Daniel was before arresting him and did not determine his flight risk. When he was taken to the hospital, ICE prevented a community member from seeing or speaking with him and denied him a phone call. The incident was cited in an ACLU of Colorado court filing detailing ICE's continued violations of a federal injunction requiring flight-risk determinations before warrantless arrests.

A native and citizen of Cambodia who was admitted to the United States as the child of a refugee in 1982 was detained by ICE on August 26, 2026, when she reported for a scheduled check-in. She had been under a 2004 final order of removal stemming from a 2001 California drug conviction, but was never removed and lived under supervised release for years. She was briefly detained again in August 2025 before being released under a class-action settlement requiring 14 days' notice before re-detention. In September 2025, a California court vacated the underlying conviction, and her motion to reopen her immigration case remains pending before the Board of Immigration Appeals. After Cambodia issued a travel document and the BIA denied a stay of removal, ICE revoked her release and took her back into custody, later scheduling her for transfer and removal by charter flight. She is currently held at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center and filed a habeas petition seeking immediate release or a bar on her removal and transfer. The federal court denied her request for a temporary restraining order, finding it lacked jurisdiction to block her removal and that she had not shown a likelihood of success on her detention claims, while her underlying habeas petition remains pending.

A 1-year-old unaccompanied migrant child appeared in an Arizona immigration court and was ordered to file a 12-page asylum application before the next hearing or face deportation. Court filings allege that an attorney from USCRI, a new government contractor, was present but never spoke up on the child's behalf, calling it part of a broader "façade of compliance." This follows the July 31 end of a federal contract with the Acacia Center for Justice, which had funded legal representation for over 24,000 unaccompanied migrant children; payments to those nonprofits reportedly stopped in November after they declined to share confidential client information with the government. Some legal aid groups, including the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, say they are continuing to represent children without pay despite a court order requiring continued legal services.

Adams County Health Department confirmed a laboratory-confirmed case of active tuberculosis involving a detainee at the GEO Group-operated Aurora ICE Processing Center. Officials said GEO failed to provide medical records, patient access, and housing or movement information required to investigate possible exposure among detainees, staff, contractors, or visitors, prompting a Public Health Order on June 25, 2026 requiring compliance with Colorado tuberculosis investigation laws. ICE denied any active TB cases at the facility and denied violating any laws or guidelines. As a lawsuit between the state and GEO Group continued, Colorado health officials asked a judge in August 2026 to force the company to allow investigators to complete the tuberculosis probe.

Chief Magistrate Judge Scott T. Varholak ordered a habeas petitioner released after finding that ICE agents had violated an injunction issued by Senior Judge R. Brooke Jackson requiring agents to meet probable cause requirements before making warrantless arrests. Varholak wrote that the case was 'one in a series' in which the Department of Homeland Security 'appears to have simply ignored the law and detained an individual in violation of the law,' noting the government could not defend the decision. He set a hearing for September 10 for the government to address its 'apparent repeated violation of the law.'

Ana Kikabidze and her children, ages 11 and 14, were detained for months at the Dilley immigration detention facility in South Texas before an immigration judge ordered their deportation to Georgia, warning that an appeal could take months longer in detention. More than 66,000 parents and children have been detained and deported since the Trump administration began requiring immigrants to remain locked up while their cases are decided, according to an analysis by Relevant Research. U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee found the administration had repeatedly violated the Flores Settlement, citing prolonged detention and inadequate medical care at Dilley, and appointed an independent monitor to oversee conditions for detained children there and at other facilities.

Women detained at the Diamondback Correctional Facility in Watonga, Oklahoma, allege in a federal lawsuit that they are suffering vaginal infections after being given used and unwashed underwear. A leaked video shared by the advocacy group Injusticias De ICE features a detainee saying in Spanish that 'almost all' female detainees at the facility have vaginal infections. The lawsuit, filed by lawyers for several women held at the facility, accuses ICE contractors and staff of 'systemic medical neglect,' including delayed responses to emergency symptoms, unfilled or delayed prescriptions, and postponed gynecological exams.