[ad_1]
American citizens are increasingly being caught up in immigration crackdowns. The four-year-old banished to Honduras is a doctoral student filming the attack in Hollywood where he was detained for 25 hours, and an Illinois man was detained for 10 hours.
More and more frustrated that offensive tactics are wiping out American citizens, Congressional Democrats have been seeking full accounting for detained citizens.
On Friday morning 49 Congress members, led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), and Reps. Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) and Dan Goldman (DN.Y.), sent letters to the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph V. Cuffari and two other immigration oversight offices asking them to open an investigation into encounters With American citizens and “Determine if DHS violates American civil rights.”
“ICE policy, by law, “ICE cannot assert civil immigration enforcement agencies to arrest and/or detain American citizens,” the legislator wrote. “However, in the recent famous cases, ICE has mistakenly arrested US citizens, and sometimes appears to be using violent physical force.”
“ICE deported US citizens. In multiple cases, ICE deported US citizen children along with undocumented parents, contrary to their families’ wishes. Americans are increasingly afraid that citizenship will not be protected from being wiped out by DHS immigration enforcement efforts, especially in Latino and Native American communities.”
For months, democratic members of Congress have been demanding that the Trump administration’s responses be of little use to the questions pointed out.
The letter was sent to Toop Hemenway’s Kafari, a representative officer for civil rights and civil liberty, and Joseph Guy, director of the Immigration Detention and Ombudsman Office. The latter two offices were hollowed out under the Trump administration and tried to abolish them entirely.
“The administration owes the answer to the American public, especially as Republicans in Congress have just approved record-breaking funds for immigration enforcement, threatening to put more citizens at risk,” Warren said.
The Trump administration has firmly defended its actions.
“DHS’s enforcement operations are highly targeted and have not led to the arrest of US citizens,” a spokesperson for the Tricia McLaughlin Bureau said in response to a Times investigation into the number of Americans detained, arrested and deported under the administration.
“We do due diligence. We know who we’re targeting in advance,” she said. “If we encounter an individual who is eligible for an arrest, our law enforcement agencies are trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine their status and removability.”
In the case of Romero, a 4-year-old with stage 4 cancer, DHS said at the time that his mother had received a final deportation order and chose to be deported with the child. Her attorney argues that her mother, who was arrested while checking in with a Louisiana immigration officer, is not given a choice and is barred from speaking to her attorney. They filed a lawsuit last month, with another mother who was deported along with her two-year-old citizen’s daughter.
Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, a policy expert at the National Center for Immigration Law, said immigration and customs enforcement agencies will be used to publish data relating to bookings and arrested citizens, but that is mandatory through expenditures and is no longer necessary.
Currently available data shows that citizens were deported and seven people were not arrested in 2025. 3,700 citizen parents have been removed and 6,341 arrested. The data is aggregated and does not indicate location, reason for enforcement, consequences, or length of detention, as MPs are asking.
Whitlock suspects that the data is infiltrating range based on the number of cases seen in the media.
The immigration crackdown is expected to expand considerably. Congress approved a $170 billion budget on border and immigration enforcement earlier this summer, giving agents the biggest boost of their generation. President Trump hopes that 10,000 new US immigrant and customs enforcement officers and 3,000 new Border Patrol agents will be hired.
Immigration defends fear with more capacity, and enforcement levels explode, exacerbating encounters with citizens. Already they said, the White House has given a wider tolerance institution than before.
“We are accused of policy,” said Jesse Franzbrau, associate director of policy at the National Centre for Immigration and Justice. “The ice just goes to pick up people nearby and there’s a lot of racial profiling going on.”
He points to Julio Noriega, a 54-year-old US citizen, who was picked up in sweep in Chicago in early January and handcuffed.
Noriega was looking for work when the agents picked him up and took him to the ice processing centre before looking inside his wallet. The Illinois Attorneys Center and the ACLU said he was kept in custody for 10 hours and then released without arrest. The lawyers argue that DHS violates the 2022 settlement. Agents request and report a cause that a person may believe is illegally in the country before they arrest them.
“We are not transparent about arrests without warrants. We are not transparent about how many U.S. citizens have been wiped out and arrested,” he said. Data on detained citizens are not always captured, he said.
“I don’t know how many US citizens are detained beyond their media accounts,” he said. “It is mandatory for these agencies to produce this information. These are serious issues.”
The letter asks the watchdog by September 5 to provide detailed information on the monthly breakdowns, location, enforcement actions, results and citizen stops, arrests, detention and deportation, including length of ice custody.
“Everyone should sit down if they are detained without legitimate proceedings during an ice raid,” Padilla said. “This is not a matter of immigration rights, it’s not an American’s right. It’s about ensuring that a due process is given and protected to everyone that the Fifth Amendment guarantees.”
DeBrora Flyshaker, former chief of staff for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said she could confirm that someone’s citizenship can be complicated, but authorities should explain how it works.
“Arresting or detaining US citizens is not necessarily automatically inappropriate, but they certainly shouldn’t deport them,” she said.
“My guess is that they encounter US citizens much more often than they have historically, simply because their coverage of their internal affairs is much larger than ever before.”
Eduardo Casas, an attorney for Job Garcia, a doctoral student who was detained after filming the attack at Home Depot in Hollywood, said he has so far rejected immigrants who have been asked to information about citizens who were detained and arrested during a sweep in Los Angeles this summer.
“They are not transparent,” said Eduardo Casas, a lawyer with the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund. “We know that citizens are caught up in this broad enforcement paradigm centered around mass deportation. The way they try to achieve mass deportation is to push the boundaries of civil liberty in the same way they did for people like work.”
Casas interviewed other citizens who attended during the attack and said the pattern appeared. The people filming were angry, and agents arrested them and took them to the detention center.
“They’ll take people to the detention centre and then they’ll say you might get charged, and they’ll let them go,” he said. “It’s not always a very formal process.”
[ad_2]Source link
