Legally, no — ICE has no authority to detain someone for a civil immigration violation once their U.S. citizenship is established, because citizens aren't removable under immigration law at all. In practice, it has documented, repeatedly happened anyway, through mistaken identification rather than a claimed legal authority to detain citizens. This piece covers the documented scale of that problem and what legal remedies exist.
The Documented Scale
Documented fact: Reporting compiling court filings and advocacy-group tracking identified over 170 documented cases of wrongful detention of U.S. citizens since the start of 2025, with some estimates suggesting as many as 2,000 U.S. citizens may pass through ICE custody at any given time during the current enforcement surge, even if briefly before release. We're citing that estimate as reported, not as an independently audited government figure — no government agency has published its own authoritative count of wrongful citizen detentions as of this writing.
ICE ERO Officers, West Palm Beach, Florida
Officers like these are the ones making the street-level identification calls that, in the documented cases below, twice misidentified U.S. citizens as removable. Photo: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Feb. 14, 2025, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Two Documented Individual Cases
Documented fact: Job Garcia, a U.S. citizen from Los Angeles, was detained by immigration officers outside a Home Depot. MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) filed a Federal Tort Claims Act claim on his behalf, alleging he was confined without legal authority and arrested without probable cause; the claim further alleges the stop was racially motivated and retaliatory after Garcia began recording the agents. Allegation, not yet adjudicated: those characterizations (racial motivation, retaliation) are claims made in the legal filing, not findings a court has yet reached. The same race-and-appearance-based suspicion at issue in Garcia's claim is examined directly in our piece on what ICE can legally use as grounds for suspicion.
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY)
Goldman led a bicameral group of lawmakers demanding DHS investigate wrongful citizen detentions in August 2025. Photo: official congressional portrait, public domain, via unitedstates/images (GitHub).
Documented fact: Leonardo Garcia Venegas, a U.S.-born construction worker in Baldwin, Alabama, was arrested and detained by immigration authorities on two separate occasions within a period of months — the first time by armed men in camouflage at a construction site, the second when "another immigration patrol saw him working and assumed, without reasonable suspicion, that Leo was undocumented," according to ABC News' reporting on his lawsuit. He filed a federal lawsuit alleging both arrests were "unreasonable" and violated his Fourth Amendment rights, and says he showed officers his REAL ID both times. As with the Garcia case, these are claims made in active litigation, not yet a court's final determination.
"I.C.E. Incarcerating Communities Everyday" Sticker
Wrongful detention doesn't stop at noncitizens — it's a systemic pattern that has, documented case after documented case, swept up U.S. citizens too. A blunt, pro immigrant design for anyone who wants that pattern named out loud.
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The Congressional Response
Documented fact: In August 2025, a group of federal lawmakers including Rep. Dan Goldman and Sen. Elizabeth Warren formally demanded investigations into reports of U.S. citizens being wrongfully detained and, in some reported cases, deported. That's a demand for investigation, not the outcome of a completed one; we did not find a published completed federal investigative report responding to that demand as of this writing — a gap that's directly connected to the broader collapse of DHS's own internal oversight capacity, covered in our piece on who investigates ICE.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)
Warren joined the August 2025 letter demanding DHS provide data and policy clarity on citizen detentions. Photo: official congressional portrait, public domain, via unitedstates/images (GitHub).
Constitutional Protections and Available Remedies
Interpretation, based on established law: U.S. citizens are not subject to removal under immigration law, and detaining one on that basis is not authorized by the statutes covered elsewhere in this cluster, including the warrantless-arrest standard itself. When it happens, it functions as a mistaken-identity or process failure rather than an exercise of a claimed legal power over citizens specifically. Documented remedies pursued in the cases above include Federal Tort Claims Act claims (a path to sue the federal government for the actions of its employees) and direct constitutional claims under the Fourth Amendment, both of which require the person to pursue litigation individually rather than through an automatic government correction process.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does having Latino or Hispanic appearance or speaking Spanish make someone more likely to be wrongly detained?
The documented cases above, and the pattern covered in the racial-profiling litigation later in this cluster, suggest ethnicity and language have played a role in specific stops that later proved to involve U.S. citizens, though we don't have a comprehensive statistical breakdown of wrongful-detention cases by the reason for the initial stop.
What should someone do if they believe they were wrongfully detained?
This series doesn't provide individual legal advice; the documented cases above involved formal legal claims filed with the assistance of civil rights organizations and attorneys, which is the general path such claims take.
Has anyone been held accountable for wrongfully detaining a citizen?
We did not find a published disciplinary or accountability outcome specific to either case described above as of this writing; both remain in active litigation.
"Plant Flowers Not Fascism" Sticker
A softer entry point into the same argument: a system that can't reliably tell a citizen from a noncitizen before detaining them isn't a minor bureaucratic hiccup, it's a structural Anti-Fascism concern worth naming plainly, even on something as small as a flowerpot.
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Every Abolish Ice sticker and magnet purchase from our Anti-ICE Stickers collection helps fund the reporting and continued development of this public resource.
Related Reading
Race, Accent, Job and Location: What Can ICE Legally Use as Suspicion?: the Supreme Court case testing the exact profiling factors implicated in the Job Garcia claim.
Who Investigates ICE When ICE Gets It Wrong?: why a formal congressional demand for investigation still hasn't produced a public report.
Fact-Check: "If ICE Detained Them, They Must Have Done Something Wrong" Claim: directly addresses the assumption these two citizen cases disprove.
Sources: MALDEF, press statement on the Job Garcia Federal Tort Claims Act claim, Jul. 2025; ABC News, "US-born citizen sues after twice being arrested by immigration agents"; Villanova Law Review, "'I Got Another One': The American Citizens Suing ICE for Illegal Detention"; press release, Reps. Goldman, and Sens. Warren, Padilla, Kelly, and Correa, demand for investigation, Aug. 2025.
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