FASCIST AMERICA 2025: The State Sanctioned WAR On Black And Brown America by the Federal Fascist Trump Regime Aided and Abetted by the Lethal Doctrine and Practice Of White Supremacy in the GOP, MAGA, and ICE, Alongside the Abject Capitulation and Cowardly Submission Of Far Too Many Institutions in Academia, Mass Media, Congress, the Supreme Court, the Corporate World, and State Legislatures

AUDIO:  

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/podcasts/trump-civil-rights-dei.html 

October 21, 2025

Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Nikole Hannah-Jones

Produced by Sydney HarperStella Tan and Lynsea Garrison

With Asthaa Chaturvedi

Edited by Patricia Willens and Michael Benoist

Original music by Dan PowellDiane Wong and Pat McCusker

Engineered by Chris Wood

During his second term, President Trump has upended 60 years of civil rights, largely under the guise of attacking diversity, equity and inclusion.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who covers racial injustice and civil rights for The New York Times Magazine, discusses the end of an era, and the growing fears of what a post-civil rights government will mean for Black Americans.

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On Today’s Episode

Nikole Hannah-Jones, a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine covering racial injustice and civil rights.

The efficiency with which President Trump has collapsed the civil rights and equality infrastructure of the federal government has stunned U.S. veteran civil rights leaders. Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times

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Background Reading

• How Mr. Trump upended 60 years of civil rights in two months.

• The “colorblind” campaign to undo civil rights progress.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/podcasts/trump-civil-rights-dei.html 

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine covering racial injustice and civil rights.

See more on: U.S. Politics, Donald Trump

 

TRANSCRIPT:

30:57/40:03

How Trump Upended 60 Years of Civil Rights

The White House’s assault on federal protections may bring about a new era of unchecked discrimination.

2025-10-21T06:00:16-04:00

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

michael barbaro

From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

[THEME MUSIC]

Of all the seismic changes that President Trump has made in his second term, perhaps the most overlooked and consequential is the speed with which he has upended 60 years of civil rights, much of it under the guise of attacking DEI. Today Nikole Hannah-Jones on the end of an era and the growing fear of what a post-civil rights government will mean for Black Americans. It’s Tuesday, October 21.

Nikole, before we get started, I want to reestablish your background for listeners who maybe haven’t heard you on the show in a little bit. You are, I would argue, the preeminent authority on the subject of race and civil rights in this country, not just, I would say, at “The New York Times,” but in American journalism. You’re the creator of the “1619 Project” for which you won a Pulitzer Prize in Commentary.

And so when we learned that you were looking into the Trump administration’s big moves around DEI — that’s their description of this — we were very eager to have this conversation with you. So thank you for making time for us.

nikole hannah-jones

Well, maybe I would quibble with the preeminent expert, but thank you for having me on.

michael barbaro

And here, I want to begin with an admission on our part. We had been trying to wrap our arms around these decisions that the Trump administration was making when it comes to DEI for quite some time, because I think it’s fair to say it was easy to see the big moves they were making and how wide ranging this effort was to root out anything, even mentioning the words “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

But it was harder to understand what all of it was driving at, what this larger framework was that this fit into. But that’s exactly, as it happens, what you were trying to do. So where did your reporting begin?

nikole hannah-jones

So my reporting began really immediately looking at the executive orders that Trump rolled out on his first, second, third day of office. And seeing that, despite him saying he was running on an economic campaign and securing his victory on the idea of economic anxiety, that his very early policies were racial policies.

archived recording

On his first day back in the Oval Office, Donald Trump signed an executive order ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in federal agencies.

The president calls DEI programs illegal, immoral, and discriminatory.

"archived recording (donald trump)

This is a big deal, merit. Our country is going to be based on merit again. Can you believe it?

nikole hannah-jones

They were targeting what he was broadly describing as DEI. And one of the very first things Trump did —

archived recording

President Trump revoked an executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 — Which stipulates that employers can’t discriminate against job applicants or workers on the basis of race, gender, and other —

nikole hannah-jones

On his second day in office, he rescinded an executive order that Lyndon B. Johnson had issued as part of the civil rights movement in order to try to enforce against employment discrimination. And so what Trump does is he repeals that order, but he repeals that order by calling it illegal DEI. And my antenna immediately went up.

michael barbaro

Why?

nikole hannah-jones

Well, because it’s clearly not die. DEI is something different.

michael barbaro

And presumably didn’t even exist back when Lyndon B. Johnson was president.

nikole hannah-jones

Exactly. And so I was really startled that one of his very first acts was to rescind this executive order that’s trying to enforce civil rights law, but also that he was labeling it DEI and labeling DEI illegal.

michael barbaro

So once your antennae are up and your sense is that the president’s campaign to go after die is something else, what do you do? What do you see?

nikole hannah-jones

Well, this was day two. I’m a magazine writer, and so I don’t cover breaking news.

michael barbaro

You take your time in the best possible way.

nikole hannah-jones

I try to sit back and really see what’s the larger story that is unfolding here. So I’m just watching everything. And a lot is happening in those early days.

archived recording

As of 5:00 this afternoon, every federal DEI office in the country got shuttered. DEI employees woke up this morning and found out their emails are suspended, and they’ve been put on leave.

NBC News has learned that the Defense Intelligence Agency has ordered a pause on all events related to MLK Day or Black History Month.

Juneteenth, Pride Month, Women’s History Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, all paused.

nikole hannah-jones

You were seeing the purging of federal websites that were talking about Black first or women firsts.

archived recording

The National Park Service has removed a reference to abolitionist Harriet Tubman from its web page that’s dedicated to the Underground Railroad.

Military websites also taking down tributes to the legendary Tuskegee airmen, the fabled Navajo Code Talkers of World War II, and Ira Hayes, a Native American and one of the marines who raised the flag —

nikole hannah-jones

There was a lot of erasure that was happening in a lot of different ways in this blitzkrieg of targeting of all sorts of efforts to really catalog the history of this multicultural country. So I’m talking with my editor, and she’s really wanting me to do a story that is cataloging that erasure. And I thought that was important.

And yet at the same time, I’m also looking at what’s happening across all of these different federal agencies. And I’m like, there’s something much, much bigger that’s happening here that is more than erasure, that’s actually about basic civil rights.

michael barbaro

Well, just explain. What exactly did you see happening across federal agencies?

nikole hannah-jones

So the first sign, I mentioned before, was the rescinding of this civil rights era order against employment discrimination. And then it quickly got deeper than that. So the Trump administration said they were going to slash 90 percent of the staff for this civil rights enforcement arm of the Department of Labor.

The Trump administration was also gutting the civil rights division of the US Department of Education, threatening to layoff all of these civil rights lawyers at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, going agency by agency and making it impossible to enforce civil rights. So, for instance, Lee Zeldin, who’s the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, he announces that the agency is eliminating all 10 of its regional environmental justice and civil rights offices.

And I’m noticing how in these orders and these actions, Trump is conflating DEI with civil rights. He’s treating these two as the same thing. And so it becomes pretty clear that he is using DEI to attack civil rights.

michael barbaro

Well, let’s just define these terms. In your mind, the president is using the concept of die to pause, reverse, in some cases it sounds like perhaps even eviscerate civil rights. But quite simply, what exactly is the difference? Because clearly, there’s a strong relationship between the two.

nikole hannah-jones

Civil rights are laws and legal protections, mostly passed in the 1960s as part of the civil rights movement, that exists to ensure basic and essential rights. So these laws protect our freedom of thought and speech and religion. And typically, in the United States, we think of civil rights as protecting minority groups from discrimination. So we’re talking about actual rights.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion as an ideology, it arises out of civil rights and the protections that civil rights ensure. But they aren’t the same things. We don’t really see what we today know as DEI until 2010 or so. And you don’t see the proliferation of DEI across nearly every American institution until after 2020, with the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning.

What we typically think of today as DEI, I mean, it really doesn’t have a single definition. So DEI could be that corporate training that you had to go through about privilege and how race works. It could be a training about gender, or it could be programs to try to make workspaces more inclusive of people of color or other marginalized groups. It could be really just about anything. And that’s a little squishier, obviously, than civil rights.

And look, I myself was a critic of DEI, because I felt so much of it was performative, that you had companies where you could look at their hiring track record. What percentage of Black people do you employ in management? And yet they’re putting out these statements and hiring DEI officers who would have no budget and no power and yet had this very public position.

michael barbaro

Some of it became virtue signaling.

nikole hannah-jones

Yes, there was a lot of that. And so a lot of people probably roll their eyes at DEI. That’s where we are in this country. And so weren’t really realizing that something much, much more essential and dangerous was happening. But I was seeing, agency by agency, this entire civil rights infrastructure that had been set up over decades being dismantled. And that was happening at a pace and a rate and a sophistication that we had not seen before.

michael barbaro

Well, Nikole, I just want to linger on that idea for a moment. How exactly could it be possible that what begins as a dismantling of DEI somehow becomes the dismantling of civil rights itself? Because so many of the civil rights in this country come from constitutional amendments, come from laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that would seem to make them not at all easy to roll back or dismantle in the first place. So just explain that.

nikole hannah-jones

Well, laws are not self-enforcing. This is why you have laws against murder and robbery, but you still have a police department that has to go out and enforce the law. And so that’s the same thing with federal agencies.

Most people, I have found, are actually surprised that every major federal agency actually has a civil rights enforcement division within that agency. And there’s a reason for that. The federal government touches every aspect of American lives, and it is actually the greatest tool, therefore, of enforcing civil rights law, because all types of private contractors engage with the federal government, our public benefits, all of these institutions.

And so out of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, we see this growth of civil rights offices within the various divisions to ensure that any community that the federal government was engaging with was going to have robust civil rights enforcement. So why does that matter so much at the federal level? We have to understand, the reason we even need it, federal civil rights laws was, because in some states, the state was actively discriminating against Black Americans.

They had segregation laws and segregation mandates. And so on a state-by-state basis, Black Americans often could not go to their government to get relief from discrimination, not their local government, not their state government. So the federal government had to step in, really, historically, going all the way back to the end of slavery, to ensure that Black Americans rights were being enforced across the country.

So the Social Security Department has a civil rights division, or at least it did. And that was because Black Americans actually face discrimination in trying to obtain their Social Security benefits. The Veterans Administration — it’s been shown that Black Americans face discrimination in trying to access their veterans benefits. So there’s a civil rights division in that agency, or at least there was.

michael barbaro

And so the idea is that if you’re going to your local Social Security office and saying, I’m here to get my check, and the local office said, no, I’m not giving you your Social Security check, then that could be appealed to the civil rights division of the Social Security Administration, who would then redress it.

nikole hannah-jones

Right. And so this is true across all of these different federal agencies. And we tend to think of — and of course, I talk about civil rights often through the frame of Black Americans.

But these rights protect all Americans. And so it’s been very critical for women, for people who come from foreign countries, for people who come from a minority religion, for people who are disabled to be able to have their rights that exist on paper vindicated. And so to have those agencies either fully dismantled or crippled, it sends a signal that there’s going to be very little civil rights enforcement.

michael barbaro

And from what you’re saying, without the federal infrastructure of enforcing civil rights law, those civil rights laws, in a certain sense, ceasefire to do what they’re intended to do.

nikole hannah-jones

Yes, absolutely. I think we look back on that period of the Civil Rights movement in gauzy ways. We forget what it took to actually get those rights in this country, that Black Americans were fighting for 80 years to get those rights, that this was a bloody and deadly fight.

There were political assassinations. There were lynchings, that these rights had been violently suppressed. And we tend to tell the story that once those rights were achieved, then all of that anger and hatred and belief that Black Americans should stay in their place, that it just dissipated overnight with the signing of these laws.

It didn’t. That was ingrained in our society. And so almost immediately after the passage of those civil rights laws of the 1960s, we see a backlash.

archived recording

We’re soliciting opinions on the civil rights bill. Would you like to give us yours?

Well, I sure don’t like it, that’s for sure.

I don’t like it. I think it’s trying to put something on us that we don’t want.

And I think this is the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened.

nikole hannah-jones

Almost immediately, we see a movement that says these laws are too onerous, that it’s victimizing white Americans who have the federal government prying in their business.

archived recording

Why can’t the federal government leave us alone and give us our school?

nikole hannah-jones

You started to see, for instance, restrictions on efforts to integrate schools.

archived recording

We want no trouble. We don’t condemn these Black people. They are human beings too. We understand that. But we want our school.

nikole hannah-jones

You see, within a few years of the civil rights movement, a Supreme Court case challenging affirmative action programs in college.

archived recording

Today there was talk of white and Black, in particular the rights of the white person. This was not heard before. As a white person, I’m discriminated against because of reverse discrimination.

nikole hannah-jones

And you see the Reagan administration bringing these anti-white or what they would call reverse discrimination findings through the Department of Education. And that just only gains momentum when George Bush took over.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So this has long been a pattern. I mean, some folks wanted to overturn the 1964 Civil Rights Act. There wasn’t a political will to do that, but you could defang it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So we see over time the steady chipping away of the ability to use civil rights law to affirmatively remedy years of racial discrimination.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And under Trump, you see this 60-year vision meet its perfect moment.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

So, Nikole, take us more deeply inside the Trump administration’s dismantling of these civil rights enforcement mechanisms in federal agencies and how it starts to, we think, impact the ability of civil rights laws to actually do their intended job.

nikole hannah-jones

So we can look at a place like the Department of Education, which, despite what the Trump administration says, the Department of Education does not set curriculum. That’s set at the local and state level. It doesn’t hire teachers. More than anything else, the Department of Education exists as a civil rights enforcement division. It really exists to enforce and ensure the rights of students.

But what you’ve seen under the Trump administration is they shuttered most of the regional divisions charged with enforcing those rights. So what does that mean? One of the major things that the Department of Education does is it enforce the rights of students who have disabilities. Students with disabilities are supposed to receive special services, but those services are often very expensive. And so sometimes school districts won’t provide them.

The Department of Education Civil Rights Division will ensure that students, if they have a complaint, if they’re not receiving the services that they are entitled to, that those districts comply. And also, they enforce the law for English language learners, who have a right to an appropriate education. They enforce equal access to sports under Title IX, and then they also enforce against all of the racial disparities that Black and other students face, really, across every level of education. So when you see these efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, which is what the Trump administration has said, is he really wants to shutter the entire Department of Education, what they’re really shuttering is the ability to enforce civil rights law across America schools.

michael barbaro

And as you said earlier, when that federal enforcement goes away, then any complaint, any lawsuit, any objection really falls back to the local school district, which, for a variety of reasons, may not have much of an incentive to do anything.

nikole hannah-jones

Exactly. Because if your local and state government are the actors who are committing the discrimination, where do you go? Now, really, the only avenue for redress that people would be to pay a private lawyer or to find a civil rights organization who might represent them. And so where we once had the full weight and power of the federal government, the federal government has gutted nearly all the offices that will enforce the law.

michael barbaro

OK, take us inside, if you could, another agency where we are seeing this dismantling of civil rights enforcement.

nikole hannah-jones

There’s probably nowhere where this gutting is more profoundly troubling than what’s happening at the Department of Justice. So, of course, the Department of Justice is this nation’s most foundational law enforcement agency. And in fact, the civil rights division at the Department of Justice is considered the crown jewel of civil rights enforcement in the country. It was created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957, precisely to protect the voting rights of Black citizens and to prosecute crimes that were being committed against civil rights workers.

But now, under the Trump administration, if you look at what that civil rights division has actually done, it’s moved to dismiss voting rights cases and civil rights cases involving police departments under the guise of enforcing Trump’s anti-DEI DEI mandate. So, for instance, the Justice Department walked away from overseeing the Louisville Police Department. And that oversight had been initiated by the Biden administration following the killing of Breonna Taylor. The Justice Department instead is going to actually target organizations and institutions in this country for trying to integrate and comply with the affirmative action mandates of the civil rights law.

michael barbaro

On what basis?

nikole hannah-jones

Well, on the basis that these efforts are anti-white, that they are racially discriminatory against white Americans.

michael barbaro

So on top of dismantling much of the enforcement capacity across all these agencies, what you’re pointing to is a change in who the administration is fighting for, who it sees as the victims of discrimination.

nikole hannah-jones

Exactly. So you see this when, for instance, the Department of Justice moves to dismiss this landmark civil rights lawsuit against this chemical company that was emitting so many pollutants into this poor Black community in Louisiana’s Cance Alley, that that community faced the highest cancer risk in the whole country.

michael barbaro

Wow.

nikole hannah-jones

But the administration sought to dismiss that case because they said that it wasn’t the Black community that was being victimized, but that it was the company that was being discriminated against. And we’re seeing again and again through their language and their actions, they are constantly focusing on what they consider to be anti-white discrimination. And I think it’s important to say, trying to actually redefine white people as the primary victims of racism and discrimination in the United States, that’s not backed up by any of the data we know, even self-reporting amongst white Americans.

michael barbaro

Well, if that’s the case, is it possible that we don’t end up in this situation, Nikole, if not for DEI? Would the Trump administration be able to do what it is now doing, as quickly and as thoroughly as it’s doing it, if not for the birth of the expansion of the institutionalization of diversity, equity and inclusion, this mushier thing that I don’t see you assigning anywhere near as much importance to as the traditional civil rights law and infrastructure?

nikole hannah-jones

I mean, Michael, that’s hard to say. I don’t know that even without those DEI efforts, we wouldn’t have arrived here anyway, because, of course, we have been on this trajectory for 60 years. But I certainly think that in terms of a propaganda tool, DEI and the co-opting of that term has been very useful. And I don’t think that all of the organizations that engaged in this performative DEI have done civil rights any favors, because I do think, Michael, and the polling shows, that there was a weariness with DEI amongst some circles, that there was a sense that some DEI practices went too far.

I don’t actually think it’s a justification. I don’t think that some training you had to sit through that you didn’t like or some person who put something on a website that you took offense to can justify where we are. But I do think it dampened opposition to settled civil rights law and enforcement being undone.

michael barbaro

I’m glad you used that word “dampen opposition,” because that seems like something we should talk about. Trump’s message is not just finding an audience with Republicans in the United States, it would seem. There’s not very much pushback, you could contend, from Democrats either. And that would perhaps suggest that the problem, as you see it, is not viewed in a bipartisan way as a problem.

nikole hannah-jones

I think that is true to a degree. Polling shows that the majority of Republicans see efforts to ameliorate racism as making life more difficult for white Americans, that they tend to see racism against Black Americans as a major problem, but of the past, and that now white Americans are suffering from racism more than any other group.

But more surprising, I would imagine, is the fact that since the time of the 2024 election, polling on racial attitudes showed that the percentage of Democrats who believe that white Americans benefit a great deal from advantages in society that Black Americans don’t have has plummeted 15 percentage points in just two years. I don’t know that we can blame that on DEI. But certainly, there were some societal force that was leading white Americans to say, OK, maybe this has gone too far. And I think that there’s a significant constituency who doesn’t really want to talk about race anymore, and that while they may not agree with other Trump policies, they don’t actually disagree with these that much.

michael barbaro

I mean, let’s just ask this plainly, for all the reasons we’re talking about, the dismantling of the structures, as well as the polling and the public opinion that seems to not be all that opposed to it, does that amount to the modern era of civil rights for Black Americans specifically now being over?

nikole hannah-jones

Unfortunately, that’s what it feels like, because I think that we are on the cusp of an America that no one our age, Michael, has ever lived in before. I mean, this is where, I think, history really matters.

michael barbaro

Explain that.

nikole hannah-jones

This country has experienced another period where Black Americans gained all of these rights. And those rights would remain on paper, but they would lose any ability to actually access them.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And that period was called the nadir. It was named so by a historian by the name of Rayford Logan. He named it the nadir because nadir means the low point.

This was the period after Reconstruction. Reconstruction was really about ensuring that people who had been enslaved will now be able to access full citizenship in this country.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So we passed the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery, the 14th Amendment, which, for the first time, puts equal protection in the Constitution, no matter your race. The law has to treat you the same. It’s also what gives us birthright citizenship.

And we get the 15th Amendment, which ensures that you cannot be denied the right to vote based on your race. This is a period of time where the nation passes its first civil rights law, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, and that’s followed by the 1875 Civil Rights Act. It’s this remarkable period, because, literally, just a few years out of slavery, you have Black men who had been enslaved who are now serving in Congress. They’re in the Senate. They’re in the House of Representatives.

We have an integrated university in South Carolina. There’s integrated public schools in Louisiana. And you see this broad expansion of Black rights. And it probably seemed, at that moment, that progress was inevitable. But it wasn’t.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

There was a tremendous backlash. You start to see efforts to make it harder for Black Americans to vote. So that’s where we get the grandfather clauses and poll taxes and literacy tests. Pretty soon, there are no Black people left in Congress.

Then you see things like Southern states that had integrated transportation and integrated neighborhoods start to pass laws of segregation to tell Black people where they could eat, where they could go to school, where they had to sit on a train. And the Supreme Court upholds that.

So we have this great expanse of rights. And then just as quickly, those rights, one by one by one, are removed. So we know that this country is capable of doing that.

I mean, we are commonly taught about the civil rights movement as this achievement, a time that we should be proud of, without really questioning why civil rights movement had to be fought in the 1960s in the first place. The Civil Rights movement was not an effort for Black Americans to attain their rights, but to reinstate them, to get those rights back that they had achieved a century earlier and that the nadir had erased. And so as I’m watching everything that’s unfolding, I just couldn’t help feeling like we may be at the cusp of a second nadir.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

michael barbaro

You’re beginning to do this, but I wonder if you can describe. If a second nadir comes to pass, what does it look like, given the progress that has been made in this country over the last many decades? Almost by definition, correct me if I’m wrong, the bottom of a second nadir looks tremendously different than the bottom of the first.

nikole hannah-jones

I do think you’re making an important point, that, obviously, even with the first nadir, they didn’t reinstate slavery. So all progress was not erased, but a significant amount of progress was erased. And I think, when we look at the landscape that is being created, not only are companies losing an incentive to try to integrate, but they would actually be penalized if they do.

So Trump has threatened to investigate law firms that have integration programs, where they’re trying to diversify the profession. I think only 4 percent of lawyers at all law firms are Black.

michael barbaro

Compared to the fact, we should probably say that Black Americans make up about 14 of the population.

nikole hannah-jones

Exactly. So if you are going to actually say that you will investigate law firms if they’re trying to integrate, that could lead to a scenario where there are almost no Black lawyers. We look at medical schools. The America First law firm, which was founded by Stephen Miller, Trump’s right hand man, is sending letters and filing complaints against medical schools, saying that they are discriminating because they have race-conscious admissions programs.

If you look at the settlements that Trump is making with Columbia, for instance, or the demands of a place like Harvard or Brown, they’re also saying, we have to look at your books. We need to see the test scores and race of every person you admit as well as all of the hiring information on everyone you hire. Well, if I am a university, I’m going to be very reticent to hire too many Black people or admit too many Black students, because I may meet the wrath of the federal government that is going to say that I violated the civil rights law.

So if you look at the fact that he’s saying DEI is illegal and that companies that they believe are engaging in DEI are violating the law and could face criminal prosecution, you can very quickly imagine a world where it is exceedingly difficult for Black Americans. And so I think about reading Ida B. Wells’ diary —

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ida B. Wells, of course, the great journalist and civil rights activist who was born right at the period of emancipation, and she is witnessing, having experienced all of these rights and this vast expansion of possibility for Black Americans and then slowly watches as those rights are being taken away one by one by one.

And if we look at that timeline, Black Americans would not regain full access to the ballot for nearly a century. We wouldn’t have another Black Senator for nearly a century. The University of South Carolina, which was the only integrated public University in the South at that time, wouldn’t reintegrate for nearly another century.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. But what I’m saying is, all of the ingredients to once again see a disappearing of Black Americans from elite institutions, from prominent jobs and professions, and even from the halls of Congress, it is possible in this moment. I don’t know if it will happen, but all the ingredients are there.

And that is very frightening to me. Because, again, I and you, Michael, have never lived in that America. But what we do know is that we can live in that America again.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

michael barbaro

Well, Nikole, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

nikole hannah-jones

Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

michael barbaro

A new analysis shows just how much Black officials have begun to disappear from the most senior ranks of the federal government in President Trump’s second term. Of Trump’s 98 Senate-confirmed appointments during the first 200 days of the second term, just 2 percent were Black. By contrast, during the same period, Black officials accounted for 21 percent of the Senate-confirrmed nominees under President Biden, 13 percent under President Obama, and 8 percent under President George W. Bush.

At the same time, Black representation in Congress could soon decline as well. During arguments last week, the Supreme Court appeared poised to roll back a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark civil rights law that allowed race to be used as a factor in drawing election maps. If that provision is rolled back, Republicans are expected to respond by eliminating most of the majority Black House districts across the South.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ll be right back.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Here’s what else you need to know today. A federal appeals court has ruled that President Trump can proceed with his plan to deploy the National Guard to Portland, Oregon over the objections of local and state officials, who say it’s both unnecessary and illegal. A lower court judge had previously blocked the deployment, finding that Trump’s claims that Portland was experiencing violent civil unrest was overblown. But Monday’s ruling put greater stock in Trump’s claims, finding that protests in Portland represent a genuine threat to federal officials and to a federal building there.

And in a series of text messages obtained by Politico, President Trump’s nominee to lead a federal agency used a racist slur to describe holidays that honor Black Americans, declared that people from China and India cannot be trusted, and confessed to having what he called a, quote, “Nazi streak in me from time to time.” The nominee, Paul Ingrassia, is Trump’s choice to run the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates federal whistleblower complaints and claims of discrimination. But by Monday night, several Republican senators expressed doubts about Ingrassia’s nomination, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune.

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Today’s episode was produced by Sydney Harper, Stella Tan, and Lynsea Garrison, with help from Asthaa Chaturvedi. It was edited by Patricia Willens and Michael Benoist, fact checked by Susan Lee, contains music by Dan Powell and Pat McCusker, original music by Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-dhs-ice-secret-police-civil-rights-unaccountable

 

 

Federal law enforcement agents led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement prepare to conduct an arrest in Georgia in February. Credit: Carlos Barria/Reuters/Redux 

 

Immigration

 
Unfettered and Unaccountable: How Trump is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force 

by J. David McSwane and Hannah Allam
October 18, 2025
ProPublica

[ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.]

Reporting Highlights

• Aggression: Under President Donald Trump’s deportation mission, ICE officers are using force to detain and jail immigrants.
• Impunity: The administration gutted guardrails and offices meant to rein in abusive actions.
• Disappeared: Some families say they have no idea where their loved ones were jailed after immigration raids.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stormed through Santa Ana, California, in June, panicked calls flooded into the city’s emergency response system.

Recordings of those calls, obtained by ProPublica, captured some of the terror residents felt as they watched masked men ambush people and force them into unmarked cars. In some cases, the men wore plain clothes and refused to identify themselves. There was no way to confirm whether they were immigration agents or imposters. In six of the calls to Santa Ana police, residents described what they were seeing as kidnappings.

“He’s bleeding,” one caller said about a person he saw yanked from a car wash lot and beaten. “They dumped him into a white van. It doesn’t say ICE.”

One woman’s voice shook as she asked, “What kind of police go around without license plates?”

And then this from another: “Should we just run from them?”

During a tense public meeting days later, Mayor Valerie Amezcua and the City Council asked their police chief whether there was anything they could do to rein in the federal agents — even if only to ban the use of masks. The answer was a resounding no. Plus, filing complaints with the Department of Homeland Security was likely to go nowhere because the office that once handled them had been dismantled. There was little chance of holding individual agents accountable for alleged abuses because, among other hurdles, there was no way to reliably learn their identities.

Since then, Amezcua, 58, said she has reluctantly accepted the reality: There are virtually no limits on what federal agents can do to achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of mass deportations. Santa Ana has proven to be a template for much larger raids and even more violent arrests in Chicago and elsewhere. “It’s almost like he tries it out in this county and says, ‘It worked there, so now let me send them there,’” Amezcua said.

 

Santa Ana residents chant about ICE raids during a City Council meeting in June. Credit: Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register/Getty Images

Current and former national security officials share the mayor’s concerns. They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world’s most repressive regimes. ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force. The transformation, the officials say, unfolded rapidly and in plain sight. Trump’s DHS appointees swiftly dismantled civil rights guardrails, encouraged agents to wear masks, threatened groups and state governments that stood in their way, and then made so many arrests that the influx overwhelmed lawyers trying to defend immigrants taken out of state or out of the country.

And although they are reluctant to predict the future, the current and former officials worry that this force assembled from federal agents across the country could eventually be turned against any groups the administration labels a threat.

One former senior DHS official who was involved in oversight said that what is happening on American streets today “gives me goosebumps.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, the official rattled off scenes that once would’ve triggered investigations: “Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they’re showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can’t access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there’s a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.”

The former official paused. “We’re at an inflection point in history right now and it’s frightening.”

Although ICE is conducting itself out in the open, even inviting conservative social media influencers to accompany its agents on high-profile raids, the agency operates in darkness. The identities of DHS officers, their salaries and their operations have long been withheld for security reasons and generally exempted from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. However, there were offices within DHS created to hold agents and their supervisors accountable for their actions on the job. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, created by Congress and led largely by lawyers, investigated allegations of rape and unlawful searches from both the public and within DHS ranks, for instance. Egregious conduct was referred to the Justice Department.

The CRCL office had limited powers; former staffers say their job was to protect DHS by ensuring personnel followed the law and addressed civil rights concerns. Still, it was effective in stalling rushed deportations or ensuring detainees had access to phones and lawyers. And even when its investigations didn’t fix problems, CRCL provided an accounting of allegations and a measure of transparency for Congress and the public.

The office processed thousands of complaints — 3,000 in fiscal year 2023 alone — ranging from allegations of lack of access to medical treatment to reports of sexual assault at detention centers. Former staffers said around 600 complaints were open when work was suspended.

The administration has gutted most of the office. What’s left of it was led, at least for a while, by a 29-year-old White House appointee who helped craft Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint that broadly calls for the curtailment of civil rights enforcement.

Meanwhile, ICE is enjoying a windfall in resources. On top of its annual operating budget of $10 billion a year, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill included an added $7.5 billion a year for the next four years for recruiting and retention alone. As part of its hiring blitz, the agency has dropped age, training and education standards and has offered recruits signing bonuses as high as $50,000.

“Supercharging this law enforcement agency and at the same time you have oversight being eliminated?” said the former DHS official. “This is very scary.”

Michelle Brané, a longtime human rights attorney who directed DHS’ ombudsman office during the Biden administration, said Trump’s adherence to “the authoritarian playbook is not even subtle.”

“ICE, their secret police, is their tool,” Brané said. “Once they have that power, which they have now, there’s nothing stopping them from using it against citizens.”

Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, refuted descriptions of ICE as a secret police force. She called such comparisons the kind of “smears and demonization” that led to the recent attack on an ICE facility in Texas, in which a gunman targeted an ICE transport van and shot three detained migrants, two of them fatally, before killing himself.

In a written response to ProPublica, McLaughlin dismissed the current and former national security officials and scholars interviewed by ProPublica as “far-left champagne socialists” who haven’t seen ICE enforcement up close.

“If they had,” she wrote, “they would know when our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by highly sophisticated gangs” and other criminals.

McLaughlin said the recruiting blitz is not compromising standards. She wrote that the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is ready for 11,000 new hires by the beginning of next year and that training has been streamlined and boosted by technology. “Our workforce never stops learning,” McLaughlin wrote.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson also praised ICE conduct and accused Democrats of making “dangerous, untrue smears.”

“ICE officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism,” Jackson said. “Anyone pointing the finger at law enforcement officers instead of the criminals are simply doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens and fueling false narratives that lead to violence.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the Trump pick who fired nearly the entire civil rights oversight staff, said the move was in response to CRCL functioning “as internal adversaries that slow down operations,” according to a DHS spokesperson.

Trump also eliminated the department’s Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, which was charged with flagging inhumane conditions at ICE detention facilities where many of the apprehended immigrants are held. The office was resurrected after a lawsuit and court order, though it’s sparsely staffed.

The hobbling of the office comes as the White House embarks on an aggressive expansion of detention sites with an eye toward repurposing old jails or building new ones with names that telegraph harsh conditions: “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades, built by the state and operated in partnership with DHS, or the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska.

“It is a shocking situation to be in that I don’t think anybody anticipated a year ago,” said Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who studies authoritarianism. “We might’ve thought that we were going to see a slide, but I don’t think anybody anticipated how quickly it would transpire, and now people at all levels are scrambling to figure out how to push back.”

Scenes from the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building’s U.S. Immigration Court in New York City, where federal agents working for ICE detain immigrants and asylum-seekers reporting for court proceedings Credit: Charly Triballeau, Michael M. Santiago and Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images via AFP/Getty Images

“Authoritarian Playbook”

Frantz and other scholars who study anti-democratic political systems in other countries said there are numerous examples in which ICE’s activities appear cut from an authoritarian playbook. Among them was the detention of Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was apprehended after co-writing an op-ed for the campus paper that criticized the school’s response to the war in Gaza. ICE held her incommunicado for 24 hours and then shuffled her through three states before jailing her in Louisiana.

“The thing that got me into the topic of ‘maybe ICE is a secret police force’?” said Lee Morgenbesser, an Australian political science professor who studies authoritarianism. “It was that daylight snatching of the Tufts student.”

Morgenbesser was also struck by the high-profile instances of ICE detaining elected officials who attempted to stand in their way. Among them, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was detained for demanding a judicial warrant from ICE, and U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a DHS press conference.

And David Sklansky, a Stanford Law School professor who researches policing and democracy, said it appears that ICE’s agents are allowed to operate with complete anonymity. “It’s not just that people can’t see faces of the officers,” Sklansky said. “The officers aren’t wearing shoulder insignia or name tags.”

U.S. District Judge William G. Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee, recently pointed out that use of masked law enforcement officers had long been considered anathema to American ideals. In a blistering ruling against the administration’s arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters, he wrote, “To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.” The Trump administration has said it will appeal that ruling.

Federal agents stand guard outside an ICE detention facility in Newark, N.J. The Trump administration authorized the deployment of National Guard units at immigration facilities, escalating its use of the military as part of the president’s immigration crackdown. Credit: Victor J. Blue/The New York Times/Redux

Where the Fallout is Felt

The fallout is being felt in places like Hays County, Texas, not far from Austin, where ICE apprehended 47 people, including nine children, during a birthday celebration in the early morning of April 1.

The agency’s only disclosure about the raid in Dripping Springs describes the operation as part of a yearlong investigation targeting “members and associates believed to be part of the Venezuelan transnational gang, Tren de Aragua.”

Six months later, the county’s top elected official told ProPublica the federal government has ignored his attempts to get answers.

“We’re not told why they took them, and we’re not told where they took them,” said County Judge Ruben Becerra, a Democrat. “By definition, that’s a kidnapping.”

In the raid, a Texas trooper secured a search warrant that allowed law enforcement officers to breach the home, an Airbnb rental on a vast stretch of land in the Hill Country. Becerra told ProPublica he believes the suspicion of drugs at the party was a pretense to pull people out of the house so ICE officers who lacked a warrant could take them into custody. The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration has yet to produce evidence supporting claims of gang involvement, said Karen Muñoz, a civil rights attorney helping families track down their relatives who were jailed or deported. While some court documents are sealed, nothing in the public record verifies the gang affiliation DHS cited as the cause for the birthday party raid.

“There’s no evidence released at all that any person kidnapped at that party was a member of any organized criminal group,” Muñoz said.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, did not respond to questions about Hays County and other raids where families and attorneys allege a lack of transparency and due process.

 

ICE agents knock on the door of a residence during a multiagency enforcement operation in Chicago in January. Credit: Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg/Getty Images

 
In Plain Sight 

Months after ICE’s widely publicized raids, fear continues to envelop Santa Ana, a majority-Hispanic city with a large immigrant population. Amezcua, the mayor, said the raids have complicated local policing and rendered parents afraid to pick up their children from school. The city manager, a California-born citizen and Latino, carries with him three government IDs, including a passport.

Raids of car washes and apartment buildings continue, but the community has started to “push back,” Amezcua said. “Like many other communities, the neighbors come out. People stop in the middle of traffic.”

With so few institutional checks on ICE’s powers, citizens are increasingly relying on themselves. On at least one occasion in nearby Downey, a citizen’s intervention had some effect.

On June 12, Melyssa Rivas had just started her workday when a colleague burst into her office with urgent news: “ICE is here.”

The commotion was around the corner in Rivas’ hometown, a Los Angeles suburb locals call “Mexican Beverly Hills” for its stately houses and affluent Hispanic families. Rivas, 31, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, belongs to Facebook groups where residents share updates about cultural festivals, church programs and, these days, the presence of Trump’s deportation foot soldiers.

Rivas had seen posts about ICE officers sweeping through LA and figured Downey’s turn had come. She and her co-worker rushed toward the sound of screaming at a nearby intersection. Rivas hit “record” on her phone as a semicircle of trucks and vans came into view. She filmed at least half a dozen masked men in camouflage vests encircling a Hispanic man on his knees.

Her unease deepened as she registered details that “didn’t seem right,” Rivas recalled in an interview. She said the parked vans had out-of-state plates or no tags. The armed men wore only generic “police” patches, and most were in street clothes. No visible insignia identified them as state or federal — or even legal authorities at all. 

“When is it that we just decided to do things a different way? There’s due process, there’s a legal way, and it just doesn’t seem to matter anymore,” Rivas said. “Where are human rights?”

“We’ll Smash the Fucking Window Out and Drag Him Out”

Video footage shows Rivas and others berating the officers for complicity in what they called a “kidnapping.” Local news channels later reported that the vehicles had chased the man after a raid at a nearby car wash.

“I know half of you guys know this is fucked up,” Rivas was recorded telling the officers.

Moments later, the scene took a turn. As suddenly as they’d arrived, the officers returned to their vehicles and left, with no apology and no explanation to the distraught man they left on the sidewalk.

Through a mask, one of them said, “Have a good day.”

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

J. David McSwane

I write about national issues, including everything from health care to business to civil rights issues. More Stories

I want to hear from current and former federal workers, lawyers and advocates — really anyone who sees an injustice worth investigating. 

Hannah Allam

From Washington, I cover national security issues, with a focus on militant movements and counterterrorism efforts.

• More Stories

I’m interested in tips about counterterrorism, court cases involving surveillance or civil liberties, national security personnel changes, threat assessments and the proximity of extremist movements to federal power.

 

https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-citizens-arrested-detained-against-will

Immigration

 
We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days.

 

Leonardo Garcia Venegas was detained by immigration agents while filming a raid on his worksite, despite having a REAL ID on him and telling the officers he was a citizen.

 

by Nicole Foy, photography by Sarahbeth Maney 

October 16, 2025

ProPublica 

[ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. ]

 

Reporting Highlights 

• Americans Detained: The government doesn’t track how many citizens are held by immigration agents. We found more than 170 cases this year where citizens were detained at raids and protests.
• Held Incommunicado: More than 20 citizens have reported being held for over a day without being able to call their loved ones or a lawyer. In some cases their families couldn’t find them.
• Cases Wilted: Agents have arrested about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, for allegedly interfering with or assaulting officers, yet those cases were often dropped.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.  

When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned.

“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”

But that is far from the reality many citizens have experienced. Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.

About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones.

Videos of U.S. citizens being mistreated by immigration agents have filled social media feeds, but there is little clarity on the overall picture. The government does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans.

So ProPublica created its own count. 

 


We compiled and reviewed every case we could find of agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests. While the tally is almost certainly incomplete, we found more than 170 such incidents during the first nine months of President Donald Trump’s second administration.

Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. That includes four who were held for weeks with their undocumented mother and without access to the family’s attorney until a congresswoman intervened.

Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances. Agents can hold people whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino.

Immigration agents also can arrest citizens who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused of assaulting or impeding officers.

These cases have often wilted under scrutiny. In nearly 50 instances that we have identified so far, charges have never been filed or the cases were dismissed. Our count found a handful of citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.

Among the detentions in which allegations have not stuck, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper sprayed and punched a young man who had filmed them searching for his relative. In another, agents knocked over and then tackled a 79-year-old car wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. His lawyer said he was held for 12 hours and wasn’t given medical attention despite having broken ribs in the incident and having recently had heart surgery. In a third case, agents grabbed and handcuffed a woman on her way to work who was caught up in a chaotic raid on street vendors. In a complaint filed against the government, she described being held for more than two days, without being allowed to contact the outside world for much of that time. (The Supreme Court has ruled that two days is generally the longest federal officials can hold Americans without charges.)

 

George Retes, an American combat veteran, at the site of his arrest by immigration agents on California’s Central Coast. Retes was detained for three days without access to a lawyer and missed his daughter’s third birthday.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the Department of Homeland Security said agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

A top immigration official recently acknowledged agents do consider someone’s looks. “How do they look compared to, say, you?” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino said to a white reporter in Chicago.

The White House told ProPublica that anyone who assaults federal immigration agents would be prosecuted. “Interfering with law enforcement and assaulting law enforcement is a crime and anyone, regardless of immigration status, will be held accountable,” said the Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson. “Officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens, and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism.”

A spokesperson for Kavanaugh did not return an emailed request for comment. An immigration raid on 79-year-old Rafie Ollah Shouhed’s car wash left him with broken ribs. Credit: Courtesy of Rafie Ollah Shouhed. Compiled by ProPublica.

Tallying the number of Americans detained by immigration agents is inherently messy and incomplete. The government has long ignored recommendations for it to track such cases, even as the U.S. has a history of detaining and even deporting citizens, including during the Obama administration and Trump’s first term.

We compiled cases by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We did not include arrests of protesters by local police or the National Guard. Nor did we count cases in which arrests were made at a later date after a judicial process. That included cases of some people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks or tossing a flare to start a fire.

Experts say that Americans appear to be getting picked up more now as a result of the government doing something that it hasn’t for decades: large-scale immigration sweeps across the country, often in communities that do not want them. 

In earlier administrations, deportation agents used intelligence to target specific individuals, said Scott Shuchart, a top immigration official in the Biden, Obama and first Trump administrations. “The new idea is to use those resources unintelligently” — with officers targeting communities or workplaces where undocumented immigrants may be.

When federal officers roll through communities in the way the Supreme Court permitted, the constitutional rights of both citizens and noncitizens are inevitably violated, argued David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He recently analyzed how sweeps in Los Angeles have led to racial profiling. “If the government can grab someone because he’s a certain demographic group that’s correlated with some offense category, then they can do that in any context.”

Cody Wofsy, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, put it even more starkly. “Any one of us could be next.”

The video Garcia Venegas made of an immigration raid on a construction site shows him walking away from the officer while trying to film and then stating that he’s a citizen before being detained. Credit: Courtesy of Garcia Venega

---

When Kavanaugh issued his opinion that immigration agents can consider race and other factors, the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices strongly dissented. They warned that citizens risked being “grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.”

Leonardo Garcia Venegas appears to have been just such a case. He was working at a construction site in coastal Alabama when he saw masked immigration agents from Homeland Security Investigations hop a fence and run by a “No trespassing” sign. Garcia Venegas recalled that they moved toward the Latino workers, ignoring the white and Black workers.

Garcia Venegas began filming after his undocumented brother asked agents for a warrant. In response, the footage shows, agents yanked his brother to the ground, shoving his face into wet concrete. Garcia Venegas kept filming until officers grabbed him too and knocked his phone to the ground.

Other co-workers filmed what happened next, as immigration agents twisted the 25-year-old’s arms. They repeatedly tried to take him to the ground while he yelled, “I’m a citizen!”

Officers pulled out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to those legally in the U.S. But the agents dismissed it as fake. Officers held Garcia Venegas handcuffed for more than an hour. His brother was later deported.

  

Leonardo Garcia Venegas told agents he was a citizen both times he was detained. His REAL ID was dismissed as a fake.

Garcia Venegas was so shaken that he took two weeks off of work. Soon after he returned, he was working alone inside a nearly built house listening to music on his headphones when he sensed someone watching him. A masked immigration agent was standing in the bedroom doorway.

This time, agents didn’t tackle him. But they again dismissed his REAL ID. And then they held him to check his citizenship. Garcia Venegas says agents also held two other workers who had legal status.

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Garcia Venegas’ detentions, or to a federal lawsuit he filed last month. The agency has previously defended the agents’ conduct, saying he “physically got in between agents and the subject” during the first incident. The footage does not show that, and Garcia Venegas was never charged with obstruction or any other crime.

Garcia Venegas’ lawyers at the nonprofit Institute for Justice hope others may join his suit. After all, the reverberations of the immigration sweeps are being felt widely. Garcia Venegas said he knows of 15 more raids on nearby construction sites, and the industry along his portion of the Gulf Coast is struggling for lack of workers.

Kavanaugh’s assurances hold little weight for Garcia Venegas. He’s a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, who speaks little English and works in construction. Even with his REAL ID and Social Security card in his wallet, Garcia Venegas worries that immigration agents will keep harassing him.

“If they decide they want to detain you,” he said. “You’re not going to get out of it.”

Men building a home in rural Baldwin County, Alabama. Garcia Venegas was detained by immigration agents twice while working on homes in the area.

---

George Retes was among the citizens arrested despite immigration agents appearing to know his legal status. He also disappeared into the system for days without being able to contact anyone on the outside.

The only clue Retes’ family had at first was a brief call he managed to make on his Apple Watch with his hands handcuffed behind his back. He quickly told his wife that “ICE” had arrested him during a massive raid and protest on the marijuana farm where he worked as a security guard.

Still, Retes’ family couldn’t find him. They called every law enforcement agency they could think of. No one gave them any answers.

Eventually, they spotted a TikTok video showing Retes driving to work and slowly trying to back up as he’s caught between agents and protestors. Through the tear gas and dust, his family recognized Retes’ car and the veteran decal on his window. The full video shows a man — Retes — splayed on the ground surrounded by agents.

George Retes’ family noticed his car in a compiled video posted to TikTok. This clip from that longer video shows his white vehicle surrounded by tear gas. Immigration agents later pinned him on the ground. Credit: nota.sra/TikTok

Retes’ family went to the farm, where local TV reporters were interviewing families who couldn’t find their loved ones.

“They broke his window, they pepper sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor,” his sister told a reporter between sobs. “We don’t know what to do. We’re just asking to let my brother go. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car.”

Retes was held for three days without being given an opportunity to make a call. His family only learned where he had been after his release. His leg had been cut from the broken glass, Retes told ProPublica, and lingering pepper spray burned his hands. He tried to soothe them by filling sandwich bags with water.

Retes recalled that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.” He said one DHS official laughed at him, saying he shouldn’t have come to work that day. “They still sent me away to jail.” He added that cases like his show Kavanaugh was “wrong completely.”

DHS did not answer our questions about Retes. It did respond on X after Retes wrote an op-ed last month in the San Francisco Chronicle. An agency post asserted he was arrested for assault after he “became violent and refused to comply with law enforcement.” Yet Retes had been released without any charges. Indeed, he says he was never told why he was arrested.

Retes said that agents knew he was a citizen. 

“They didn’t care.”

The Department of Justice has encouraged agents to arrest anyone interfering with immigration operations, twice ordering law enforcement to prioritize cases of those suspected of obstructing, interfering with or assaulting immigration officials.

But the government’s claims in those cases have often not been borne out.

Daniel Montenegro was filming a raid at a Van Nuys, California, Home Depot with other day-laborer advocates this summer when, he told ProPublica, he was tackled by several officers who injured his back.

Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who oversaw the LA raids and has since taken similar operations to cities like Sacramento and Chicago, tweeted out the names and photos of Montenegro and three others, accusing them of using homemade tire spikes to disable vehicles.

“I had no idea where that story came from,” Montenegro told ProPublica. “I didn’t find out until we were released. People were like, ‘We saw you on Twitter and the news and you guys are terrorists, you were planning to slash tires.’ I never saw those spike tire-popper things.”

Officials have not charged Montenegro or the others with any crimes. (Bovino did not respond to a request for comment, while DHS defended him in a statement to ProPublica: “Chief Bovino’s success in getting the worst of the worst out of the country speaks for itself.”)

The government’s cases are sometimes so muddied that it’s unclear why agents actually arrested a citizen.

Andrea Velez was charged with assaulting an officer after she was accidentally dropped off for work during a raid on street vendors in downtown Los Angeles. She said in a federal complaint that officers repeatedly assumed she did not speak English. Federal officers later requested access to her phone in an attempt to prove she was colluding with another citizen arrested that day, who was charged with assault. She was one of the Americans held for more than two days.

DHS did not respond to our questions about Velez, but it has previously accused her of assaulting an officer. A federal judge has dismissed the charges.

Other citizens also said officers accused them of crimes and suddenly questioned their citizenship — including a man arrested after filming Border Patrol agents break a truck window, and a pregnant woman who tried to stop officers from taking her boyfriend.

The prospects for any significant reckoning over agents’ conduct, even against citizens, are dim. The paths for suing federal agents are even more limited than they are for local police. And that’s if agents can even be identified. What’s more, the administration has gutted the office that investigates allegations of abuse by agents.

“The often-inadequate guardrails that we have for state and local government — even those guardrails are nonexistent when you’re talking about federal overreach,” said Joanna Schwartz, a professor at UCLA School of Law.

More than 50 members of Congress have also written to the administration, demanding details about Americans who’ve been detained. One is Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat. After trying to question Noem about detained citizens, federal agents grabbed Padilla, pulled him to the ground and handcuffed him. The department later defended the agents, saying they “acted appropriately.”


How We Did This

Americans have reported a wide range of troubling encounters with immigration agents. To get a wider sense of agents’ conduct, we cataloged all incidents we could find of citizens being held against their will by immigration officers.

Critically, there is no way to know the complete scope of these stops since the government itself does not track them. But we were still able to fill in the picture a bit more.

We reviewed more than 170 cases overall, which we sorted into two categories.

The first is Americans who were held because agents questioned their citizenship. We found more than 50 such cases. The second category is Americans arrested by immigration agents after being accused of assaulting or impeding officers at protests or during immigration arrests of others. In that category, we tallied about 130 Americans, including more than a dozen elected officials. In many of these cases, the government never charged these individuals or the cases were dismissed.

We also tracked another nine citizens who reported being concerned about racial profiling after being extensively questioned by immigration officials. This includes a Mescalero Apache tribal member who was pulled out of a store and asked for his passport, and a California man who was previously deported by mistake and got another deportation order in the mail.

We did all this by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We compiled cases from the beginning of the current Trump administration through Oct. 5. Our accounting of arrests in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago is particularly limited, since the events there are still unfolding.

We did not review cases of Americans detained in airports or at the border, where even citizens are more likely to encounter increased questioning. We also did not review cases of Americans arrested at some point after alleged encounters with immigration agents since those involved a judicial process. We similarly excluded arrests of immigration protestors by local police who, unlike many of the federal agencies, booked protesters into a local jail where they could access the legal process and their families could find them. 

Do you have information or videos to share about the administration’s immigration crackdown? Contact Nicole Foy via email at nicole.foy@propublica.org or on Signal at nicolefoy.27.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: 

Nicole Foy

Nicole Foy is ProPublica’s Ancil Payne Fellow, reporting on immigration and labor

 

Sarahbeth Maney

I am a photojournalist documenting the impact of social issues on individuals and communities, supported by the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Foundation