A Democracy Drive Thread
Masked agents, deaths in detention, U.S. citizens shot and detained, toddlers deported — a chronological, sourced record of what Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its sister agencies have done since January 2025, and who paid the price.
Handed a vast budget and arrest quotas to fill, ICE and the Border Patrol became the sharp edge of the administration's mass-deportation drive. This thread is a sourced, chronological record of what that has meant on the ground: U.S. citizens shot, beaten, and detained; children — some of them citizens — deported or hospitalized; a rising toll of deaths in custody that the agency then moved to hide; and agents who, when they crossed the line, were defended rather than disciplined. Every entry links to its sources. The list is not exhaustive — it is a representative record of a pattern.
January 20, 2025
In the first months of the second term, the administration arrested and detained the parents of more than 11,000 U.S.-citizen children, according to ProPublica — forcing families to choose between separation and taking their American kids to countries they had never known.
April 7, 2025
The administration admitted it had deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father, to a notorious El Salvador mega-prison through what it called an “administrative error” — then fought all the way to the Supreme Court to avoid returning him.
April 15, 2025
Trump and his press secretary confirmed the White House was looking for “legal pathways” to send U.S. citizens — whom Trump called “homegrowns” — to El Salvador's mega-prison.
“The homegrowns are next.”
April 16, 2025
DOJ attorney Erez Reuveni was fired after he candidly told a court that Abrego Garcia's deportation had been an error — punished not for the mistake but for admitting it.
April 25, 2025
A 2-year-old U.S. citizen, identified in court records as “VML,” was deported to Honduras with her mother — in what a federal judge said happened with “no meaningful process” to protect the child's rights.
May 3, 2025
House Republicans defeated an amendment that would have explicitly prohibited ICE from detaining U.S. citizens.
May 20, 2025
ICE began arresting migrants as they arrived for their own immigration court hearings — making compliance with the law the moment of capture.
May 31, 2025
CBP was found to be uploading the DNA of migrants — including children as young as four — into CODIS, the FBI's national criminal DNA database.
August 7, 2025
Chaofeng Ge, a 32-year-old from Queens, was found hanged in a shower stall at a Pennsylvania ICE processing center. His family sued the government for answers.
September 30, 2025
A federal judge ruled the administration had violated the First Amendment by targeting noncitizen students and professors for deportation over pro-Palestinian speech.
October 4, 2025
A CBP agent shot Marimar Martinez, a 30-year-old woman, five times during an immigration operation in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood.
October 20, 2025
ICE agents shot 25-year-old U.S. citizen Carlos Jimenez in the shoulder in Los Angeles; his lawyers said he was hit from behind as he stopped to warn a school bus of agents nearby.
October 25, 2025
During a Chicago enforcement sweep, Border Patrol agents allegedly dragged and broke the ribs of a 67-year-old U.S. citizen and member of a local running club.
October 26, 2025
Randall Gamboa Esquivel, 52, died after being deported to Costa Rica in a vegetative state following his time in ICE custody.
November 5, 2025
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed no U.S. citizens had been arrested or detained in immigration sweeps — a statement fact-checkers rated false, with multiple documented cases by then.
“No American citizens have been arrested or detained.”
November 22, 2025
Federal prosecutors apologized in court for deporting Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old Babson College student detained days before Thanksgiving.
December 9, 2025
ICE agents in Minneapolis arrested Susan Tincher, a U.S. citizen, while she peacefully observed one of their operations as a community witness.
December 15, 2025
With deaths in immigration detention reaching a 22-year high, ICE quietly scaled back the detailed public reports it had long issued each time a detainee died.
December 16, 2025
Nenko Gantchev, a 56-year-old Bulgarian-born Chicago business owner, died in ICE custody at a privately run Michigan facility.
January 7, 2026
ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old American woman, in Minneapolis; a family-commissioned autopsy found she was shot in the head. Ross received three days of administrative leave. Trump publicly defended him, falsely claiming Good had “run over” the officer — who, video showed, remained on his feet throughout.
“...very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”
January 18, 2026
Amalia, an 18-month-old held at the Dilley family detention center in Texas, was hospitalized with respiratory failure after her family said she was denied medication.
January 23, 2026
Wael Tarabishi, a 30-year-old with Pompe disease, died after ICE detained his father and primary caregiver, who had been the one driving him to medical care.
February 16, 2026
Dr. Linda Davis, a special-education teacher in Savannah, Georgia, was killed when a man fleeing ICE officers crashed into her car.
March 2, 2026
Emmanuel Damas, a 56-year-old Haitian asylum seeker, died of sepsis from an untreated tooth infection while held in ICE custody in Arizona.
March 7, 2026
After arresting an undocumented father in Franklin Township, New Jersey, ICE agents left his two young children unattended.
March 11, 2026
A judge dismissed felony charges against Miguel Angel Garcia Martinez, a 24-year-old U.S. citizen, after agents' accounts of him “assaulting” them were contradicted by the record.
March 14, 2026
Mohammad Nazeer Paktyawal, a 41-year-old former Afghan special-forces soldier who had been legally evacuated to the United States, died in ICE custody.
March 23, 2026
The Justice Department admitted in federal court that the administration had wrongfully deported 91 asylum seekers who were protected by a court order.
June 24, 2026
On Election Day, two ICE agents found Syracuse poll worker Paigelynne Gonyea at the library where she was working and pressed her to sign a notice saying she was under investigation — over an Instagram post that named Jonathan Ross, the agent who had killed Renee Good. Election officials said law enforcement had no business inside a polling place.
“For ICE to come to me over a social media post just feels very 1984 to me.”