Last updated: July 20, 2026. This page lists additional violations beyond the most egregious cases.
| Date | Administration Action | Why does this violate the Constitution? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025–2026 | Alabama-born construction worker Leonardo Garcia Venegas was detained three times during worksite raids despite showing a REAL ID proving citizenship (agents called it fake) — the third arrest coming while his lawsuit over the first two was pending. | His federal class-action suit alleges detention of a citizen without cause or any attempt at verification; the repetition while litigation was pending underscores the absence of due process safeguards. | Research cited in reporting suggests roughly 1% of the 60,000+ people in immigration detention may be U.S. citizens. |
| September 2025 | During ICE’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in the Chicago area, agents made dozens of warrantless arrests in violation of a binding federal consent decree. | A federal judge ruled that more than 30 warrantless arrests violated the consent decree barring arrests without probable cause plus flight risk, ordered detainees released or given bond hearings, and extended the decree with monthly reporting requirements. | Hundreds of people detained in the operation became eligible for release as a result. |
| July 2025 | Held detainees at Florida’s Everglades facility (“Alligator Alcatraz”) without charges and cut off from lawyers and courts — denied attorney calls and visits, transferred away before scheduled attorney meetings, initially with no immigration court even having jurisdiction over their cases. | Federal courts ordered ICE to provide counsel access, and in March 2026 a judge issued a class-wide injunction requiring free, confidential legal calls and written attorney-access protocols. | Similar suits documented ICE facilities in Arizona, Louisiana, Texas, and Oregon blocking attorney calls and visits. |
| July 2025 | During a raid on a California cannabis farm, agents tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and smashed the car window of security guard George Retes — a U.S. citizen and Army veteran — then held him for three days, strip-searched, with no phone call, no lawyer, and no judge, and never charged him. | His federal lawsuit alleges detention of a citizen without probable cause, hearing, or counsel — core Fourth and Fifth Amendment violations. | |
| July 2025 | Deported five men from Vietnam, Yemen, Cuba, Jamaica, and Laos to Eswatini under a secret $5.1 million agreement; Eswatini held them in a maximum-security prison without charges or meaningful access to counsel. | The removals proceeded under the third-country deportation policy that a federal court later held unlawful (see the main page); the men had no opportunity to contest removal to a country they had never set foot in. | One detainee’s month-long hunger strike ended only at signs of organ failure. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights allowed a complaint over their detention to proceed. |
| June 2025 | Immigration officials forcibly arrested a U.S. citizen Ph.D. student for filming an ICE raid and informing others of their right to remain silent. | The student was exercising his constitutional right to free speech; he was arrested without probable cause and was not informed of his rights. | In July 2025, he filed a $1 million federal claim for illegal arrest, excessive force, and 24-hour detention without charge. |
| May 2025 | Began a coordinated “dismiss-and-arrest” practice at immigration courthouses: ICE attorneys moved to dismiss immigrants’ pending cases so agents waiting in hallways could arrest them and funnel them into fast-track removal. Oral motions to dismiss rose over 600%, most adjudicated the same day. | A class action alleged the practice “intentionally stripped people of basic due process rights.” In 2026, the government admitted the memo it relied on never authorized courthouse arrests, and a federal judge blocked the arrest policy nationwide, vacating it as “arbitrary and capricious.” | |
| April 2025 | ICE mass-terminated the student-status records of several thousand international students — often over dismissed charges or minor infractions — abruptly stripping their ability to study and work. | A federal judge issued a nationwide injunction in May 2025, finding the government unlawfully altered students’ legal status without authority or process. | This nationwide dragnet is distinct from the Harvard-specific enrollment revocation covered on the education page. |
| April 2025 | A 19-year-old U.S. citizen was wrongfully detained by immigration authorities for 10 days. | The man, despite being a U.S. citizen and telling the officers such, was held unlawfully and no attempts were made to verify his claims. | The man said that he had been taken by ambulance to a hospital to treat a seizure and, upon being released from care, did not have his I.D. on him. He asked federal officials for help returning home, but they arrested him and did not take his citizenship claim seriously until his family was allowed to bring his birth certificate to a hearing scheduled over a week later. |
| April 2025 | A U.S. citizen was held for hours while trying to cross from the Canadian border. | The officers refused to tell him why they were detaining him and he was not read his legal rights. | |
| April 2025 | Two U.S. citizen children were deported to Mexico along with their mother. | They were given no due process before an immigration court. | |
| March 2025 | Terminated the roughly $200 million contract funding legal representation for some 26,000 unaccompanied migrant children, leaving children as young as toddlers to face immigration court alone. | A federal judge ordered the funding restored, finding the cutoff likely violates the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which requires the government to ensure counsel for these children “to the greatest extent practicable.” | As of July 2026, legal-aid organizations report the government still has not fully complied with the funding order. |
| March 2025 | Arrested and detained lawful permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil for three months in Louisiana over his campus speech, seeking to deport him under a rarely used “foreign policy” provision. | A federal judge found his detention likely unconstitutional and ordered him released on bail in June 2025 — a legal resident never charged with any crime, detained over protected speech. | An appeals court later held the district court lacked jurisdiction until immigration proceedings finish — a procedural ruling, not a vindication of the detention. The government’s campaign to deport him continued into 2026 (see the First Amendment page). |
| February 2025 | Two days after an immigration judge granted him protection from removal, a Guatemalan man (“O.C.G.”) was bused to Mexico with no notice or chance to object; Mexico then sent him to Guatemala, where he went into hiding. | A federal judge found “the only evidence before the Court” was that he received “no notice… and no opportunity” to raise the danger — a straightforward due process violation of a person with a live protection order. | He was flown back in June 2025 — the administration’s first court-ordered return of a wrongly deported person. |
| January 2025 | Expanded expedited removal — deportation without a hearing before a judge — from the border zone to anywhere in the country and to anyone who arrived within two years. | A federal judge blocked the expansion in August 2025, holding that people living in the interior must receive due process and that current procedures “fall short.” | An appeals court reversed 2–1 in June 2026 and restored the policy; the dissenting judge wrote that the procedures are “woefully inadequate” for people found in the interior. |