Last updated: July 16, 2026. This page lists additional violations beyond the most egregious cases.
| Date | Administration Action | Why does this violate the Constitution? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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). |
| 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. | |
| 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 | 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. |
| 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.” | |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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 | 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |