Over the course of two hours, witnesses watched and listened as Christa Pike cried, whimpered and snored through Tennessee’s attempt to execute her. By the end of it, executioners had given her two doses of the state’s lethal injection drugs. Her arms were swollen and blistered, and one had turned purple, her attorneys said. And she was still alive, marking what legal experts say is the first time a prisoner in the U.S. has survived one dose — let alone two — of lethal injection drugs. 

Even if the outcome was unprecedented, what went wrong was not. Pike’s was the third Tennessee execution in 14 months to go awry. But as a reporter who has covered death row for nearly a decade and witnessed several executions, I know the state is not alone. The factors behind the breakdowns in Tennessee have popped up again and again across the country — and show how easily another botched execution could occur, even as soon as the ones planned Wednesday in Texas and next week in Florida.

Here’s what we know about Tennessee’s attempt to execute Pike: The procedure started more than nine hours late, delayed by last-minute legal fights. Then, inside the death house, executioners struggled to find a vein, jabbing Pike with at least seven needles, according to her lawyers, one of whom watched in dismay. As the caustic barbiturate finally started flowing into the IV lines, Pike did not fall into sedation quickly. Instead, witnesses said, she sang with her spiritual adviser. Then she said her arm felt like it was about to burst open. “Does this happen like that?” she asked. 

Like Pike, many aging death row prisoners have medical problems that can complicate efforts to kill them, potentially turning what are supposed to be relatively quick deaths into agonizing, drawn-out procedures. Even when prisoners are healthy, several states have faced questions about the competence of their execution teams, as both the American Medical Association and American Nurses Association have strongly opposed their members taking part in death penalty procedures. And death penalty states across the country shroud their executions in such secrecy that it is often difficult or impossible to confirm the age, source or sterility of the drugs.

“The types of failures that went into this botch happen all the time,” said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project. “There is nothing in the execution process that states are incapable of getting wrong.”

The Tennessee Department of Correction declined to comment, though hours after the attempted execution the agency said in a statement that it had “followed every step” of the state’s established protocol, which “has been consistently effective.” On Saturday, the head of the agency resigned. Meanwhile, Gov. Bill Lee said in a statement that he had ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” and that the execution previously scheduled for December would no longer take place this year. His office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

On Friday, Pike’s lawyers filed a motion asking a court to order the agency to preserve any evidence related to the state’s failed effort to kill their client. In a statement, they said the filing “details the serious complications that occurred during the execution attempt, many of which Christa and her attorneys had warned the State and the courts about months earlier.”

Pike remains in the hospital where she is receiving critical medical care, they said. After several days on a ventilator, intubated and unconscious, on Tuesday afternoon her attorneys said she was awake and speaking. “Her prognosis remains unclear but, at a minimum, we expect a long recovery,” they wrote in a statement. “We continue to ask the Governor of Tennessee to commute Christa Pike’s sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.”

Unhealthy Prisoners

By the time the Tennessee Department of Correction strapped her to the gurney last week, Pike had been on death row for 30 years. She had been sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow Job Corps student in Knoxville. Pike was 18 at the time and, like many people on death row, had a history of mental illness and childhood sexual abuse. 

Now 50 years old, Pike has faced an array of health problems, which her legal team had repeatedly warned could lead to a bungled execution. During a three-day hearing in August, Pike’s attorneys argued that her small veins and a blood disorder would make it harder and more painful to put in the IV lines to administer the lethal dose. The Tennessee Supreme Court did not agree, calling their arguments “speculative” and rejecting their request for a stay.

Tennessee’s execution protocol relies on pentobarbital, a caustic barbiturate that slows down breathing and has been used to treat seizures, sedate people before surgery and euthanize animals. But its use in putting to death humans has drawn scrutiny. After relying on the drug for all 13 federal executions during the first Trump administration, the Justice Department under President Joe Biden said there was too much uncertainty about whether it would cause “unnecessary pain and suffering” and decided to stop using it “unless and until that uncertainty is resolved.” This year, President Donald Trump’s DOJ reversed course and readopted its use.

Despite supply difficulties and repeated lawsuits from death row prisoners arguing that using pentobarbital is cruel and unusual, several states still use it, including Georgia, Missouri, South Carolina and Texas, where I witnessed five executions in the late 2010s as a reporter for the Houston Chronicle. Four of the condemned prisoners said the drug burned. Two said they could taste it. One said he could “hear it going through the vein.” But all of them stopped moving within minutes and were declared dead in under an hour. 

Tennessee prison officials have not offered an explanation as to why Pike’s attempted execution was so drastically different. Initially, Pike’s attorneys and several death penalty experts raised the possibility that the drugs may have been too old or degraded to work as intended. Yet in Friday’s legal filings, Pike’s lawyers focused on the way the drug was administered, saying it was “abundantly clear” that Tennessee prison officials either didn’t know that the IV lines were out of place or didn’t realize her veins had been so badly damaged that the highly alkaline liquid started leaking out into the surrounding tissue of her arm. Joel Zivot, a professor of anesthesiology in Atlanta and one of Pike’s medical experts, said that meant there wasn’t enough of the drug in her bloodstream at once to kill her. “It just got into her arms, and most of it stopped there,” he said.  

Like Pike, many people on death rows nationwide have significant health problems often compounded by old age. As the appeals process has drawn out, condemned prisoners are spending longer awaiting execution. People put to death in 1988 had spent an average of less than seven years on death row, federal data shows. By 2023, the most recent year with data, that figure had ballooned to more than 23 years. That means more people reaching the execution chamber are old, ill, worn down by decades of poor prison medical care and potentially harder to put to death. One analysis, by the nonprofit human rights group Reprieve, found that the odds of a botched lethal injection increased 6% on average with each additional year of age. Some of the most notorious failed executions of the past decade involved prisoners whose bodies were failing them.

In 2017, Ohio halted the execution of Alva Campbell after the execution team couldn’t find a usable vein. His attorneys had warned in legal filings beforehand that his medical problems — including lung cancer, COPD, prostate cancer and pneumonia — could make for an exceptionally painful execution. The 69-year-old died on his own in prison three months later. The following year, Alabama failed to kill 61-year-old Doyle Hamm, a terminally ill cancer patient. Executioners spent more than two hours trying to find a vein, possibly puncturing his bladder before giving up. He died three years later from cancer complications. And in 2024, Idaho called off the execution of 73-year-old Thomas Creech after trying to find a vein for nearly an hour. He’s still alive and on death row. 

Last year, Tennessee put to death Byron Black, a 69-year-old with dementia and congestive heart failure who used a wheelchair and had a defibrillator implanted in his chest. The defense team warned the device could cause painful shocks and prolong the execution, but Tennessee’s highest court refused to intervene and prison officials left it on. After the drugs started flowing, witnesses said Black lifted his head up, groaned and said, “It’s hurting so bad.”  

Defense attorneys worry similar problems could surface again as soon as next week, when the state of Florida plans to execute William Lee Thompson for a 1976 murder in Miami-Dade County. Since August, the 74-year-old — who has dementia and does not always remember that he is facing execution — has suffered from sepsis, pneumonia, blood clots in his lungs, a severe sacral wound and an array of other debilitating conditions. Bri Lacy, the lead attorney on Thompson’s case, told ProPublica her client is also malnourished and dehydrated, which could make it even harder for executioners to access his “hard, fragile veins.” She said Thompson had been in an outside hospital until the night before Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a warrant for his execution, after which prison officials put him in death watch, the section for people with scheduled executions. 

Last week, DeSantis issued an executive order temporarily staying the execution and requiring that Thompson be evaluated by a panel of three psychiatrists to determine whether he is competent to be executed. The results are still outstanding. DeSantis and the Florida Department of Corrections did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Unscrupulous Actors”

If the prisoner’s health is not a problem, sometimes the execution team is. 

In May, Tennessee tried to execute Tony Carruthers, who’d been sent to death row in connection with a 1994 triple murder for which he has long maintained his innocence. Executioners jabbed his hands and feet more than a dozen times trying to find a working vein, according to Maria DeLiberato, senior counsel at the American Civil Liberty Union’s Capital Punishment Project, a member of his defense team who was there as a witness. Eventually, a physician — who DeLiberato said had introduced himself as Dr. Mark Fowler — decided to try placing a central line, an invasive procedure that involves puncturing the neck, chest or groin to insert a deep IV near the heart. 

DeLiberato objected, saying Fowler wasn’t qualified. Less than a year earlier, he’d admitted in a deposition that he didn’t have hospital privileges and hadn’t placed a central line in about 12 years. “His hands were shaking, and it appeared to me he didn’t know what he was doing,” DeLiberato told ProPublica. By the time Fowler gave up trying to put one in Carruthers, DiLiberato could hear her client moaning and see blood oozing out of his puncture wounds. After more than an hour, the governor called off the execution and gave Carruthers a one-year reprieve. 

“Placing a central line is like riding a bicycle. You don’t forget,” Fowler said in a text message to ProPublica. “My hands were not shaking and the process requires deliberation. I stopped because it was uncomfortable for Carruthers.” He added that his lack of hospital privileges was “irrelevant.”

It’s not clear whether Fowler took part in Pike’s attempted execution last week. Though he previously told local media that he would, neither the state nor the defense team confirmed his participation. He declined to comment on the matter to ProPublica.  

After the failed attempt to execute Carruthers, several dozen Tennessee doctors and nurses wrote to the governor urging a moratorium on the death penalty. They said medical providers who take part in executions “are those willing to set aside their professional ethics” and that bungled executions “are the predictable result of working with such unscrupulous actors.”

For years, the physician overseeing executions in Missouri was a surgeon who’d been disciplined by the state board and sued about 20 times for malpractice, he estimated in a deposition, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. At least five of those cases ended in settlements, and one ended in a court judgment that he appealed and lost, the paper reported. In court testimony in the mid-2000s, he admitted that he sometimes confused names of different drugs and said he’d decided on his own to halve the amount of anesthetic given to condemned prisoners. A court eventually banned him from taking part in executions in Missouri — though federal officials later put him on the execution team at the federal death chamber in Indiana. He did not respond to phone calls and an email seeking a comment.

After Oklahoma executed Clayton Lockett in 2014 in a drawn-out and bloody procedure, a paramedic involved later testified that it took a long time because “Black people have smaller veins than white people.” 

Death penalty experts compared what happened last week in Tennessee to a 2006 Florida execution, where the first dose of drugs failed to kill 55-year-old Ángel Díaz. He struggled for about half an hour, and executioners eventually dosed him a second time. It turned out the needles had gone through his veins and the drugs had seeped into the surrounding tissue, leaving footlong burns on his arms. An investigation found the state hadn’t provided adequate training or followed its own protocols, and the lead executioner later testified he had “no medical training and no qualifications.” Following a short moratorium, the state revised its procedures and resumed executions in 2008. 

Shrouded in Secrecy

Cases like these come to light largely by accident. Secrecy laws generally shield the names of execution team members, so it’s almost impossible to know whether they have a troubled history.

Secrecy laws likewise conceal information about the drugs themselves, as well as their effects. Maya Foa, who heads up Reprieve, said that states have “gotten more secretive over time” and that some hide aspects of executions that could shed light on the effects of lethal injection drugs. Some states do not allow witnesses to watch the placement of the IV lines, and in Florida, she said, officials “tape [prisoners’]  fingers so you can’t see if they’re wiggling or still conscious.”

Various states withhold everything from the supplier name to sterility testing results to purchase dates — all of which could help determine if the drugs have degraded or become tainted. When executions go badly, that lack of information can make it difficult to know whether the age of the drugs or inadequate testing could have played a role.

Tennessee’s record gives little reason for confidence. In 2022, citing a “technical oversight,” the governor called off the execution of Oscar Smith, then paused future executions and ordered an investigation that ultimately found the state hadn’t been testing its death drugs for bacterial toxins as required by its own rules. After a three-year hiatus, the state resumed executions last year.

It’s not clear how old the drugs were that Tennessee used in Pike’s execution, though records obtained by ProPublica suggest the state purchased some earlier this year. An email from the corrections department to the state comptroller, turned over in response to a public records request regarding payments for lethal injection drugs, showed that the prison agency spent $650,000 this year on execution-related expenses. Legal experts said it’s still not clear where the drug supplies came from, when they were made or even whether they were manufactured by a pharmaceutical company or mixed in a compounding pharmacy.

Prisoners across the country have repeatedly sued over this kind of secrecy, demanding to know more about the drugs used to kill them. Right now, that’s happening in Tennessee, where six condemned men are suing for information about the age, origin and expiration dates of the state’s pentobarbital supplies. One of the lawyers involved in the lawsuit — Kit Thomas, a deputy chief in the Middle District of Tennessee’s federal public defender office — said state officials have resisted providing basic details such as whether the drug was manufactured by a pharmaceutical company or mixed in a compounding pharmacy. The case is ongoing. The state attorney general did not offer a comment on the lawsuit.

“Without public accountability or transparency,” Thomas said, “we should expect to see more people strapped to gurneys and tortured for hours at a time.”

That is what Jamaal Howard’s attorneys fear could happen Wednesday in Texas. The 46-year-old is scheduled for execution in connection with the May 2000 shooting of a convenience store clerk in Hardin County. On Saturday, his legal team asked Gov. Greg Abbott for a 30-day reprieve — not because their client is innocent, but because they want more information about the drugs Texas plans to use. In the past, the state has routinely turned over testing results and other records. But in recent months, that’s changed — and after the botched execution in Tennessee, Howard’s attorneys say they want more proof the drugs are still good.  “We expect [the Texas Department of Criminal Justice] will assure you that its drugs are sound,” Don Bailey and Jeff Newberry wrote. “Tennessee gave the same assurance.”

Abbott’s office didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Amanda Hernandez, a Texas prison spokesperson, said the state has successfully put to death more than 600 people since 1976 and “stands ready to carry out the execution scheduled for Oct. 7.”

The post I’ve Covered Death Row Cases for Nearly a Decade. What Happened to Christa Pike Wasn’t an Anomaly. appeared first on ProPublica.

Experts have long warned that immigration dragnets and the erosion of civil rights for immigrants will inevitably result in the erosion of rights for citizens.

Since the start of this Trump administration, we’ve watched those warnings come true.

The Trump administration says none of this is happening.

“DHS is NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake.” “There are no ‘indiscriminate’ stops.” Allegations of “racial profiling are disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE.” “The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force.” “ICE does not zip tie or restrain children.”

But that is precisely what is happening, and at a far larger scale than previously reported.

We know because we have once again done what the government hasn’t:

We have tallied and cataloged every case we can find of an immigration agent holding a citizen during the current administration.

More than 500 cases. That includes:

• More than a hundred Americans held after agents questioned their citizenship. Nearly all were people of color.
• At least 70 American children and teens detained, some of whom were handcuffed.
• Of the more than 300 Americans we tracked as detained for allegedly assaulting or obstructing agents, we found fewer than half were actually charged in federal court, and many of those cases were dropped or dismissed.
• At least 63 Americans detained while recording.
• 36 Americans held for at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or their family.
• Roughly a dozen citizens deported, mostly children.

Collectively, these cases show that as the administration has relentlessly pursued immigrants, federal agents have run roughshod over the constitutional rights of citizens too.

We’re showing you every case — the reality that the administration denies — along with the receipts.

Explore our list of incidents where 506 citizens were detained.

In January 2025, agents held a 21-year-old citizen at gunpoint and put him in handcuffs during a raid at the Philadelphia car wash where he worked.

In April, a 20-year-old was held in a Florida jail for more than 24 hours, despite having proof of his citizenship.

In June, a dual citizen of Mexico and the U.S. was detained while working in California. He was held for four days without access to a lawyer or his family.

During the enforcement surge in Chicago last fall, known as Operation Midway Blitz, there were “no administrative arrests of U.S. citizens,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. “ICE has significant protections in place to ensure U.S. citizens are not arrested, detained, or mistakenly removed.” But we found that federal agents detained more than 120 citizens in Illinois during the height of the surge.

In November, agents took an 18-year-old citizen off the street, eventually dumping him in the woods.

In December, an American in Baltimore was picked up and held for 25 days, unable to see her 5-year-old son over Christmas.

In January, hours after Renee Good’s killing, agents tackled and handcuffed a school staffer in Minneapolis. He was terrified, he recalled: “I feel lucky to be alive.”

In April, when agents stopped a man in Texas, he told them, “I’m a citizen, it’s fine.” He was deported four days later.

In May, a New York teen was thrown to the ground, bloodied and then dumped in an unfamiliar neighborhood. “He just grabbed me and threw me on the floor,” the teen recalled.

In September, agents detained and injured an Illinois man they thought was someone else.

We shared details and footage of many of the incidents with former immigration officials. They reacted with anger and disbelief.

“This is just terrible,” said Eric Balliet, who spent more than two decades at Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, both agencies under DHS, including in President Donald Trump’s first administration.

“I’ve never seen so many U.S. citizen encounters in all my years,” said Darius Reeves, who oversaw the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s Baltimore office before retiring last year. “It’s an embarrassment.”

In tallying these detentions, we included anyone who authorities held against their will for any period of time — whether they were handcuffed, held at gunpoint or otherwise prevented from leaving by immigration agents. The courts consider someone detained if they aren’t free to leave.

Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances: if they can reasonably suspect they are in the country illegally, or if they allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers.

ProPublica shared its findings and information on each case with DHS. 

The department defended agents’ conduct. “DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted. We do our due diligence,” the agency said in a statement. It added that anyone who obstructs agents “will of course face consequences which include arrest.”

We compiled our list by scouring social media, court records and local media to confirm and compile incidents.

Our work doesn’t include all of agents’ problematic interactions with citizens. We didn’t count incidents where, say, an agent shot but didn’t detain a citizen. And as with the tally we did last year, the new list is an undercount. For instance, witnesses estimate that more than 200 citizens were detained in an Idaho raid last fall, but we only included the 30 citizens who we were able to identify.

Willy Wender Aceituno, a naturalized citizen who voted for Trump twice, said he never imagined that the immigration crackdown he supported would entangle him.

Then, last November, Border Patrol agents broke his truck window, yanked Aceituno out and threw him onto the pavement of a parking lot, where one agent knelt on his back. (DHS says he “refused to comply” with agents’ commands.)

“ICE isn’t looking for criminals,” Aceituno said. “They’re looking for Latinos. Having papers in this country does not protect you.”

“Upon Probable Cause”

Under the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement generally must have probable cause to arrest someone. But there’s a lower bar, reasonable suspicion, for stopping someone to question them.

The Trump administration has repeatedly said its agents are just questioning citizens, not detaining them — even when they’re in handcuffs or held for hours. DHS also cites a concurring opinion issued last year by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh stating that agents can consider factors like “apparent ethnicity” when making stops. Citizens around the country have been detained because, they’ve said, of their skin color, accents or jobs.

Ever since his arrest in November, Aceituno said his U.S.-born daughter carries her passport at college. “She has a Latino face,” he said, adding, “My daughter’s white friends aren’t carrying their passports.”

“Secure in Their Persons, Houses, Papers and Effects”

The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution also prohibits officers from entering homes without a judge’s warrant.

An ICE memo revealed by a whistleblower this year showed that agents had been doing it anyway. The agency asserted that administrative warrants that didn’t involve a judge gave agents the ostensible authority to force their way into homes looking for someone with a final deportation order. Some of those incidents have also resulted in Americans being detained.

In January, Jeyli Salguero, her parents and her sister were asleep at home when armed federal agents broke through the front door and rushed inside.

“The first thing I yelled when I stepped out of my room was that I was a U.S. citizen and I had the right to record,” Salguero recalled. “That’s when they snatched my phone.”

The agents told Salguero’s family they were looking for her brother, who does not live there. After half an hour, the agents released Salguero and her mother, but detained her father, who had temporary protected status, and her sister, who was undocumented. The sister was eventually deported to El Salvador, and her father was later released from detention.

Salguero told us that agents left her and her mom alone in their wrecked house with the Minneapolis winter air coming in through a broken door.

Salguero is one of several plaintiffs who have filed a lawsuit against the government for going into homes without a judicial warrant. DHS has moved to dismiss the lawsuit, saying it has “paused” the policy.

“Against Unreasonable Searches and Seizures”

The Fourth Amendment is also intended to protect people from “unreasonable” use of force during arrests. Previously, we’ve documented how agents have used chokeholds that DHS banned other than when deadly force is authorized. We’ve also documented how immigration agents have broken car windows while pursuing people they believe are in the country illegally. But they’ve been doing it to citizens, too. Many of those citizens have filed lawsuits.

Darren Eichler was working at a Christian cemetery in a Chicago suburb last October when he and his coworkers moved to help a man who was wading in the nearby river. They soon realized — too late — that the man was running from immigration agents, who emerged from the brush near the river and demanded access to a gated area of the cemetery. When the men refused and started filming, agents used bolt cutters to cut open the gate, then fired pepper balls and tackled the men.

Explore incidents where citizens were subjected to crowd control weapons.

Eichler said his face felt like it was on fire and he had trouble breathing. “I pleaded with them for an hour to please call an ambulance.” Eichler told ProPublica. He was eventually brought to a hospital, still handcuffed, while the agents stood over his bed. Eichler’s co-workers were held for several hours at a nearby federal office. No one was charged.

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment about the incident.

“The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble”

The First Amendment protects protesters and those documenting agents’ conduct. The amendment guarantees the freedom to assemble — in other words, to protest peacefully — and the freedom of speech, which courts have interpreted to include recording in public.

The Trump administration has, however, aggressively pursued the arrest and prosecution of citizens who were protesting, often claiming the protesters were assaulting officers or interfering with enforcement activities. We counted more than 300 people accused of assaulting or obstructing officers, about 130 of them at protests.

Top DHS officials, including former Secretary Kristi Noem, went further, claiming that filming ICE agents was interfering with arrests. Last summer, three siblings driving in Texas were detained after they stopped to film an immigration arrest. One of the siblings was a young teen. “They tackled me down and an agent put one knee behind my knee, where I felt a sharp pain,” he told ProPublica. He was separated from his mother, who has a green card. “They were saying my mom wasn’t a U.S. citizen, and I was scared they were gonna take her away.”

The siblings have filed claims for damages with the government. Asked about the incident, DHS said it respects “the First Amendment rights of individuals to observe and express themselves. However, if such actions interfere with or obstruct our operations, ICE will take necessary steps to address the situation.”

Our review did uncover instances that appear to show some protesters or other civilians assaulting officers. One person pleaded guilty to throwing pieces of cinder block at an agent. A woman in California pleaded guilty to pulling off an officer’s mask.

Many protesters were accused of crimes but never actually charged. We found 137 instances of citizens who were charged with federal crimes, most of whom were charged with assaulting or obstructing federal agents. In nearly half of those instances, the charges were dropped or dismissed. Three dozen citizens have been sentenced to prison or probation, and another three dozen cases are pending, as of September 15.

Explore incidents where citizens were detained while recording.

Some of those arrested, like clarinet player Oriana Korol, were initially charged with felony assault before pleading guilty to a misdemeanor — in Korol’s case, for trying to kick an officer. She said she did so after officers shoved her and pepper-sprayed her twice in the face. Just moments before, the band had been playing the “Ghostbusters” theme song as part of a peaceful protest.

Video footage shows agents leading Korol away, handcuffed, while one pulls her tear-gas-soaked mask over her mouth. “Please pull it down,” Korol tells the agents in the video. “I’m going to have an asthma attack. I have asthma. Why are you doing this to me? Please.”

The Rights of Children

Unlike earlier administrations, Trump has detained significant numbers of immigrant children living far from the border. Citizen kids have been swept up too — at least 70 of them. We’ve found about 20 kids who were handcuffed or zip-tied.

DHS said that ICE doesn’t zip-tie or restrain children, or separate families. But agents handcuffed a 15-year-old with disabilities outside a school in Los Angeles in 2025. The agents said they mistook the teen for an alleged gang member. A few months later, officers detained more than a dozen American children during a raid on an Idaho horse track. Anabel Romero said her children are still deeply shaken by their detention.

Romero told us how her 7-year-old son warned his older sister about going to another race this month: “He said, ‘Watch out for ICE, make sure you have your phone to film — I’ll come save you.’”

“Without Due Process of Law”

As the government has rushed to deport people as quickly as possible, Americans have also been swept up and removed from the country too. About a dozen American kids have been deported with their parents, allegedly over their parents’ objections.

DHS said: “Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”

One American adult in Texas was also deported this spring.

The car Brian Morales Garcia was in was pulled over earlier this year in central Texas. Officers didn’t believe him when he said he was a citizen. And they wouldn’t let him get his birth certificate. Morales Garcia was held for four days without being able to call his lawyer or anyone else. Then he was deported to Mexico.

After suing, Morales Garcia was allowed back into the country just last month using his birth certificate.

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Morales Garcia’s deportation. In earlier court filings, officials disputed Morales Garcia’s citizenship and claimed he had admitted to being born in Mexico.

“I couldn’t process what they were doing to me.” Morales Garcia told ProPublica. When he was first stopped in Texas, he had told officers, “I’m a citizen, it’s fine.”

Explore more video evidence compiled by ProPublica and our list of incidents where 506 citizens were detained.

How We Reported This Story

How We Counted Incidents

We found and vetted cases from a number of sources, including English- and Spanish-language social media, DHS statements, court records and local news reports, in addition to our own reporting. We included an incident in our dataset only if we could find at least two sources for it. For additional details about the incident, like whether crowd control weapons were used, we accepted one source in some cases.

When DHS provided a response specific to an incident — including about whether it happened or the circumstances under which it happened — we noted that response in cases in our full list for which we offered detail beyond a simple count of detained citizens. DHS responses that generically denied ever detaining citizens or that are proven inaccurate by our reporting were not included.

As with our count a year ago, most of the detained Americans on our list fell into two broad categories. The first is Americans who were held because agents questioned their citizenship. This time, we found more than a hundred 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 roughly 300 Americans. 

In many of these cases, the government accused but never charged these individuals with assault. Sometimes agents detained people because of questions about their citizenship but later accused them of crimes. While public attention often focuses on ICE, the immigration dragnet often relied on officers from agencies across the government.

Since the government itself does not track these cases, our list is almost certainly an undercount. Except in a few cases in which DHS itself confirmed detentions, we only counted citizens we were able to individually identify. So, for example, while witnesses estimate as many as 200 citizens were detained in an Idaho raid last fall, we were only able to identify 30 individuals by time of publication. We encountered the same issues for many smaller raids and protests, such as a raid of a food plant in Cato, New York; protesters detained by ICE at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey; and a raid of a Hyundai-LG plant in Ellabell, Georgia.

ICE itself occasionally has stated higher numbers than we were able to confirm: It told Congress that 131 citizens were arrested for assaulting, obstructing or interfering this year in Minnesota’s Metro Surge. It didn’t name them. We cataloged fewer than a hundred.

We tagged each case with details like whether a minor was detained or a citizen was held after filming. Another trend we tracked was citizens held for more than a day without access to a lawyer or their family. When multiple citizens were detained in one incident or sometimes on the same day and city, we grouped them together.

Because we focused on the expanded presence of immigration agents in American communities, we restricted our count to warrantless arrests that took place outside of airports and away from the borders, where immigration agents have long had more authority. We also excluded cases of Americans who were arrested after a judicial warrant.

We did not include incidents where an agent shot, tackled or pepper-sprayed a citizen but didn’t detain them.

We also did not include immigration protesters arrested by police who were only enforcing local laws. We did, however, include some cases involving police working with immigration agents. We still have little visibility into how many citizens have been detained by police deputized to act as immigration agents.

We also found reports of more than 30 Americans who felt racially profiled by immigration agents, but we did not include them in our database because it was not clear they were held against their will.

How We Counted and Reviewed Court Cases

We searched every named adult in our list to see if they were charged with a federal crime in relation to their detention. We conducted searches, using several name combinations for people with double names or compound names, in federal district courts through the online platform PACER. We looked for a criminal case filed within two months of the noted date of a person’s detention in the judicial district in which the detention happened. We then noted whether we found charges, what the charges were, and whether the person involved was sentenced or had their case dismissed or discharged.

How We Chose the Videos in This Report

We reviewed hundreds of videos of federal agents detaining American citizens across the country. While that included body camera footage, news clippings and helicopter footage, the vast majority of videos were made by bystanders and shared over social media. Many of the videos went viral and were recirculated across the internet by a range of third-party accounts. They touch on everyday American life in a range of settings, including workplaces, homes, protests, car washes, suburban sidewalks and the interiors of vehicles.

We tagged each video with how clearly it shows the incident and whether the citizen detained was clearly visible. We then categorized the videos by the kind of conduct they show, such as citizens being detained after recording. We provided DHS an opportunity to respond to each of the videos we included.

We did not alter videos, nor did we add watermarks, blur faces or overlay captions on videos unless otherwise noted. Videos that include captions or watermarks are shown as they were obtained.

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