Just last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed a man in Houston, Texas who had lived in the country for 35 years; he was a father to three sons and a business owner. ICE didn’t even allege that he posed a danger at the time, or had committed crimes in the past. This wasn’t a lone occurrence: Senior White House official Tom Homan recently admitted that at least half of those ICE is currently arresting have no criminal record. And days later, ICE shot another man in Maine.
A new ACLU report, “Agents of Chaos and Cruelty,” illustrates how these types of headline-making abuses committed by ICE are the tip of an iceberg. We closely reviewed and documented more than 1,200 incidents that occurred in eight states in 2025. We found that ICE and the agents working for them — together, what we call the national deportation policing force — have adopted methods and routine tactics that frequently lead to serious civil rights violations. They are committing these violations at a scale and severity without precedent in our nation’s recent history.
The Trump administration is ramping up immigration arrests and deportations to record-breaking levels. Instead of surging into one city at a time — as we saw in Minneapolis and Los Angeles, for instance — the administration is escalating its deportation efforts in communities across the country, at the same time. A larger-than-ever ICE, together with the thousands of state and local police they have deputized, is attempting to arrest scores of people on American streets in the coming weeks to meet a quota. These street arrests, which ICE has never previously conducted at this scale, will endanger everyone’s rights and safety.
Turning American Streets Into Deportation Zones
The Trump administration has repeatedly characterized its actions as targeting “the worst of the worst,” but the reality is that no one is safe from its indiscriminate deportation drive. We identified numerous people who were detained, targeted, or subjected to law enforcement misconduct by the national deportation policing force, including:
- 782 protestors, journalists, elected officials, clergy, and community observers
- 214 children, including 32 who were U.S. citizens
- 155 U.S. citizens
The Trump administration has turned American streets into deportation zones, changing the nature of American life. In our research, we also identified:
- 624 instances when everyday locations like grocery stores, bus stops, and gas stations became the sites of immigration arrests
- 437 likely instances of racial profiling, which has become rampant
- 49 times the national deportation policing force was deployed at or near schools, prompting 40 school lockdowns
- 418 times agents pushed, shoved, tackled, or pinned people and 81 instances when agents used tactics that can limit breathing and become deadly, such as chokeholds
- 361 instances when agents deployed chemical irritants, including 132 times directly aimed at individuals
Agents made the threat of deadly force part of ordinary enforcement – and the cases we reviewed reveal the recklessness of agents. Examples include:
- In Hyattsville, Maryland, agents pinned a man in a busy intersection, pressing against his neck, when one dropped his gun. After scrambling to retrieve it, he turned it toward the crowd. A second agent later drew his weapon and moved toward bystanders.
- In Simi Valley, California, agents detained Rodrigo Almendarez, a U.S. citizen born in Canoga Park, outside his job at a roofing and building supply company. Agents left their SUV in drive when they grabbed him; the SUV rolled forward while one agent chased after it, striking a tree and shattering a side mirror.
- In Bowie, Maryland, agents arrested a father after he had just left home to drive his children to school in the family minivan. His three children — ages 6, 7, and 8 — were in the backseat as masked agents smashed his window, pulled him from the car, pinned him to the ground, pressed a hand on his neck, and pointed a Taser at him while he was pinned. The children later told their mother they saw agents point a gun at their father; video shows an agent pointing the Taser. He was detained one day after his wife said he had checked in for immigration supervision.
This civil rights data is among the largest that has ever been reported regarding ICE, and is based on our meticulous research and analysis. It’s not a full accounting of ICE’s street enforcement actions in 2025 — which exploded to unprecedented levels — but it is a striking sample. The data also expose the gaps in our accountability structures, which largely failed to stop agents who routinely threatened public safety in communities across the country.
The Blueprint for Authoritarian Rule
The tactics that “Agents of Chaos and Cruelty” details are straight from the authoritarian playbook. The Trump administration deploys anti-immigrant scapegoating and nearly explicit white supremacist narratives, even featuring white supremacist slogans and images in its recruitment campaigns. Its deportation drive also involves suppressing dissent, evading checks and balances, and consolidating executive power.
In 2025, senior officials created a national deportation policing force of officers who often appeared masked and menacing in our communities. They treated it as the president’s personal force to be deployed against American cities perceived as hostile to his interests, during political standoffs with the opposing party, and in response to protests. Now, the national deportation policing force is — with little public notice — operating all over the country, with state and local police conducting traffic stops and setting up checkpoints for immigration enforcement.
What we are experiencing mirrors aspects of countries under authoritarian rule, where the loss of basic freedoms grows so widespread that it seems less remarkable over time and simply becomes a fact of life. We must prevent the abuses we’ve seen across the country from becoming an accepted, new normal.
Transforming Our System: The ACLU's Affirmative Vision
It is time for transformative change to an immigration system that has long been cruel and dysfunctional, and has proven vulnerable to exploitation for authoritarian ends. Nearly 25 years since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and its component agency ICE, our immigration system requires a hard reset.
“Agents of Chaos and Cruelty” is the first in a new series of ACLU papers and reports making the case for the new immigration system we envision. This system would replace ICE’s abuses with "a new cabinet-level Immigration Management Agency oriented toward service — with a mission to keep families together, support American communities and meet the needs of the American workforce." Our democracy needs an immigration system built with safe, fair, and proportionate tools to hold people accountable to our immigration laws — not a vast paramilitary force operating with claimed immunity and punishing people with deadly, unjust, and unnecessary mass civil detention.
Congress must finally enact a path to citizenship so that millions of our loved ones and neighbors can gain lasting and real protection from deportation, and the equal rights and all protections under the law afforded by citizenship. Bills like the American Dream and Promise Act, which would extend a path to citizenship to an estimated 4.4 million Americans-in-waiting, should be at the top of Congress’ agenda. Congress must also dismantle the national deportation policing force, including by ending ICE’s misuse of state and local police through the 287(g) program. It should rescind the $240 billion in no-strings-attached funding it has provided to our immigration agencies; that money should go to supporting our communities, not attacking them.
Achieving transformative change to our immigration system will require all of us to call our members of Congress, state legislators, and city councils, and keep sharing why this matters.