Trump Says ICE Isn’t Detaining U.S. Citizens. Here’s the Truth.

The Trump administration has detained more than 500 U.S. citizens since it began its mass deportation initiative, a ProPublica investigation has found.

Trump officials have insisted that U.S. citizens are not at risk under the president’s agenda. “We have said it a million times: ICE does NOT arrest or deport U.S. citizens,” former DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement last October.

But that was a lie. A ProPublica story published Tuesday tracked every instance of an immigration agent holding a U.S. citizen during the second Trump administration.

They found 506 such cases, including at least 70 children and teenagers, and more than 100 Americans who were detained after federal agents questioned their citizenship status—nearly all of whom were people of color. ProPublica acknowledged that this total is likely an undercount.

At least 63 Americans were detained while they were recording and documenting their arrest, and 36 were refused the right to contact their lawyers or family for more than a day. Roughly a dozen U.S. citizens were deported, according to the report. Most of them were children.

“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,” ProPublica noted.

The nonprofit newsroom’s findings call into question practically every public assurance DHS has made. Instead, it’s become increasingly clear that federal immigration agents have run roughshod over the U.S. Constitution as they face mounting pressure from the Oval Office and White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to deport as many people as possible.

Miller has framed immigration as an “invasion.” He has advocated to end habeas corpus for immigrants, promoted large-scale raids at workplaces, churches, and neighborhoods, threatened the futures of immigrants who do not “self-deport,” and encouraged the White House to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Miller was fundamental in crafting some of the more draconian policies of Donald Trump’s first term, including separating families at the border, terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and the executive orders that amounted to Trump’s Muslim ban.

In May 2025, Miller issued another tyrannical order to his ICE underlings: a minimum quota of 3,000 arrests per day. “President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every day,” Miller told Fox News at the time.

But that goal proved unsustainable, particularly after reports began to circulate that ICE agents had never been so miserable. Agents complained that the massive quota pushed them to detain noncriminal immigrants. The Justice Department walked back Miller’s directive in August that year, though even the loosened reins didn’t stop agents from arresting dozens of citizens.

During Operation Midway Blitz in September 2025, DHS pledged that ICE had “significant protections in place to ensure U.S. citizens are not arrested, detained, or mistakenly removed,” noting that there would be “no administrative arrests of U.S. citizens.” Something entirely different happened on the ground: at the height of the federal encroachment, agents detained more than 120 citizens across the state, according to the ProPublica report.

Darius Reeves, who ran ICE offices around the East Coast for roughly eight years before he retired in 2025, told ProPublica that he had “never seen so many U.S. citizen encounters in all my years.”

“It’s an embarrassment,” Reeves said.

The White House pressured the FBI to investigate anti-ICE protesters in Los Angeles in violation of the Constitution, a whistleblower alleges.

A former supervisory intelligence analyst in the bureau’s field office in Los Angeles, Jill Fields, made a formal complaint to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Trump administration’s response to the protests around federal buildings last year, NBC News reports.

After President Trump saw a TikTok video of people using megaphones to alert the public about immigration agents, their legal rights, and the legal requirement of judicial warrants, he ordered FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate those organizers, according to the complaint. A person whose name was redacted in Fields’s letter told her that “the President wants this investigation.”

The protests came in response to stepped-up ICE activity across Los Angeles early last year. Fields’s complaint states that the FBI’s L.A. agents were pulled from active drug cartel cases to provide “optics” and “make a show for the president,” in the words of one of her supervisors.

When Fields spoke to a senior bureau official who dealt with privacy and civil liberties issues, that agent shared her concerns but said she planned to resign. Fields would later resign herself after she was removed from leading three programs, which she believes was retaliation. The FBI created a chilling effect within the workforce” and “signaled to other employees that raising constitutional or legal concerns could carry professional consequences,” Fields wrote.

The Justice Department called Fields’s complaint politically motivated and said that the Constitution does not protect violence, even though her letter only mentioned investigation of peaceful protesters.

“Under President Trump, the Department of Justice will continue to vigorously uphold the First Amendment rights of all Americans and restore the rule of law,” a DOJ spokesperson told NBC News. “The DOJ and FBI have a responsibility to investigate any potential violations of federal law, and conspiracies to impede federal law enforcement and assaults on federal officers are against the law.”

Ultimately, Trump’s efforts to charge protesters in Los Angeles only resulted in dropped cases, and his decision to send federal troops to the city was shot down in federal court. But Trump wasn’t deterred from ramping up immigration enforcement in other cities across the country, such as Minneapolis and Chicago, and he continues to press on with his mass deportation efforts, defying the Constitution and federal courts every day. It remains to be seen if Democrats will put a stop to his policies if they take control of Congress after the midterms.

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is taking action to strip 40 naturalized Americans of their citizenship.

According to a DOJ press release published Monday, the department has filed “denaturalization actions” against these individuals after they were accused of “serious offenses,” including “acting as an agent for a foreign government, committing voluntary manslaughter, and aggravated sodomy against a special-needs man.” The press release goes on to list the names, ages, countries of origin, and alleged crimes that each foreign-born citizen committed.

This move comes in the final months of a year that the president has spent doggedly pursuing his mass deportation agenda, which has included expanding denaturalization efforts so that no one born outside of the U.S.—not even those with legal status—feels safe. Reporting from The New York Times in April revealed that the Department of Justice was targeting 384 naturalized Americans from whom it wanted to revoke citizenship, an attempt to denaturalize Americans at a level not seen since the early nineteenth century. A DOJ official at the time told the Times that the department’s April effort was only “the first wave.”

“Today’s announcement marks the largest denaturalization effort in modern history,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Monday. “From an individual convicted of espionage to others convicted of sexual offenses against minors, these defendants concealed critical facts from the U.S. government and represent serious criminal offenders.”

“Every single one of these individuals lied their way into U.S. citizenship,” Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate added in the release. “This administration will continue to pursue the largest denaturalization effort in department history to restore trust and integrity in U.S. citizenship. Our message is clear: The United States will not tolerate deception in the naturalization process.”

This is indeed a massive escalation in the Trump administration’s denaturalization crusade. In comparison, an average of just 15 denaturalization cases were filed per year from 2017 to 2025.

The 40 foreign-born American citizens now in danger of losing their citizenship originally came from countries including Mexico, Colombia, Pakistan, Haiti, Nepal, and Ghana. For the millions of naturalized Americans living in the U.S. today, the message is clear: Your citizenship may not be safe.

President Donald Trump called Natalie Harp a “perfect person” after showing her off to hundreds of rallygoers.

Trump invited a very special guest onstage at his rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, Monday night to deliver an executive order aimed at addressing the elevated fuel prices sparked by his war against Iran.

“So, tonight I’m going to sign a historic executive order to officially waive the off-road requirement and allow anyone to purchase tax-free red-dye diesel for any reason,” Trump said. “And I’d like to ask Natalie to come out. Natalie, come out! Bring it out here!”

As the president’s grinning blonde aide walked onto the stage, the crowd cheered wildly. After signing the document, Trump handed it back to Harp, patting her on the shoulder. As she departed the stage, the president looked back, just to ogle her one last time.

“She reminds me of, like, The Price is Right. ‘Thank you, Natalie! Come on!’ This perfect person comes up, hands it, walks up—we should go on television with this show, right?” Trump said.

Trump’s comment comparing Harp to a model only deepens assertions that the two have a wildly inappropriate working relationship. As Trump’s “human printer,” Harp has become the de facto gatekeeper to the president of the United States. In turn, Harp seems to have developed an unhealthy obsession with the president’s approval. Her own writing reveals that Harp views Trump as a kind of spiritual adviser, a father figure, and a Mr. Darcy-type romantic lead.

It was only two months ago that the White House raged over the speculation about Trump’s relationship to his 35-year-old assistant. Now the president doesn’t seem the least bit committed to putting those rumors to bed.

President Trump invited infamous election denier Tina Peters to the White House to discuss plans for the midterms.

Former Department of Justice official Ed Martin revealed the meeting to host Eric Bolling on the conservative network Real America’s Voice Monday, saying that Trump had met with Peters about two hours earlier.

“Tina Peters, you know, from Colorado, was in the Oval Office meeting with the president on election integrity, and they were talking about the plans,” Martin said.

Peters was the Mesa County clerk and recorder, a position that put her in charge of local elections, including polling logistics, candidate paperwork, voter registration, and processing ballots. After the 2020 election, she swallowed the MAGA conspiracy theory that the election was rigged through voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems.

That led her to give a security badge to a fellow election conspiracist, Conan Hayes, who used the access to copy the hard drive of a voting machine while Peters ensured security cameras were turned off. The data was turned over to MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell.

For her efforts, Peters was convicted of election tampering and sentenced to nine years in prison. Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis caved to pressure from Trump in May and ultimately commuted her sentence. Since then, she has basked in positive attention from right-wing media, repeating her claims of voter fraud and asking Trump for a job.

Monday’s visit was Peters’s second time at the White House, as she was invited to meet with Trump in June.

“What she went through should never happen to anyone again,” Trump posted on Truth Social at the time. “Just think of it, she caught the Democrats cheating, and they put her in jail for Voter Fraud.”

Of course, Peters found no proof of election fraud, which raises concerns about the supposed midterm plans the president wanted to discuss with her. On Monday, Martin claimed they discussed how Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in August “that election voting machines use parts from China and Russia and foreign places and are therefore compromised.” It appears that Trump is taking the word of a convicted election fraudster and trying to mess with November’s elections.