A Democracy Drive Thread
Masked agents, deaths in detention, U.S. citizens shot and detained, toddlers deported — a chronological, sourced record of what Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its sister agencies have done since January 2025, and who paid the price.
Handed a vast budget and arrest quotas to fill, ICE and the Border Patrol became the sharp edge of the administration's mass-deportation drive. This thread is a sourced, chronological record of what that has meant on the ground: U.S. citizens shot, beaten, and detained; children — some of them citizens — deported or hospitalized; a rising toll of deaths in custody that the agency then moved to hide; and agents who, when they crossed the line, were defended rather than disciplined. Every entry links to its sources. The list is not exhaustive — it is a representative record of a pattern.
January 20, 2025
In the first months of the second term, the administration arrested and detained the parents of more than 11,000 U.S.-citizen children, according to ProPublica — forcing families to choose between separation and taking their American kids to countries they had never known.
January 23, 2025
Genry Ruiz Guillen, a 29-year-old Honduran national, died on January 23, 2025 in ICE custody at the Krome North Service Processing Center in Hialeah, Florida. He died of hyperosmolality, hypernatremia and rhabdomyolysis, among the first detainees to die as the administration rapidly expanded detention.
January 29, 2025
Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, a 45-year-old Ethiopian national, died on January 29, 2025 in ICE custody at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona. He died of acute respiratory distress, pneumonia and sepsis after being hospitalized in Phoenix.
February 20, 2025
Maksym Chernyak, a 45-year-old Ukrainian national, died on February 20, 2025 in ICE custody at the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, Florida. He suffered a stroke in custody and was pronounced dead at a Miami hospital.
February 23, 2025
Juan Alexis Tineo-Martinez, a 44-year-old Dominican national, died on February 23, 2025 in ICE custody at ICE custody in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He died of a collapsed lung after being taken to a San Juan hospital.
March 15, 2025
Just after midnight on March 15, 2025, Ruben Ray Martinez, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen, drove slowly past officers managing traffic near a crash scene on South Padre Island, Texas, when an ICE Homeland Security Investigations agent fired multiple rounds at him through an open side window, killing him. ICE claimed Martinez had struck an agent with his car — but body-camera footage released by the Texas Department of Public Safety shows nothing of the kind, and the agent who fired was not wearing a camera. Though the death was reported at the time, the government did not disclose that a federal agent had killed him until nearly a year later, when members of Congress demanded a public accounting.
April 7, 2025
The administration admitted it had deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father, to a notorious El Salvador mega-prison through what it called an “administrative error” — then fought all the way to the Supreme Court to avoid returning him.
April 15, 2025
Trump and his press secretary confirmed the White House was looking for “legal pathways” to send U.S. citizens — whom Trump called “homegrowns” — to El Salvador's mega-prison.
“The homegrowns are next.”
April 16, 2025
DOJ attorney Erez Reuveni was fired after he candidly told a court that Abrego Garcia's deportation had been an error — punished not for the mistake but for admitting it.
Nhon Ngoc Nguyen, a 55-year-old Vietnamese national, died on April 16, 2025 in ICE custody at the El Paso Processing Center in Texas. He was transferred to hospice with dementia, agitation and a pressure ulcer, and died in El Paso.
April 25, 2025
A 2-year-old U.S. citizen, identified in court records as “VML,” was deported to Honduras with her mother — in what a federal judge said happened with “no meaningful process” to protect the child's rights.
Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old Haitian national, died on April 25, 2025 in ICE custody at the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, Florida. She died of cardiovascular failure tied to hypertension; her death drew scrutiny over conditions at the facility.
May 3, 2025
House Republicans defeated an amendment that would have explicitly prohibited ICE from detaining U.S. citizens.
May 5, 2025
Abelardo Avelleneda-Delgado, a 68-year-old Mexican national, died on May 5, 2025 in ICE custody at the Lowndes County Jail in Valdosta, Georgia. He became unresponsive while being transported to the Stewart Detention Center and could not be revived.
May 20, 2025
ICE began arresting migrants as they arrived for their own immigration court hearings — making compliance with the law the moment of capture.
May 31, 2025
CBP was found to be uploading the DNA of migrants — including children as young as four — into CODIS, the FBI's national criminal DNA database.
June 7, 2025
Jesus Molina-Veya, a 45-year-old Mexican national, died on June 7, 2025 in ICE custody at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia. He was found unresponsive with a cloth ligature around his neck and pronounced dead at a Georgia hospital.
June 23, 2025
Johnny Noviello, a 49-year-old Canadian national, died on June 23, 2025 in ICE custody at a federal detention center in Miami, Florida. He was found unresponsive and could not be revived; his death prompted a formal response from the Canadian government.
June 26, 2025
Isidro Perez, a 75-year-old Cuban national, died on June 26, 2025 in ICE custody at the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, Florida. The 75-year-old was found in cardiac distress and died despite CPR and defibrillation.
July 19, 2025
Tien Xuan Phan, a 55-year-old Vietnamese national, died on July 19, 2025 in ICE custody at the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center in Texas. He was hospitalized for seizures, vomiting and unresponsiveness and died in Karnes City.
August 7, 2025
Chaofeng Ge, a 32-year-old from Queens, was found hanged in a shower stall at a Pennsylvania ICE processing center. His family sued the government for answers.
August 31, 2025
Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas, a 32-year-old Mexican national, died on August 31, 2025 in ICE custody at a detention facility in Florence, Arizona. He was hospitalized and died of suspected pulmonary complications at 32.
September 8, 2025
Oscar Duarte Rascon, a 58-year-old Mexican national, died on September 8, 2025 in ICE custody at the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona. He had late-stage Alzheimer's disease, kidney cancer and hepatitis C, and died in a Mesa hospital.
September 12, 2025
On September 12, 2025, an ICE officer shot and killed Silverio Villegas González, a 38-year-old Mexican immigrant who had lived in the Chicago area for nearly two decades, as he tried to drive away from a traffic stop in suburban Franklin Park during the administration’s “Midway Blitz” enforcement operation. DHS claimed Villegas González had dragged an officer with his car; the Cook County medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, and the Illinois State Police opened an investigation. It was one of the first killings of the intensified 2025 immigration crackdown around Chicago.
September 18, 2025
Santos Reyes-Banegas, a 42-year-old Honduran national, died on September 18, 2025 in ICE custody at the Nassau County Correctional Center in East Meadow, New York. He died of liver failure less than 18 hours after being taken into ICE custody.
September 22, 2025
Ismael Ayala Uribe, a 39-year-old Mexican national, died on September 22, 2025 in ICE custody at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California. He developed an abscess, went into tachycardia and hypotension, and died of a heart attack.
September 29, 2025
Huabing Xie, a 53-year-old Chinese national, died on September 29, 2025 in ICE custody at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, California. He suffered an apparent seizure in custody and died in San Diego.
September 30, 2025
A federal judge ruled the administration had violated the First Amendment by targeting noncitizen students and professors for deportation over pro-Palestinian speech.
October 4, 2025
A CBP agent shot Marimar Martinez, a 30-year-old woman, five times during an immigration operation in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood.
Leo Cruz-Silva, a 34-year-old Mexican national, died on October 4, 2025 in ICE custody at the Ste. Genevieve County Jail in Missouri. He was reported to have died by hanging while held for ICE.
October 11, 2025
Hasan Ali Moh'D Saleh, a 67-year-old Jordanian national, died on October 11, 2025 in ICE custody at the Krome North Detention Center in Miami, Florida. The 67-year-old spiked a high fever, became unresponsive and died of cardiac arrest.
October 20, 2025
ICE agents shot 25-year-old U.S. citizen Carlos Jimenez in the shoulder in Los Angeles; his lawyers said he was hit from behind as he stopped to warn a school bus of agents nearby.
October 23, 2025
Gabriel Garcia-Aviles, a 56-year-old Mexican national, died on October 23, 2025 in ICE custody at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California. He went into cardiac arrest attributed to alcohol withdrawal and died in Victorville.
October 25, 2025
During a Chicago enforcement sweep, Border Patrol agents allegedly dragged and broke the ribs of a 67-year-old U.S. citizen and member of a local running club.
Kai Yin Wong, a 63-year-old Chinese national, died on October 25, 2025 in ICE custody at the South Texas ICE Processing Center in San Antonio, Texas. He died of heart failure and possible pneumonia at a San Antonio hospital.
October 26, 2025
Randall Gamboa Esquivel, 52, died after being deported to Costa Rica in a vegetative state following his time in ICE custody.
November 5, 2025
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed no U.S. citizens had been arrested or detained in immigration sweeps — a statement fact-checkers rated false, with multiple documented cases by then.
“No American citizens have been arrested or detained.”
November 22, 2025
Federal prosecutors apologized in court for deporting Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old Babson College student detained days before Thanksgiving.
December 3, 2025
Francisco Gaspar-Andres, a 48-year-old Guatemalan national, died on December 3, 2025 in ICE custody at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas. He was hospitalized with suspected liver and kidney failure and died in El Paso.
December 5, 2025
Pete Sumalo Montejo, a 72-year-old Filipino national, died on December 5, 2025 in ICE custody at the Montgomery Processing Center in Texas. The 72-year-old died of pneumonia complications, hypoxia and shortness of breath.
December 6, 2025
Shiraz Fatehali Sachwani, a 48-year-old Pakistani national, died on December 6, 2025 in ICE custody at the Prairieland Detention Center near Fort Worth, Texas. He died of heart failure related to respiratory, liver and kidney problems.
December 9, 2025
ICE agents in Minneapolis arrested Susan Tincher, a U.S. citizen, while she peacefully observed one of their operations as a community witness.
December 12, 2025
Jean Wilson Brutus, a 41-year-old Haitian national, died on December 12, 2025 in ICE custody at the Delaney Hall Detention Facility in Newark, New Jersey. He was found dead of suspected natural causes at the privately run facility.
December 14, 2025
Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, a 39-year-old Nicaraguan national, died on December 14, 2025 in ICE custody at the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Mississippi. He was found without a pulse and removed from a ventilator after doctors found no brain function.
Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, a 46-year-old Eritrean national, died on December 14, 2025 in ICE custody at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania. He died in medical distress after complaining of chest pain, amid allegations of inadequate care at the facility.
December 15, 2025
With deaths in immigration detention reaching a 22-year high, ICE quietly scaled back the detailed public reports it had long issued each time a detainee died.
December 16, 2025
Nenko Gantchev, a 56-year-old Bulgarian-born Chicago business owner, died in ICE custody at a privately run Michigan facility.
December 31, 2025
On the night of December 31, 2025, Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old father of two, was firing an AR-15-style rifle into the air in a New Year’s Eve celebration outside his home in Northridge, Los Angeles, the LAPD said, when an off-duty ICE agent — later identified in court filings as Brian Palacios — left his apartment with his service weapon and shot him dead. DHS said Porter had pointed the rifle at the agent; his family and neighbors said he was celebrating and posed no threat, and that the agent should have called police and waited. No charges have been filed, and the family is demanding an independent investigation.
January 3, 2026
Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban national, died on January 3, 2026 in ICE custody at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas. An autopsy ruled his death a homicide by asphyxia, noting petechiae — a rare official homicide finding among in-custody deaths.
January 5, 2026
Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, a 42-year-old Honduran national, died on January 5, 2026 in ICE custody at ICE custody in Conroe, Texas. He died of congestive heart failure after being hospitalized.
January 6, 2026
Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, a 68-year-old Honduran national, died on January 6, 2026 in ICE custody at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, California. The 68-year-old was hospitalized with chest pains and died in Indio.
January 7, 2026
ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old American woman, in Minneapolis; a family-commissioned autopsy found she was shot in the head. Ross received three days of administrative leave. Trump publicly defended him, falsely claiming Good had “run over” the officer — who, video showed, remained on his feet throughout.
“...very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”
January 9, 2026
Parady La, a 46-year-old Cambodian national who came to the U.S. at age two, died on January 9, 2026 in ICE custody at a federal detention center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He suffered an anoxic brain injury after cardiac arrest attributed to drug withdrawal and died in Philadelphia.
January 14, 2026
Victor Manuel Diaz, a 36-year-old Nicaraguan national, died on January 14, 2026 in ICE custody at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas. He was found unresponsive in a death ICE deemed a presumed suicide; his family has disputed that account.
Heber Sánchez Domínguez, a 34-year-old Mexican national, died on January 14, 2026 in ICE custody at the Robert A. Deyton Detention Facility in Lovejoy, Georgia. The 34-year-old husband and father was found hanging in his cell.
January 18, 2026
Amalia, an 18-month-old held at the Dilley family detention center in Texas, was hospitalized with respiratory failure after her family said she was denied medication.
January 23, 2026
Wael Tarabishi, a 30-year-old with Pompe disease, died after ICE detained his father and primary caregiver, who had been the one driving him to medical care.
January 24, 2026
On January 24, 2026, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and ICU nurse at a VA hospital, on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis. DHS said Pretti was armed and was shot in self-defense as he resisted being disarmed, but bystander video does not show him holding a weapon, and a CNN analysis appears to show a federal officer removing a gun from him just before he was shot at least ten times. Pretti, who had a state permit to carry and no criminal record, was the third person shot by federal agents in Minneapolis in under a month — after ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Renee Good on January 7.
February 16, 2026
Dr. Linda Davis, a special-education teacher in Savannah, Georgia, was killed when a man fleeing ICE officers crashed into her car.
Lorth Sim, a 59-year-old Cambodian national, died on February 16, 2026 in ICE custody at the Miami Correctional Facility in Bunker Hill, Indiana. He was found unresponsive in his cell and pronounced dead.
Jairo Garcia-Hernandez, a 27-year-old Guatemalan national, died on February 16, 2026 in ICE custody at ICE custody in South Miami, Florida. The 27-year-old collapsed unexpectedly with severe medical complications and died.
February 27, 2026
Alberto Gutierrez-Reyes, a 48-year-old Mexican national, died on February 27, 2026 in ICE custody at ICE custody in Victorville, California. He suffered from diabetes and high cholesterol; a city council member said he had been denied medical care.
March 1, 2026
Pejman Karshenas Najafabadi, a 59-year-old Iranian national, died on March 1, 2026 in ICE custody at ICE custody in Natchez, Mississippi. The 59-year-old, who had chronic health issues, died of cardiac arrest at a Mississippi hospital.
March 2, 2026
Emmanuel Damas, a 56-year-old Haitian asylum seeker, died of sepsis from an untreated tooth infection while held in ICE custody in Arizona.
March 7, 2026
After arresting an undocumented father in Franklin Township, New Jersey, ICE agents left his two young children unattended.
March 11, 2026
A judge dismissed felony charges against Miguel Angel Garcia Martinez, a 24-year-old U.S. citizen, after agents' accounts of him “assaulting” them were contradicted by the record.
March 14, 2026
Mohammad Nazeer Paktyawal, a 41-year-old former Afghan special-forces soldier who had been legally evacuated to the United States, died in ICE custody.
March 16, 2026
Royer Perez-Jimenez, a 19-year-old Mexican national, died on March 16, 2026 in ICE custody at the Glades County Detention Center in Moore Haven, Florida. The 19-year-old was found unconscious and unresponsive in his room and could not be revived.
March 23, 2026
The Justice Department admitted in federal court that the administration had wrongfully deported 91 asylum seekers who were protected by a court order.
March 25, 2026
José Guadalupe Ramos-Solano, a 52-year-old Mexican national, died on March 25, 2026 in ICE custody at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California. He was found unresponsive in his bunk; he had suffered from diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol.
April 1, 2026
Tuan Van Bui, a 55-year-old Vietnamese national, died on April 1, 2026 in ICE custody at the Miami Correctional Facility in Bunker Hill, Indiana. He was found unresponsive at the facility and pronounced dead.
April 11, 2026
Alejandro Cabrera Clemente, a 49-year-old Mexican national, died on April 11, 2026 in ICE custody at the Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana. He was found unresponsive at the privately run facility and could not be revived.
April 12, 2026
Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt, a 27-year-old Cuban national, died on April 12, 2026 in ICE custody at a federal detention center in Miami, Florida. The 27-year-old died in what officials called a presumed suicide.
April 28, 2026
Denny Adan Gonzalez, a 33-year-old Cuban national, died on April 28, 2026 in ICE custody at ICE custody in Lumpkin, Georgia. He died in what officials called a presumed suicide.
June 4, 2026
Mamuka Artmeladze, a 43-year-old national of Georgia, died on June 4, 2026 in ICE custody at the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana. He was found dead at the facility with the cause of death pending an autopsy.
June 19, 2026
Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez, a 63-year-old Mexican national, died on June 19, 2026 in ICE custody at the Webb County Detention Center in Laredo, Texas. The 63-year-old died of what officials described as natural causes.
June 24, 2026
On Election Day, two ICE agents found Syracuse poll worker Paigelynne Gonyea at the library where she was working and pressed her to sign a notice saying she was under investigation — over an Instagram post that named Jonathan Ross, the agent who had killed Renee Good. Election officials said law enforcement had no business inside a polling place.
“For ICE to come to me over a social media post just feels very 1984 to me.”
July 7, 2026
On July 7, 2026, around 6:50 a.m., an ICE officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had lived in the United States for roughly 35 years, as he drove his construction crew to a job site in Houston’s East End. A homebuilder and father of three who was in the process of obtaining a work permit, Salgado Araujo was not even the target of the operation, according to a source familiar with the case. The Department of Homeland Security said he had “weaponized his vehicle” and tried to run over an officer, who fired “in self-defense.” His passengers told their attorney otherwise: no agent was ever directly in front of the van, and the shots came from the sides — the officer, they said, fired through the passenger window — an account irreconcilable with the agency’s. His family and Houston officials demanded an independent investigation, and the DHS inspector general took over the inquiry as protests spread. It was one of at least eight deaths in the administration’s immigration-enforcement campaign.
July 13, 2026
On the morning of July 13, 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed a 26-year-old Colombian man at an intersection in Biddeford, Maine, during an immigration-enforcement operation. Immigrant-rights advocates said the man was authorized to work in the United States and had been issued a Social Security number; authorities had not publicly released his name. The Department of Homeland Security claimed he had tried to use his car as a weapon against agents pursuing him for deportation — but the agents were not wearing body cameras, so there is no footage of the encounter, and bystander video captured only the aftermath as agents tried to stop a white sedan circling the intersection. Sen. Angus King confirmed the agents had no body cameras; the FBI and Maine State Police opened investigations as protests grew. It was the second person killed by ICE in under a week, after an officer in Houston shot a man in his work van.
On July 13, 2026, Minnesota prosecutors announced that federal investigators had finally handed over evidence they had sought for more than half a year in the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti — both 37 — killed by federal immigration officers at anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said the materials included previously withheld hard drives containing statements, police body-camera video, and other records, along with Good’s badly damaged SUV. Good, a mother of three, was shot in her vehicle while leaving a protest on January 7; Pretti, an intensive-care nurse, was shot by federal officers weeks later on January 24. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said he remained “deeply troubled” by the delay: “It should never have taken this long.”
July 15, 2026
On the ground
After two men — Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine — were fatally shot in ICE-involved incidents, DHS on July 14, 2026 temporarily paused most ICE traffic stops. Within a day Trump, angered by criticism from prominent MAGA voices that the pause looked soft, ordered it reversed, posting that “The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch.” Senior ICE leaders said they were surprised by the reversal.
“The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch.”