Stories of 47
Snapshots of the second Trump administration.
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Tracking the Scale of ICE Detention's First Year
Federal data through March shows more than 450,000 people experienced ICE detention in the Trump administration's first fourteen months — a count that includes both new bookings and inter-facility transfers.
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Survivors of the Don Maca
Ecuadorian fishers aboard the Don Maca survived a US drone strike on their vessel during routine fishing operations; no evidence has been produced linking them or their boat to drug trafficking.
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First Day of the Iran War: An Untested Missile Hit a School
On the war's first day, the United States deployed a ballistic missile that had never been used in combat; analysis of the strike sites shows it hit a sports hall, an elementary school, and residential buildings, killing at least twenty-one including children.
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Hanne Engan, Type 1 Diabetic, Detained
Hanne Engan, a Norwegian woman married to an American citizen, was detained at her green card appointment in San Diego; while in custody at Otay Mesa, the equipment and insulin she needs to manage her Type 1 diabetes were withheld, she was nearly killed multiple times, and after her release she discovered her credit-card information had been stolen while she was in detention.
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The First Bumbling Raid
Investigative journalist Radley Balko launched an ongoing series cataloguing the false official statements that the Department of Homeland Security has issued after specific acts of abuse or violence by ICE and Border Patrol officers in the field; the first installment examines the illegal raid on ChongLy Scott Thao and his family.
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Four Out of Five Chemotherapy Sessions
Oudone Lothirath, a Minnesota man with aggressive lymphoma, missed four of five scheduled chemotherapy sessions while in ICE detention in Texas in January; he was returned to Minnesota only after a hospital letter warned he would die without treatment, and he is now in hospice.
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Inside Dilley
Sworn declarations from detained children and parents at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center — the nation's only family detention facility, run by CoreCivic and reopened in 2025 — describe vomit-inducing food, denied medical care, intimidating guards, and a four-year-old who developed a black eye after hitting his head, his potential concussion left untreated.
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When the Body Cameras Caught the Chase
Body camera footage from an October 2025 Chicago incident contradicts the Department of Homeland Security's account: Border Patrol agents continued a high-speed pursuit against direct supervisor orders to end it, blew a tire, crashed, and then deployed tear gas in the surrounding neighborhood.
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The Memo That Said What ICE Already Did
The legal memo ICE used for more than a year to justify courthouse arrests does not, on its face, grant that authority — a fact ICE's own counsel has now confirmed in writing to the Southern District of New York.
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Thirteen Thousand Sent Anywhere But Home
Thirteen thousand people have been removed under the third-country deportation framework — many under removal orders issued decades earlier that prior administrations would not have enforced this way.
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Twenty-Three Hours
Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal, an Afghan father of six who had worked alongside the US military in Afghanistan and was applying for asylum, died less than twenty-four hours after Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him outside his apartment in suburban Dallas.
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The Sons' New Drone Company
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are backers of a new drone company explicitly targeting Pentagon contracts; the company would profit from defense procurement decisions made by the administration of which their father is the head.
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The Pool
An Associated Press investigation, drawn from 911 calls and detainee accounts, reports that staff at the nation's largest ICE detention facility — Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss in Texas — placed bets on which detainee would next die by suicide; Camp East Montana sits on the site of a World War II Japanese American internment camp.
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Adding to the War Crimes File
Reading the Secretary of Defense's public statement that the mission would not be 'guided by rules rooted in the law of armed conflict,' former UN special rapporteur David Kaye flagged the declaration as material for any future war crimes prosecution.
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Arrested for Silent Challenge
Aliya Rahman, who was violently dragged from her car by federal agents in January, was arrested again at the State of the Union — the cited reason being that she had silently challenged the president during the speech.
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The Only Other Witness
The only passenger in the car when an ICE officer shot and killed a US citizen in Texas had planned to publicly contradict the government's official account of the shooting; before he could testify, he died in an unrelated car crash.
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Trained to Disregard
ICE whistleblower Ryan Schwank, a former agency instructor and staff attorney, testified that field agents were trained to disregard constitutional rights — making rights violations a matter of policy rather than aberration.
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When the Cameras Came Out
Federal prosecutions of protesters and others accused of 'assaulting' or 'impeding' federal officers have repeatedly collapsed when courtroom evidence — particularly video — contradicted the officers' sworn statements.
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Not Accidental
Deaths in immigration detention now match the patterns recorded in the early phases of past regimes' concentration camps: poor conditions, untreated disease, abuse — not random misfortune but the predictable output of a custodial system designed for harm.
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Seventy-Three Percent
Of people booked into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since the start of the second Trump administration's enforcement push, seventy-three percent had no criminal conviction of any kind; eight percent had a conviction for a violent or property offense.
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The Procurement Officer's Former Employer
The federal official directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detention procurement is a former GEO Group executive who, by ethics waiver, was permitted to award contracts to his prior employer — a company poised to receive tens of billions of dollars over four years through detention contracts often awarded without competitive bids.
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Eighteen Days for Being Latino
A 20-year-old lawfully present in the United States was arrested for being Latino and held for eighteen days in a Minnesota detention cell so cramped he couldn't sit down — an arrest the federal courts have since ruled unlawful.
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After the Letters Were Published
Letters from children imprisoned in the Dilley, Texas family detention camp — including a seven-year-old held for seventy days, a five-year-old, and a nine-year-old held for one hundred thirteen days — reached ProPublica. The day the resulting story was published, federal personnel raided the dormitories to confiscate further letters.
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The Customer in Question
CoreCivic's CEO described Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a 'customer' on a 2025 earnings call; investors on the same calls expressed frustration that the agency's record detention numbers were not yet high enough. ICE revenues for the contractor more than doubled that year.
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The Thirty-Eighth Killing
A running tally maintained by independent observers records the United States military's thirty-eighth instance of unlawfully killing civilians under the orders of the Secretary of Defense and the President; the cumulative count of dead is at least one hundred thirty.
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Five Patterns of Defiance
Federal judges hearing immigration cases have begun to articulate a recurring playbook of administrative noncompliance with their orders — across detainee transfers, deadlines, release conditions, post-release treatment, and bond hearings.
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One Hundred and Fifty Leases
WIRED reviewed federal records showing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has secretly negotiated more than 150 new office leases and expansions across nearly every U.S. state — many near schools, medical offices, and places of worship — with the General Services Administration explicitly asked to bypass usual procurement procedures and conceal listings under 'national security' pretext.
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She Has Not Gone Outside
Thi Dua Vang, a Hmong asylum-seeker in St. Paul who fled religious persecution in Vietnam and has legal status in the U.S., was detained by ICE in January, transferred to Texas, and ordered released by a judge after two weeks; since her return, she has been unable to leave her home because ICE agents continue to come to the door.
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The Sheriff Who Spoke Up
A day after Cumberland County, Maine sheriff Kevin Joyce publicly criticized ICE for arresting one of his corrections officers, ICE served the county with a subpoena demanding employment data on every person who had worked at the jail since January 2025; the agency separately ended its long-standing detention contract with the county.
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Gassed in His Own Home
Federal agents deployed tear gas on a Minneapolis crowd that included children; the canisters shattered the window of a low-income apartment occupied by a disabled veteran, who was tear-gassed inside his own home.
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The Doxxing That Hasn't Happened
The Department of Homeland Security has cited doxxing of ICE agents and rising assaults as the public rationale for permitting agents to operate while masked; according to DHS's own press releases, no ICE agent has been doxxed or assaulted in connection with this rationale since the start of the second Trump administration.
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Fifty-Nine Million, Conservatively
A Chicago Tribune review of court filings, databases, and public records puts the federal cost of Operation Midway Blitz, the immigration enforcement surge in Illinois, at at least fifty-nine million dollars over four months — a back-of-the-envelope figure DHS declined to confirm or contest.
2026
2025
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Hours on a Roof, in Subzero
Masked federal agents wearing ICE vests, refusing to identify themselves or present warrants, cordoned off a Minneapolis construction site and trapped two men on the roof for hours in subzero temperatures; one was eventually taken away by ambulance.
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Seventy Years, A Refugee Camp, Alligator Alcatraz
Paul Bojerski, seventy-nine, was born to Polish parents in a German refugee camp after World War II and emigrated legally to the United States with his family in 1952; in July of 2025 he was detained at a routine ICE check-in and sent to the Everglades detention camp known as Alligator Alcatraz on a decades-old removal order that had previously gone unenforced.
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Held for the Likes
Yaa'kub Ira Vijandre, a Texas photojournalist and DACA recipient, has been held in ICE custody for his Instagram posts and likes expressing support for Palestine; new court filings frame him as a political prisoner.
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Deported in a Vegetative State
Randall Alberto Gamboa Esquivel, a fifty-two-year-old Costa Rican man held in ICE custody in Texas since February, was put on an air ambulance to Costa Rica in September while in a vegetative state with encephalopathy and rhabdomyolysis; he died in a hospital in his hometown in October.
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The Toddler in the Backseat
Federal immigration agents in California arrested a U.S. citizen and drove away with the man's car — with his toddler still in the backseat — over the protests of a crowd that had gathered, and only after the crowd's intervention did agents permit the family to take the child.
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Less Than a Minute
A New York Times reconstruction of the September 12 Chicago-area shooting of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez — drawing on surveillance footage, body-camera video, and bystander recordings — contradicts the DHS account: the videos do not show Villegas-Gonzalez striking either officer with his car, and one of the officers describes his own injuries on camera as 'nothing major.'
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Cash Bonuses for Locating Immigrants
An ICE procurement document reviewed by The Intercept solicits private contractors to locate immigrants in batches of ten thousand at a time, with monetary bonuses paid based on how many targets are successfully tracked down — the contractor model resembles a plan circulated earlier in the year by former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince.
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Tear Gas Almost Every Day
After U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis issued a temporary restraining order on October 9 limiting federal agents' use of crowd-control weapons against Illinois protesters, court filings allege that federal agents violated the order 'almost every day,' including a Halloween-eve incident in which children on their way to a school parade were tear-gassed.
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Operation in the Most Conservative Neighborhood
A Border Patrol operation seized people working in the front yard of a home in Edison Park, Chicago, transferred them in a parking lot in a neighboring suburb to a prisoner van, and was met by neighbors blowing whistles and shouting at the agents.
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Fifty-Plus Cases That Fell Apart
A ProPublica investigation methodically tracked over fifty cases of US citizens detained by immigration agents on charges that were either dismissed in court or never filed at all — including a woman accused of an assault that wasn't on video and a charge listing the injury as 'the thumb of an ATF Special Agent.'
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What the Body Cam Said
Federal agents shot Marimar Martinez, a US citizen in Chicago, multiple times; the Department of Homeland Security's account claimed she menaced agents with a gun and her car, but charging documents and body camera footage have since contradicted nearly every element.
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What the Cold War Did to Passports
Historian Julia Rose Kraut, author of 'Threat of Dissent,' surfaced the Kent v. Dulles precedent on Bluesky in response to an Intercept report that Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who has already sought to punish immigrants for their speech — would have new legislative authority to extend that punishment to U.S. citizens; in 1958 the Supreme Court held that the right to travel cannot be conditioned on a citizen's political speech.