During the second presidency of Donald Trump, federal immigration enforcement policies and operations have resulted in the documented arrest, death, detention, and removal of American citizens. As of October 2025, the U.S. government was not tracking the number of detained or missing citizens, but ProPublica confirmed at least 170 citizen detentions by that time. The deportation of U.S. citizens from the United States is illegal.

High-profile detention cases of American citizens include arrests of elected officials, disabled adults and children, and Puerto Rican and Indigenous people. Donald Trump has voiced support for the denaturalization of American citizens and the detainment of citizens in foreign prisons noted for human rights abuses.

Congressional Democrats have challenged the Trump administration to justify the detention of U.S. citizens and have been blocked by the Trump administration from investigating, passing laws limiting abuses, or overseeing immigration actions affecting U.S. citizens. President Trump, other Republicans, and administration officials alternately confirmed, defended, and denied reports of American citizens being arrested, deported, and detained. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was confirmed by independent review and U.S. judges to have violated laws including the Immigration Act of 1990 by interrogating and detaining people without warrants or review of their citizenship status.

The Trump administration's treatment of U.S. citizens has raised concerns among civil rights advocates. Some activists have compared the impact of ICE on American citizens to concentration camps such as Manzanar, where Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II. Between 110,000 and 120,000 U.S. citizensThe official WRA record from 1946 states it was 120,000 people. See were imprisoned by the U.S. government during the internment of Japanese Americans for political reasons from 1942 to 1945. The Cato Institute called Trump's immigration policies damaging to American interests. Legal and immigration experts have stated that these legal violations were caused by Trump administration pressure to deport people quickly without safeguards.

Background

ICE history of deporting or detaining citizens The Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent non-partisan agency of the United States Congress, found that up to 70 U.S. citizens were deported by ICE between 2015 and 2020. In the same time period, ICE was confirmed to have arrested 674 potential U.S. citizens and detained 121. Investigators determined that both ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) maintain poor and insufficient records, and that the numbers may be higher. The GAO found that ICE has defects and loopholes in their training and operations. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found ICE named 2,840 U.S. citizens as eligible for deportation between 2002 and 2017. Of those, 214 citizens were arrested by ICE. Based on research and surveys of immigration attorneys, Jacqueline Stevens of Northwestern University estimated that 1% of all ICE detainees are U.S. citizens, based on pre-2025 numbers, but that the rates would increase under the second Trump administration's more aggressive immigrant deportation program. The American Immigration Lawyers Association states that ICE and CBP have a documented history of racism and racial profiling among their rank and file.

Proposed transfer of U.S. citizens to foreign prisons Despite longstanding legal prohibitions against deporting American citizens, President Trump explored the possibility of transferring citizens convicted of crimes to foreign prisons during his second presidential term. Trump publicly stated numerous times that his administration was examining whether such actions could be legally pursued.

Under the law of the United States, a U.S. citizen cannot legally be deported and has the legal right to return to the United States at any time. ("Denial of rights and privileges as national") Prior to the second Trump administration, some academic studies attempted to count the number of unlawful detention and deportations of American citizens that had previously occurred; one study estimated that from 2003 to 2011 more than 20,000 Americans were incorrectly detained or deported by immigration officials.

Beginning with his second presidential administration, Trump pushed for mass deportations along with reducing safeguards to stop inappropriate detentions and deportations. This process resulted in American citizens becoming entangled in enforcement efforts. New York magazine described the problem as, "[i]t's not a matter of if U.S. citizens are getting caught up in President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown and mass-deportation efforts but, rather, how and how many."

El Salvador offer to imprison U.S. citizens

While visiting the White House on February 4, 2025, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele stated his willingness to house people of any nationality detained by the United States, including American citizens, in the maximum security Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador for payment. He confirmed the statement on X, writing that he had offered the U.S. "the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system". Although the U.S. government cannot legally deport U.S. citizens, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the administration would study whether the U.S. Constitution and laws would enable the administration to do so.

Rubio called the offer "very generous", noting that it was the first time another country had made such an offer, and that it would cost a fraction of imprisoning criminals in the U.S. prison system. Trump said that he was looking into whether he could move forward with the offer, telling reporters, "if we had a legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat." Trump also stated that he was not sure whether that legal right existed, and that the administration was assessing it. Trump said the cost of incarcerating American prisoners in other countries would be much less than that of imprisoning people in the U.S., and in addition, "it would be a great deterrent." He said that several countries had already agreed to host American prisoners.

Elon Musk called the proposal a "Great idea!!" on X. Rubio specified that this would apply to dangerous criminals. However, Politico noted that Bukele said on X that El Salvador would gladly take U.S. ex-senator Bob Menendez, who was serving an 11-year prison sentence for bribery but who was not a violent criminal. In March 2025, iresponse to a spate of incidents involving vandalizing Teslas, Trump suggested that such "terrorist thugs" could be sent to Salvadoran prisons.

Ahead of Bukele's White House visit in April 2025, Trump confirmed that they would discuss sending Americans to El Salvador's prisons and stated, "if they can house these horrible criminals for a lot less money than it costs us, I'm all for it." When Trump met with Bukele at the White House on April 14, they continued to discuss the topic of sending Americans to CECOT, with Trump exploring its legality.

During the visit, Trump and Bukele discussed the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which courts and news outlets described as illegal. In this context, Trump was quoted as advocating for the deportation of U.S. citizens, telling Bukele: "Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough."

Analysis of moving citizens to foreign jails Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy for the Vera Institute of Justice, stated that no reasonable reading of "the Constitution or due process" would allow the President to send American citizens to serve their time in foreign prisons. Lauren-Brooke Eisen, the senior director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Politico that the proposal would be illegal because it violates the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, as well as the First Step Act, which requires Americans sentenced to prison to serve in facilities that are "as close as practicable to the prisoner's primary residence, and to the extent practicable, in a facility within 500 driving miles of that residence."

The BBC noted that while U.S. citizens are technically afforded legal protection from deportation, it is possible for naturalized citizens to be denaturalized. This can happen when the citizenship was fraudulently obtained, and thus, citizens suspected of ties to criminal gangs or terrorist organizations, such as Tren de Aragua or MS-13, could, in theory, be stripped of citizenship and then deported after due process. Citizens born in the U.S. cannot be denaturalized.

Proposals to denaturalize citizens

Besides researching whether the Trump administration could send American citizens to foreign prisons, the Trump administration also was looking into stripping citizenship away and deporting certain citizens through the denaturalization process as reported in July 2025. The Department of Justice wrote in a memorandum that the civil division is going to "prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence."

In June 2025, United States Representative Andy Ogles called for Uganda-born US citizen Zohran Mamdani, then-candidate in elections for Mayor of New York City, to be denaturalized and expelled from the United States.

In July 2025, President Trump threatened to denaturalize comedian and long-standing critic Rosie O'Donnell, who was born in New York state and holds dual United States and Irish citizenship.

In December 2025, it was reported that USCIS guidance, issued the same month, said that the Office of Immigration Litigation be supplied with "100–200 denaturalization cases per month" in the 2026 fiscal year. Previously, from 2017–2025, "just over 120 cases" had been filed. Immigrants may be denaturalized under federal law only if they have committed fraud while applying for citizenship. In most cases they would be granted legal permanent residence. In 2025, the Justice Department brought thirteen such cases and won eight of them.

Deaths

Renée Good

Ruben Ray Martinez On March 15, 2025, San Antonio resident Martinez, 23, and his friend went to South Padre Island, Texas on a spring break trip. Officers from HSI were assisting local police in directing traffic after an accident. ICE documents claimed Martinez did not initially respond to commands to stop, then accelerated forward, hitting an agent. Another agent, later identified as Jack C. Stevens, after being struck and damaging the driver-side mirror, fired three shots through the open driver's side window, killing Martinez. Lawyers for Martinez's family say that eyewitness accounts were not consistent with the government's report, and Martinez's mother said a Texas Rangers investigator told her there was video of the shooting that contradicted the federal account. Although local sources reported on the shooting in March 2025 shortly after it occurred, ICE's involvement was not disclosed until internal documents were obtained as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the watchdog group American Oversight in February 2026.

Days after the shooting was disclosed, Martinez's friend Joshua Orta, the only passenger in the car with Martinez and only known eyewitness of the shooting, was killed in an unrelated highway collision in San Antonio. Orta had disputed the official narrative given by the DHS of the incident and had planned to assist with further inquiries into the shooting. Orta stated that Martinez drank several shots and a beer and smoked marijuana and in the video, Martinez was seen briefly holding an open bottle of alcohol. Autopsy reports indicate that Martinez exceeded the legal alcohol limit to drive. After Orta's death, a county grand jury declined to hand up indictments in the case.