Perhaps the most consequential action that Stephen Miller, the president’s new Chief of Staff, took to shape ICE’s mass deportation campaign was in May 2025. Dissatisfied with the number of ICE arrests, he ordered a campaign of racial and demographic profiling—targeting people for interrogation, detention, and even arrest based on broad factors like race, ethnicity, language, and location.
Since that meeting, I’ve documented on social media hundreds of cases of Americans and legal residents being stopped, harassed, and even beaten for refusing to cooperate with racial profiling—a sampling of which you can find above. I tried to include even the seemingly benign document checks, and I exclude the many cases where ICE has attacked US citizens for other reasons, such as for protesting, which I’ve also documented extensively. But the pattern is disturbing: ICE and Border Patrol show complete hostility to the presumption of innocence and the 4th Amendment.
The incidents in my video compilation above include agents stopping individuals explicitly because they spoke with an accent, because they look “illegal,” and because they looked “scared” of the agents. Agents are caught on camera saying versions of: “Prove to me you’re a citizen or you’re going to jail.” One Hispanic American was stopped three times over the course of a few months in Alabama. Another one was detained multiple times within 5 minutes in Charlotte. American witnesses described what they were witnessing as profiling, and one former Trump voter who saw workers detained in his yard stated: “There is no constitutional right for them to do that.”
I have no doubt that racial and demographic profiling played a role in Hispanic Americans’ massive swing away from Republicans during the midterms. Nearly 90% of Hispanics who voted for Democrats oppose ICE’s tactics, according to NBC’s exit poll. I have heard from nearly every legal immigrant and naturalized citizen I know that they believe that ICE is a potential threat to their rights as well.
I wrote about this issue in more detail last year:
ICE officials told The Wall Street Journal that in mid-May the White House ordered them to stop “develop[ing] target lists of immigrants” and just “go out on the streets” and make arrests right away. The ICE officials told the Washington Examiner they were asked by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, “What do you mean you’re going after criminals? Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7‑Eleven?”
Since the White House marching orders, street arrests of people with no criminal history or removal order spiked threefold to over 1,500 per week.
We can’t know whether there was probable cause for these arrests in every case, but we do know the administration uses sweepingly broad profiling categories because its representatives already told us it does. Deportation czar Tom Homan told Fox News that agents will detain people “based on the location, their occupation, their physical appearance, their actions like … they walk away.”
DHS describes these interactions as “consensual.” But they are anything but. As a California district court put it, “When individuals have tried to avoid an encounter with agents and officers, they have been followed and pushed to the ground, sometimes even beaten, and then taken away.”
In one case, DHS agents pepper-sprayed, tackled and brutally beat a landscaper in Los Angeles after they profiled him outside an IHOP, and — according to DHS — he “refused to answer questions” and tried to leave. After they discovered he was a father of three U.S. Marines, they released him. In another case, agents jumped from a car to arrest a random Latino man on the street who asserted in English, “I have the right to remain silent.”
The one thing that the DHS data does not record: how many times DHS illegally profiles U.S. citizens and legal residents.
Fox News watched agents go “house to house” in a Florida housing development site demanding to see proof of immigration status from workers. The outlet reported agents interrogated 361 workers and arrested just 33. In other words, the number of legal residents being targeted vastly exceeded those who were not legal.
These aren’t simply harmless errors. Border Patrol agents shoved Jason Brian Gavidia against a fence when he told them he was a citizen, demanding to know the hospital where he was born. After agents smashed his car window, U.S. citizen and U.S. veteran George Retes was pepper-sprayed, dragged from his vehicle and detained by ICE for three days without charge, as the AP reported.
ICE agents tackled a 32-year-old U.S. citizen, Andrea Velez, on her way to work. After they learned she was a citizen, they charged her with impeding their efforts to chase down other people to determine “whether they were lawfully present.” In other words, their defense against charges of illegal profiling was: We were profiling someone else! The charges against Velez were dismissed, according to The Guardian.
These tactics are causing chaos in the streets. Bystanders think these arrests could be kidnappings when masked agents don’t identify themselves. A U.S. citizen was pepper-sprayed and arrested trying to stop Velez’s illegal arrest. Surgical center employees were arrested for demanding a warrant from an agent to enter their property to arrest a landscaper whose immigration status he admitted he didn’t know in his affidavit.
When a court briefly enjoined racial and demographic profiling in Los Angeles last year, ICE arrests fell by about two-thirds. Congress must end this unlawful, unconstitutional, and unethical behavior.