ACLU documents 50+ detention deaths in immigration enforcement report
Review of 1,200 incidents across eight states found fatal shootings, force against children, and US citizens caught up in operations in 2025
WASHINGTON (MNTV) — An American Civil Liberties Union report alleges widespread civil rights violations, excessive force, and misconduct in immigration enforcement across eight states during the second Trump administration.
The report examined more than 1,200 incidents involving federal, state, and local agencies in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, and New Mexico between January and December 2025. It documented more than 50 deaths in ICE detention and at least eight additional fatal shootings by ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers.
Use of force runs through the findings. The ACLU identified 375 incidents involving physical force or its threat — pushing, tackling, restraint, weapons — including dozens using tactics civil rights experts warn can restrict breathing or cause serious injury.
It also flagged vehicle-related practices, with agents alleged to have boxed in cars, forced dangerous driving, and struck vehicles or people, echoing the “he used the car as a weapon” accounts that have followed multiple ICE killings this year.
Children recur throughout. The report documents 157 cases involving children during operations near schools, at traffic stops, in home raids, and at check-ins, including at least 54 in which agents directly questioned or detained a child.
Nor were the targets only undocumented: the ACLU logged 200 incidents involving US citizens, lawful permanent residents, and people protected under DACA who were allegedly detained or targeted, along with cases involving people with disabilities, older adults, and pregnant women.
In one, two Honduran women detained at Louisiana check-ins were deported with their children, including US citizen children — one child, the report says, with a rare cancer, removed without medication or any handoff to doctors.
The numbers are the argument. Fifty deaths in detention and a child with cancer deported without her medicine are not the byproduct of a system straining under scale; they are what the system is producing, and the ACLU’s call for oversight, accountability, and safeguards is a request that someone be answerable for it.
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