Families recount nightmares, injuries and lasting trauma after detentions

More than 500 U.S. citizens have been detained by immigration agents since President Donald Trump returned to office, according to a ProPublica portrait series that pairs its count with photographs and firsthand accounts of the people detained. The essay’s portraits, ProPublica wrote, show that the detained citizens “are not just numbers.”

The Department of Homeland Security denies that it is detaining Americans. In written statements, it said that “allegations that ICE is arresting and deporting U.S. citizens is FALSE.” It also said that “when individuals are briefly questioned under ‘reasonable suspicion’ and are found to be U.S. citizens, they are immediately released,” and that “U.S. citizen agitators are only held while they actively remain a safety threat to our officers and the public.”

The accounts ProPublica collected include an elderly car wash owner whom agents repeatedly knocked to the ground as they detained several of his workers; a 6-year-old whose mother says he still has nightmares after agents pointed guns at him and his siblings; and a father who was held for several days and missed his daughter’s third birthday.

One of the profiles follows Ana Michelle Ramirez Sanan, who was 17 when she learned in September 2025, she said, that ICE agents had intercepted members of her family as they drove one of her uncles to a court hearing. Ramirez Sanan said she rushed to the scene and found that agents had broken the car’s windows and pulled her two uncles, her mother and her younger brother out.

Video of the incident showed agents kicking and slamming Ramirez Sanan’s mother to the ground and then twisting her arms to handcuff her. Ramirez Sanan said she saw other agents questioning her brother against a fence and threatening to arrest him if he could not prove he had legal status. Both she and her brother are U.S. citizens.

“Him being a 13-year-old with autism, he doesn’t understand these things like we do. He didn’t know what ‘a legal status’ is. He’s not able to tell them: ‘Yes, I have a legal status. I’m born here,’” Ramirez Sanan said. She said that when she rushed toward her mother and brother, begging agents to let them go, the agents detained her. “It was really scary thinking that they might have taken us and deported us to Guatemala, where we don’t have anything,” she said.

DHS said its agents intercepted the car in order to detain the uncle, who was going to court that day, and that agents “used the appropriate force necessary.” ProPublica reported that the uncle is facing charges of sexual assault on a child, remains in ICE custody and has pleaded not guilty.

Ramirez Sanan, her mother and her brother were released the day of the incident, according to ProPublica. Her mother, who has lived in the United States for 20 years and holds a green card, was treated at a hospital for a concussion, bruising and nerve damage in one of her arms. DHS denies that the three were ever detained.

“We have so much trauma just from the 30 minutes we were held,” Ramirez Sanan said. She said she struggled with anxiety and depression after the incident. “I lost my whole senior year fighting this,” she said. “My brother isn’t the same either.”