Finalist: Hamed Aleaziz of The New York Times
Nominated Work
A Maryland man’s deportation to El Salvador set off a fierce debate among officials in three cabinet agencies, despite agreement there had been a mistake.
By Hamed Aleaziz and Alan Feuer
A mistake had been made. That much was clear.
The Trump administration had deported a Maryland man named Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to a prison in El Salvador, even though a judge had issued a ruling expressly prohibiting that from happening.
But when the news reached the Department of Homeland Security, it set off a dayslong scramble and clashes among officials in three different agencies over how to deal with what everyone knew had been an error. As it became clear that keeping it quiet was not an option, D.H.S. officials floated a series of ideas to control the story that raised alarms among Justice Department lawyers on the case.
In the days before the government’s error became public, D.H.S. officials discussed trying to portray Mr. Abrego Garcia as a “leader” of the violent street gang MS-13, even though they could find no evidence to support the claim. They considered ways to nullify the original order that barred his deportation to El Salvador. They sought to downplay the danger he might face in one of that country’s most notorious prisons.
And in the end, a senior Justice Department lawyer, Erez Reuveni, who counseled bringing Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States, was fired for what Attorney General Pam Bondi said was a failure to “zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.”
Documents obtained by The New York Times laying out the debate among leading lawyers at the State, Justice and Homeland Security Departments reveal new details of the administration’s early efforts to develop a strategy for a case that has become a major test of President Trump’s mass deportation effort.
The discussions do not directly capture any conversations about the case inside the White House or at the level of the relevant cabinet secretaries. But the documents show how Trump officials, from the start, tried to keep Mr. Abrego Garcia out of the reach of the American judicial system.
To this day, Mr. Abrego Garcia remains locked up in El Salvador despite court rulings demanding that the United States work toward securing his release. And he got there in the first place through what everyone agreed was a bureaucratic slip-up.
“This was an administrative error,” James Percival, a D.H.S. official appointed by Mr. Trump, wrote to his colleagues on March 30. “(Not that we should say publicly.)”
Tricia McLaughlin, a D.H.S. spokeswoman, said in a statement that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation was part of “a highly sensitive counterterrorism operation with national security implications.”
“We invoked the state secrets privilege over many of the details — of course our officials discussed what should be divulged publicly,” she added. “This just proves they are responsible public servants putting the safety of the American people first. The leakers of these emails, on the other hand, clearly do not care about public safety.”
Far-Reaching Consequences
According to the documents, administration officials realized quickly that the case had sweeping implications for Mr. Trump’s efforts to remove other immigrants from the United States and send them to a Salvadoran megaprison.
As Mr. Reuveni pointed out to the group, the case potentially “jeopardizes many far more important initiatives of the current administration.” If the government fought and lost, it could have legal repercussions, not least of which for the nearly 140 Venezuelans who were sent to the same facility under the authority of a rarely used wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
Ultimately, three courts — including the Supreme Court — pushed back against the White House, ordering Trump officials to at least take steps toward freeing Mr. Abrego Garcia. But Mr. Trump and some of his top aides have taken a defiant stance, insisting that Mr. Abrego Garcia will not be coming back to the United States.
The turmoil started on March 12, when Mr. Abrego Garcia was arrested as he drove home from work in Maryland, swept up as immigration agents scrambled to meet one of Mr. Trump signature promises: the biggest deportation operation in U.S. history.
Mr. Abrego Garcia had been under deportation orders, but there was a catch: In 2019, an immigration judge found that he could be deported to anywhere except El Salvador, his homeland, because his life was in danger there.
But on March 15, El Salvador is where the United States sent him, on one of three charter planes with scores of other immigrants. While Mr. Abrego Garcia was not deported under the Alien Enemies Act, he was a last-minute addition to the flights after someone in front of him was taken off the manifest.
On March 24, lawyers working with Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wife, a U.S. citizen named Jennifer Vasquez Sura, filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Maryland, asking Judge Paula Xinis to issue an order forcing the White House to bring her husband back.
The news of the lawsuit was received very differently at the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, which typically handles such matters, than at D.H.S., which has been overseeing Mr. Trump’s deportation policies.
The documents obtained by The Times show correspondence among the agencies and the State Department between March 27 and March 31 — a critical early period that ended with the administration acknowledging its error in deporting Mr. Abrego Garcia, setting off a legal and political furor.
A State Department spokesperson declined to address the documents obtained by The Times, saying the agency would not “discuss internal deliberations or ongoing litigation.”
On March 28, Mr. Percival, the D.H.S. official, told his colleagues that they would be working to make sure that Mr. Abrego Garcia would not return to the United States.
“We are working to fix it so he doesn’t need to be returned to the U.S.,” he wrote. Joseph Mazzara, a Trump-appointed official serving as the top lawyer at D.H.S., concurred: “We’re also trying to keep him where he is.”
Not everyone was onboard.
Over several days, Mr. Reuveni, a Justice Department lawyer who had risen up the ranks over more than a decade with the agency, advised colleagues that they needed to return Mr. Abrego Garcia at once.
That was standard practice. Migrants wrongfully removed from the country had been brought back under both Republican and Democratic administrations — including during Mr. Trump’s first term.
One of Mr. Reuveni’s chief concerns was that Judge Xinis would not look kindly on the fact that the U.S. government was keeping someone abroad who had been wrongfully removed.
“I do not think the court will receive the suggestion it’s fine to keep him there while we sort this out with any sympathy,” he wrote. “And the longer he stays there, the more difficult it becomes for us to hold the line on this is not our own custody just paid through the El Salvadorans.”
D.H.S. officials said they wanted to solve the problem by trying to reverse the original order that should have kept Mr. Abrego Garcia from being sent to El Salvador in the first place. And they wanted to do so while he was still in Salvadoran custody.
Mr. Reuveni did not agree.
“How do we reopen his removal proceedings with him abroad?” he asked. “At that point he won’t have a valid executable order.”
“The cleanest solution,” Mr. Reuveni had said just days before, was to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to U.S. soil.
The P.R. Battle Ahead
State Department officials wanted to know more.
Were there any reasons, one asked, to avoid complying if Judge Xinis ordered the government to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back?
“I cannot think of any basis for us to take the position that we can ignore such an order, nor would we,” Mr. Reuveni wrote.
Already, the government appeared to be highly alert to any possible backlash over the mistake. Mr. Percival, for instance, had asked his colleagues early on if the D.H.S. spokeswoman had been informed about the “comms implications” of the case.
Mr. Percival appeared to quickly realize that withholding the information was not tenable. A day after telling his colleagues that the government should not admit its error publicly, he reversed course and suggested the Justice Department’s response in court “would be much better if we could own that we made a mistake.”
“But I guess we need to figure out whether we’re allowed to say that…” he added.
Around the same time, officials at D.H.S. began to float the idea internally that Mr. Abrego Garcia was a leader in MS-13, a violent street gang at the center of the president’s deportation agenda.
If that were the case, it might make leaving him in El Salvador more palatable.
The only problem was that nobody seemed to know if it was true.
Mr. Percival asked other officials at one point whether they could tell Judge Xinis that Mr. Abrego Garcia was an MS-13 leader. Mr. Reuveni said that they could — but only if someone put their name to the accusation in a sworn court declaration.
Mr. Percival also wanted to say that Mr. Abrego Garcia was not in any immediate danger.
In the end, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials backed away from the claims.
“So far I have found ‘verified member,’ which is included,” an ICE lawyer wrote to Mr. Percival. “I have not found anything indicating ‘leader,’ but I’ll keep looking.”
In a statement, a Justice Department spokesman said that Mr. Abrego Garcia “was illegally in our country and has been identified as a member of MS-13, a foreign terrorist organization, by multiple officials, including an immigration judge and an appellate board.”
Mr. Abrego Garcia has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, being a member of the gang. He has said that he came to the United States illegally more than a decade ago because he was fleeing a different gang, Barrio 18.
During his deportation proceedings in 2019, some evidence was introduced that he belonged to MS-13, but Judge Xinis has cast doubt on it, saying in a court order that the “‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant.”
In 2019, an immigration judge in Maryland had ruled that Mr. Abrego Garcia should not be sent to El Salvador at all because the gang was “targeting him and threatening him with death” over his family’s business selling pupusas.
The gang had menaced Mr. Abrego Garcia’s older brother, Cesar, and then turned its eyes on him after Cesar fled to the United States. When Mr. Abrego Garcia refused to join Barrio 18, some of its members threatened to kill him, the judge determined, prompting him to follow his brother to America.
Because of the potential danger that Mr. Abrego Garcia faced from members of Barrio 18 inside El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a State Department official, James L. Bischoff, asked officials from both the Justice and Homeland Security Departments what he should advise the U.S. ambassador in San Salvador to do: Should the ambassador ask the Salvadorans to keep Mr. Abrego Garcia separate from the prison’s gang population or ask for his release?
Mr. Reuveni’s answer was clear. They needed to do both.
“We should seek to keep him from the gangs,” he wrote, “but more importantly and soonest should bring him back.”
Mr. Mazzara, the D.H.S. lawyer, told his colleagues that Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, had taken steps to seek Mr. Abrego Garcia’s segregation from other inmates, including members of Barrio 18. And the next day, he said the administration was still waiting for assurances from El Salvador that he was safe in the prison.
But Mr. Mazzara still seemed unconvinced that the gang was a threat to Mr. Abrego Garcia.
“Is Barrio 18 even in CECOT?” he asked.
In fact, the documents show that Mr. Bischoff had told Mr. Mazzara two days earlier that there were “many members of Barrio 18 in CECOT.”
‘We Concede the Facts’
The tensions between Mr. Reuveni and his homeland security colleagues came to a head on April 4, when he appeared for the first time in court before Judge Xinis.
“We concede the facts,” he immediately told her. “This person should — the plaintiff, Abrego Garcia — should not have been removed. That is not in dispute.”
Mr. Reuveni went on to explain that although there was a final order allowing Mr. Abrego Garcia to be deported from the United States, there was also another — known as a withholding of removal order — that was supposed to have ensured that he was not sent to El Salvador, where he might face persecution.
Judge Xinis thanked him for his candor, but said she had more questions. Mr. Abrego Garcia had been living in Maryland under the protection of the withholding order for nearly six years, so what authority, she asked, had law enforcement officials used when they took him off the streets on March 12?
“Your honor, my answer to a lot of these questions is going to be frustrating,” Mr. Reuveni replied. “I am also frustrated that I have no answers for you on a lot of these questions.”
The hearing, which took place on a Friday afternoon, ended with Judge Xinis entering an order clearly instructing the White House to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States by no later than 11:59 p.m. that Monday night.
The order did not survive. The Supreme Court, quickly stepping in, first put it on hold and then issued an order directing the administration to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody.
By the time that order came down, however, Mr. Reuveni was already out of a job.
On Saturday, April 5, Justice Department leadership suspended — and ultimately fired — him.
“At my direction, every Department of Justice attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States,” Ms. Bondi, the attorney general, wrote in a statement sent to The Times that day. “Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”
The case has moved forward without Mr. Reuveni, who declined to be interviewed for this article. Judge Xinis has opened an inquiry into what steps the White House has taken to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Joseph A. Darrow, who is one of Mr. Reuveni’s former colleagues and left his own job in the immigration section last month, said in an interview that people in the office were “shocked and despondent” over the retribution that Mr. Reuveni faced.
Two other lawyers who worked with Mr. Reuveni also left in recent weeks, citing his firing.
“I agree with what Joe wrote in his goodbye email — this was an act of intimidation against all the attorneys who work here,” said Erin Ryan, a trial lawyer who announced her resignation on May 16 in an email.
She said it “put us in an impossible position where we have to decide between keeping this job pushing a partisan agenda, or maintaining our ethical obligation to the court and thus our bar license.
“I choose the latter.”
Former officials said the Trump administration’s push for the agency to detain record numbers of undocumented immigrants increases the chances of mistakes.
By Hamed Aleaziz
Photographs by Todd Heisler
Demands from the White House for a drastic increase in arrests of people who have entered the country illegally have pushed immigration officials into overdrive to fulfill President Trump’s pledge of mass deportations.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is carrying out workplace raids across the country like the one in the garment district of Los Angeles last week that kicked off protests and a vast federal response. The agency is staggering shifts so agents are available seven days a week to try to meet arrest goals and asking criminal investigators who usually focus on issues like human trafficking to help identify targets. It is also asking the public to call in tips to report illegal immigration.
ICE’s work is being aided by a new mapping app that locates people with deportation orders who can be swiftly expelled, drawn from data housed in agencies across the government, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
“I said it from Day 1, if you’re in the country illegally, you’re not off the table,” Thomas D. Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar, said in an interview. “So, we’re opening that aperture up.”
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has been deeply engaged in the effort behind the scenes, meeting with top ICE officials in recent weeks and scrutinizing the numbers, according to people familiar with his involvement.
The intense pressure by top administration officials creates an atmosphere that elevates the potential for mistakes at a time when officers and agents are being pushed to make consequential decisions, former officials said.
“You’re going to have people who are being pushed to the limit, who in a rush may not get things right, including information on a person’s status,” said Sarah Saldaña, who served as ICE’s director during the Obama administration. “All of that takes time and effort, and this push on numbers — exclusive of whether or not the job is being done right — is very concerning.”
White House officials say the measures the administration is taking are necessary.
“Keeping President Trump’s promise to deport illegal aliens is something the administration takes seriously,” Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman, said in a statement. “The violent riots in Los Angeles, including attacks on federal law enforcement agents carrying out basic deportation operations, underscore why removing illegal aliens is so important.”
The political stakes are high: Mr. Trump was swept into office for a second time on a platform built around his pledge to crack down on illegal immigration and promises of mass deportations as soon as he took office.
Since Mr. Trump returned to office, more than 200,000 people in the United States without authorization have been sent back to their home country or a third country, a fraction of the 1.4 million people who faced final deportation orders by the end of last year, according to internal government data obtained by The Times.
Mr. Miller, a staunch advocate of tightening America’s borders, said on Fox News in late May that ICE would set a goal of a “minimum” of 3,000 arrests a day, figures never before seen and 10 times the daily arrests during the Biden administration. Since Jan. 21, ICE has arrested more than 100,000 people suspected of being in the country illegally, according to data obtained by The Times.
During a meeting with agency leaders late last month at ICE’s headquarters, Mr. Miller reviewed the agency’s arrest rate and discussed ways to ratchet it up. At one point, he encouraged ICE leaders to target apparent gang members with noticeable tattoos, according to people familiar with his comments.
“He wasn’t putting a specific quota on us but just going over the numbers and making sure that we’re utilizing all of our resources to make the arrests out there,” said Garrett Ripa, the head of the Miami ICE office, who at the time was a top official overseeing the agency’s deportation operations. ICE officials asked Mr. Miller for more resources, such as extra transportation help, to help meet the ambitious goals, he said.
Another official with direct knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the discussion, said that Mr. Miller asked those in the room if they thought they could hit one million deportations this year.
Former and current agency officials say that the high expectations have sapped morale in some quarters — and created a pressure keg.
“There is a constant state of anxiety,” said Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff during the Biden administration. “They understand they are playing Stephen Miller’s game. This isn’t about public safety or national security; this is about hitting a quota number. That’s it.”
Some ICE officers, however, said they welcomed the intense focus on their work.
“It’s something that I’m invested in, so I don’t feel like it’s a bad thing,” said Carlos Nuñez, a supervising deportation officer in Florida, adding that he finally felt he could do his job the way it was meant to be done.
“We just have so much work that there’s not enough hours in the day, to be honest with you, just to get it done,” he said. “My teams, all these guys you see here, they’re working seven days a week, working around the clock. I haven’t had a day off in several months already.”
Mr. Ripa said many agents are working staggered shifts to assure the entire week is covered. (A Homeland Security official said the use of staggered shifts is not new.)
The Times recently accompanied Mr. Nuñez and other ICE officials in Miami as they conducted a series of arrests. Over the course of several hours, a group of more than 10 officers — which at certain points included F.B.I. agents and an official from the State Department — tracked down and detained a total of three migrants.
In one case, a Honduran man who was the brother of an ICE target was arrested when he happened to show up to drive him to work — an example of how the agency is making collateral arrests to increase its numbers.
That is the mandate right now, Mr. Homan said.
“If they’re out there looking for a target and they find the target and he is with other people in the country illegally, they need to be taken into custody,” he said. “We’re not walking away from the illegal alien.”
The Miami arrests underscored one of the main challenges ICE faces in boosting its arrests: It is often painstaking, low-yield work. Officers spend extensive time doing surveillance, sending multiple officers to stake out a location for hours. Sometimes, an address is old or incorrect.
So in recent weeks, ICE has begun to hit workplaces such as clubs, restaurants and factories across the country, executing raids aimed at netting larger numbers. Officers have descended upon immigration courthouses, in coordination with prosecutors, to arrest migrants who show up for scheduled court dates.
The agency is also asking the public to use a tip line to report illegal immigration. In May, officers arrested five men in a Baltimore parking lot based on a phone tip. Video of the arrest was posted online by ICE with the caption, “When you call our Tip Line, we listen!”
Mr. Homan said such arrests were allowed if there was “reasonable suspicion” that someone was in the country illegally.
In some offices, investigators who usually focus on issues like human trafficking have been asked to help drive up the arrest numbers. One Homeland Security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal tactics, said that some undercover special agents responsible for investigating online sex trafficking have begun setting up in-person meetings with people suspected of prostitution to potentially arrest them on immigration charges.
The agency has also turned to higher-tech solutions. A new mapping app allows agents and officers to see areas around the country with large numbers of people under deportation orders, according to Mr. Ripa and documents obtained by The Times. An early version of the app was dubbed Alien Tracker, or Atrac.
The project was launched with help from members of the Department of Government Efficiency, which was led by the billionaire Elon Musk until he left his government role last month, according to Mr. Ripa. “I know in the infancy stages of Atrac, they were an integral part of it,” Mr. Ripa said. The White House declined to comment on the app.
The software, which is accessible on mobile phones, maps the location of migrants with deportation orders across the country, and even allows officers to zero in on those with certain criminal convictions, he said.
“The heat map shows where there are executable final orders of removal around the nation. And that officer then can just zoom in on those areas,” said Mr. Ripa.
The app contains information about more than 700,000 people, drawn from data not just at ICE, but agencies across the government. That includes the F.B.I.; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the U.S. Marshals Service; and the Social Security Administration, according to the documents obtained by The Times.
The app will “eventually allow for the centralized management of all interior enforcement priorities,” the documents say. That would include data from the Housing and Urban Development Department, the Labor Department, the Health and Human Services Department and the Internal Revenue Service, according to the documents.
The consolidation of government data to track migrants through the app comes after Musk aides moved aggressively to try to tap into streams of information held by different agencies. Career officials raised objections to the efforts, which they said violated privacy and security protocols, and labor unions and watchdog groups sued to halt the efforts.
Information about each immigrant in the app is available on a baseball-card-style format, according to the documents. Officers are required to log the outcome of each encounter they have with a target.
Despite the tech wizardry, some ICE agents have found the addresses in the map are erroneous or out of date, according to a Homeland Security official.
The agency faces other challenges in communities like Los Angeles, where a court order issued in 2024 blocks officers from knocking on doors with the intent to arrest people. An expert for the groups suing the government over the practice found that such arrests, in which ICE knocks on a door with the intent to arrest the person inside the home, accounted for more than a quarter of all residential arrests made by ICE.
In late May, Bill Essayli, the acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, directed Justice Department law enforcement agents to take over the door-knocking tasks, according to a document obtained by The Times. A spokesperson for Mr. Essayli confirmed the initiative.
There have been some signs that ICE’s push is yielding results. The Homeland Security Department said in a statement over the weekend that ICE had “arrested 2,000 aliens a day” last week. Trump administration officials pointed to the figures as a sign that their crackdown was working.
But in recent days, the numbers fell off again, according to data obtained by The Times. On Thursday, ICE arrested around 1,400 people. Friday, the total fell to over 1,200. On Saturday, the number dropped even further, to about 700.
Mr. Homan has remained undeterred, even amid the protests in Los Angeles.
“We will do this immigration operation,” he said on a show hosted by the right-wing activist Laura Loomer. “We’re going to do it every single day across this country, including L.A. You’re not going to stop us, so I guess this is game on.”
Michael H. Keller, Albert Sun, Allison McCann and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
The practice appears to be a more targeted version of the mass separation of migrant children from their parents from President Trump’s first term, which caused a global outcry.
By Hamed Aleaziz
Evgeny and Evgeniia faced an excruciating choice.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers told the couple they could leave the United States with their child and return to their native Russia, which they had fled seeking political asylum. Or they could remain in immigration detention in the United States — but their 8-year-old son, Maksim, would be taken away and sent to a shelter for unaccompanied children.
In the end, they chose the agony of limbo in the United States over a return to a place where they saw no prospect for freedom or any future for their family.
“Interior separation is approved,” ICE officials concluded in writing after the couple insisted they could not return to Russia. The last time Evgeny and Evgeniia saw Maksim was on May 15, in a room at Kennedy International Airport in New York City, as ICE agents led them back to detention in New Jersey.
“A few days, right?” Maksim begged his parents that day. “A few days?”
The couple, who asked to be identified only by their first names out of fear for their family back in Russia, said they tried to keep their son calm. Maksim pleaded with his father, who told the boy what he wanted to hear. “I said, ‘Yes, yes, it will be just a few days,’” Evgeny said, recounting the moment in an interview.
Their case is an example of a little-known tactic the Trump administration is using to pressure undocumented immigrants to leave the United States. Officials have begun separating children from their families in small numbers across the country, in what appears to be a more targeted version of one of the most explosive policies of President Trump’s first term.
The New York Times has uncovered at least nine cases in which parents have been separated from their children after they refused to comply with deportation orders, according to internal government documents, case files and interviews.
The practice is not as widespread as the “zero tolerance” policy of Mr. Trump’s first term, when thousands of children were systematically taken from their parents as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and sent to shelters and foster homes.
But the new cases suggest that the administration has decided to use family separation as a tool, at least in some instances, to persuade families to leave and to create a powerful deterrent for those who might come to the United States illegally.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, insisted that “ICE does not separate families” and placed the onus on the families themselves, saying that the parents have the option of staying with their children by leaving the country together.
“The parents had the right and the ability to depart the country as a family and willfully choose to not comply,” she said.
She denied that there was any new policy on family separations.
Previous administrations separated undocumented families for reasons including national security concerns, public safety and child endangerment. But Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official who has served in Republican and Democratic administrations, said that previous administrations, to her knowledge, did not use the threat of family separation as leverage to get people to leave the country.
“I’m not aware of ICE previously using family separation as a consequence for failure to comply” with deportation orders, Ms. Trickler-McNulty said.
Instead, she said, past administrations typically would have released such families into the United States with ankle monitors to track them as they awaited court dates, a practice that has contributed to enormous backlogs in the immigration system.
The notion of choice touches on a key difference between the separations from the first Trump administration and now.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, immigration agents would separate families at the southern border as they crossed into the United States. Adults were criminally charged with illegally entering the country and imprisoned, while their children — some of them babies, just months old — were taken away.
The family separation policy was enormously divisive. Wrenching images of children being pried from the arms of their parents stirred global outrage, but administration officials argued privately that was the whole point — the policy was meant to deter people from making a dangerous and illegal journey.
Mr. Trump ultimately relented to pressure and ended the policy in 2018. The Biden administration later agreed to a settlement that blocked family separations at the border, with some exceptions, including if children were in danger.
Now, with illegal crossings notably low, the Trump administration is focusing on immigrants who are in the United States and have been ordered to leave.
For the most part, immigrants under deportation orders are sent home on ICE flights. But in certain cases — including those involving citizens of Russia — the United States will send people on commercial flights instead.
If they do not agree to board, ICE agents present them with a choice.
‘Lawful Orders’
The Trump administration insists that it is simply enforcing the law. Mr. Trump has made aggressive enforcement a key part of his deportation campaign and says the American people elected him in part to get tough on immigration.
“To be clear, refusing a judge’s deportation order is a crime,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “If law enforcement pulled an American citizen over with kids in the back seat and they chose to not comply with lawful orders, the parents would be arrested, and the children would be placed in safe custody.”
Still, deporting families has always been a struggle for presidential administrations, Republican and Democratic alike. Children, for the most part, cannot by law remain in federal custody for more than three weeks. That means officials are under pressure to deport families quickly, or the United States would have to spend money and resources to track them.
At that point, the deportation challenge only grows. ICE agents would have the difficult task of arresting people with established ties to communities, who had been working or going to school and building lives in the United States.
During the Biden administration, officials considered various ideas, including arresting one parent or fining families who refused to comply with deportation orders, although they never put those policies in place, a former U.S. official said.
Evgeniia, speaking through an interpreter from ICE detention, said her family traveled to the Mexican border in hopes of getting an appointment under a Biden-era program that allowed people to enter the United States at a port of entry after registering with a government app. Mr. Trump canceled that program on Jan. 20, so she and her husband decided that driving to a port of entry and asking for asylum was the only way to reach safety.
They were immediately put into detention.
The American Civil Liberties Union is investigating the legality of the separations, said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the group.
“That the Trump administration has found a new form of family separation is hardly surprising given they have yet to acknowledge the horrific harm caused by the original policy and are now blatantly breaching provisions of the settlement designed to provide relief to those abused families, many of whom to this day still remain separated,” he said.
The court settlement banning separations specifically referred to the practice at the southern border. Now, however, the separations are not happening at the border — they are happening inside the country, so there may be legal wiggle room.
In at least one of the cases, ICE officials wrote that the separation fell outside the scope of the settlement, saying there were no “implication/requirements” when it comes to the court case.
Ms. McLaughlin, the Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said immigrants were taking advantage of the system and in some cases creating a public disturbance.
“We have seen recently illegal alien families have started to use a tactic where they refuse to board a commercial flight, often lashing out and posing a threat to the safety of their own children,” she said. As a result, Ms. McLaughlin added, the authorities “must ensure the children are safe and not in harm’s way until the family can soon be removed from the country.”
Regarding the case of Evgeny and Evgeniia specifically, Ms. McLaughlin said the couple “were acting so disruptive and aggressive they endangered the child’s well-being.”
The couple denied those allegations, and there was no mention of such a disturbance in the internal case file describing the separation, which was obtained by The Times. The file says that “since there is no other option to enforce the removal order in a safe manner as a family unit, interior separation is approved.”
A separate document, a referral of Maksim’s case to the agency that oversees custody of unaccompanied migrant children, said, “Subject was separated from his family on 5/15/2025 due to his parent’s refusal to board an aircraft for removal from the United States in violation of US law.”
Evgeny said he was trying to save his son from a longer separation in Russia because of what he believed to be a sure prison sentence there.
“I was explaining to them, to the officers, that our lives are in danger and our livelihood would be in danger,” he said. “And at some point, I kind of lost my bearings and started to cry.”
“I was explaining that I could not be deported, because I will face grave danger in Russia,” he said.
‘I’m Not Giving My Son Away’
The couple had crossed the border with another Russian family, Pavel Snegir and his 11-year-old son, Aleksandr. They, too, were hoping for political asylum in the United States after Mr. Snegir’s wife was locked up in Russia for her political views, he said.
But after several weeks in border custody together, Mr. Snegir and his son were transferred to ICE custody in May and taken to an airport in San Diego. There, he was told he could take Aleksandr to New York City for a court hearing.
But once they got to the airport, Mr. Snegir refused to board the plane, having become convinced that he would be deported to Russia once he got to New York. Later that day, after the flight had left, an ICE official told him he would be separated from his son because he refused to be deported.
“I’m not giving my son away,” Mr. Snegir said, moving to shield Aleksandr.
The ICE official, Mr. Snegir recalled, told him that he would be taken to the ground, handcuffed and taken away if he did not relent.
“I did not move. I did not agree to do what she was asking, and everything she promised happened,” he said of the ICE official.
Aleksandr, who had witnessed his mother being arrested in Russia, appeared to be in shock, Mr. Snegir recalled: “He was asking why.”
After several weeks of separation, Mr. Snegir was visited by an ICE official who offered him another option: Go with your son, or we will deport you by yourself and you might not see him again.
This time, Mr. Snegir agreed to go back to Russia with his son.
But in a twist, the next day it emerged that Mr. Snegir had passed a protection screening for his claim of fearing torture in Russia. That means he can still be deported — just not to Russia.
For now, ICE is trying to deport him to a third country, but none have agreed to take him yet, according to internal agency documents. Until then, the two are being held separately, the father in ICE detention and the son in a shelter for unaccompanied children.
An Uncertain Future
As it turns out, Evgeny and Evgeniia also passed their protection screening, which means the United States has determined that they, too, cannot be deported to Russia.
But as they wait for the next step, they remain in ICE detention. And Maksim is now in a foster home.
“It’s terrible, that’s what I can say,” Evgeniia said. “I wouldn’t wish it even to an enemy. It’s a constant grief and longing.”
She is allowed to speak on the telephone to her son, but she has no real answers to the first question he asks her: “Mama, when are you going to take me out of here?”
“I try to explain to him that we’re trying to do that,” Evgeniia said. “We’re talking to the officers. We’re trying to convince them. It was very hard for him to hear this information. He is crying all the time.”
Before the family came to the United States, the longest she and her husband had been separated from their little boy was one week. Now it has been months.
When he first arrived at his foster home, Maksim fastidiously counted the days he was apart from his parents. But recently, he told his mother he had stopped counting.
“What’s the point of counting days? We will not be united,” his mother recalled him saying recently.
Trump officials say the goal is not to keep the children separated from their parents indefinitely. ICE will try to reunify children with their parents in their country of origin, or in a third country, an agency official said.
But for some parents, the danger is too great.
An Indian couple who were separated from their three children after they refused to board a commercial flight decided, in the end, to go back to India without the children, according to internal ICE records and their lawyer.
The couple asked not to be identified, but their case records showed that the first attempt to deport the family as a group had failed. The family unit, or FAMU, “refused to board the removal flight (commercial).”
The record went on to state that the family’s failure to comply with deportation orders was “a clear violation of law and hindrance to execute the removal order.”
“This is an interior enforcement separation,” it continued.
After several weeks, the couple were deported to India. In response to a request for comment, an ICE official said the agency was working to send the children back, too.
For the families who are still in the United States — like Evgeny, Evgeniia, Mr. Snegir and their children — the path ahead is uncertain.
But inside her ICE detention facility, Evgeniia tries to think of a hopeful future.
“I’m imagining how I will hug him when we meet again,” she said of Maksim. “I even saved a couple of candies, because that’s what I was planning to give to him when I see him again. That’s what I imagine.”
Paul Sonne and Aishvarya Kavi contributed reporting.
A series of arrests captured on video reveal how immigration officers have worked with other law enforcement agencies to identify migrants during stops for minor infractions.
By Hamed Aleaziz, Brent McDonald and Amogh Vaz
A man from El Salvador was stopped for allegedly driving a landscaping truck through federal parkland. A Honduran man was pulled over when the police said he ran a stop sign as his family left a local park. A Jordanian man was detained while working in a food truck on the National Mall during a crackdown on unlicensed vendors.
President Trump’s deployment of federal law enforcement officers in August across Washington — intended, officials said, to lower crime — transformed what was one of the largest sanctuary cities in the country into a test case for Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it expands its efforts in major urban centers.
The agency sharply increased its arrests in the city by working alongside the local police and other federal agencies to identify immigrants during stops for minor traffic violations, according to law enforcement officials, lawyers for detained migrants, internal immigration records and witness accounts.
ICE had made only 85 arrests in Washington from Jan. 20 through the end of July, according to data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. But from early August until mid-September, ICE made around 1,200 arrests, according to officials with knowledge of the data.
One key to the strategy: ICE’s close partnership with both the Metropolitan Police Department and the U.S. Park Police, according to a New York Times review of dozens of videos filmed by witnesses in Washington. At other times, the agency operated alone, with masked officers detaining people in sometimes aggressive encounters that drew angry protests from neighbors.
Last week, an immigrants rights organization sued the Department of Homeland Security, accusing the agency of targeting people for their ethnicity, making arrests without probable cause and sowing “terror in Latino and other communities across the District.”
The department called allegations that it had engaged in racial profiling “disgusting, reckless, and categorically FALSE.”
As the administration works to deepen police cooperation on immigrant enforcement throughout the country, the effort in Washington shows how migrants stopped by local law enforcement for low-level infractions can swiftly be detained by ICE — a boost for an agency struggling to meet the White House’s demands for higher arrest numbers.
Since January, ICE has signed more than 520 agreements in 35 states that allow local law enforcement to collaborate with federal officials on immigration enforcement during routine patrols.
However, the administration has faced resistance to such arrangements from liberal cities with so-called sanctuary policies, which ban the police from assisting immigration agents.
To get around that in Washington, the Trump administration exploited the city’s tenuous status as a federal district, compelling the police to cooperate with ICE by declaring a “crime emergency.” Previously, under Washington’s sanctuary city law, local police officers had not been permitted to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement authorities.
It also took advantage of the array of federal law enforcement already operating in the region, including the U.S. Park Police, which also has officers in New York and San Francisco. During the surge, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum deputized immigration officers to patrol with Park Police officers and granted the Park Police authority to pursue fleeing offenders.
Tricia McLaughlin, a homeland security spokeswoman, said in a statement that immigration officials in Washington had “arrested gang members, kidnappers, drug traffickers and other violent thugs.” She highlighted the department’s collaboration with the local police, the Park Police and other law enforcement agencies, adding, “Criminal aliens are a public safety threat, and there should be no place for sanctuary policies that place crime over the community.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about how many of the 1,200 people detained for immigration violations in Washington had also been accused of committing other crimes.
While Mayor Muriel Bowser has said that local police officers would stop assisting immigration enforcement when Mr. Trump’s emergency order expired on Sept. 10, the federal deployment has opened the door to more cooperation.
The Metropolitan Police Department has left in place a policy change allowing officers to share information with federal immigration authorities about people not in custody, such as during traffic stops, according to Daniel Gleick, a spokesman for the mayor’s office. And the police department continues to work with a federal task force focused on Washington that includes officers from homeland security, the mayor acknowledged on Wednesday.
“We never wanted M.P.D. to patrol with homeland security agencies, but they are part of the task force, and that should change,” she told reporters.
Mr. Trump has also threatened to once again take over the city’s police department if the mayor does not cooperate on immigration enforcement.
And ICE officials, who continue to work with other federal agencies in Washington, said they did not plan to let up. “We’re going to continue our operations in the D.C. metro area,” Marcos Charles, who leads ICE’s enforcement and removal operations, said in an interview.
Seizing On Traffic Violations
One of the first visible signs of ICE’s presence in Washington came at “safety compliance” checkpoints set up on major streets at rush hour, after dark outside popular restaurants and during the day in residential zones. Videos show officers working alongside local police officers as drivers were told to pull over their cars or scooters for minor infractions.
Immigration officers were also frequently seen in videos accompanying local police officers during routine traffic stops.
The Times obtained videos from witnesses who recorded them, or from the lawyers of the people arrested, and verified their locations, names and legal status with federal law enforcement officials. Some witnesses who shared videos with The Times requested that their names be withheld out of fear of retaliation.
In one case, Aaron, a 41-year-old Honduran man, was driving away from a local park on Sept. 8 with his wife and two young children when he was pulled over for failing to make a full stop at an intersection.
Videos of the incident show a police vehicle parked directly behind his car, followed by two Customs and Border Protection vehicles.
Federal officers determined that he did not have legal status and detained him, records show.
Aaron, who asked to be identified by only his first name out of fear of retribution, said he had lived in Washington for six years, building a life in the immigrant-rich Columbia Heights neighborhood. He worked as a maintenance worker, fixing HVAC systems, and coached soccer.
In an interview from inside an ICE detention facility in Virginia, Aaron said he had no idea how his family would pay for rent and food without him.
“I mean, I’m destroyed, completely destroyed,” he said. “They changed my life — I think forever.”
Some police officials are worried about the long-term impact of the work with immigration authorities. One police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, voiced concerns that the department’s forced alliance with ICE could shatter trust between local police officers and the immigrant community.
A New Focus for Park Police
The primary role of the Park Police, a division of the National Park Service, is protecting national parklands, federal buildings and monuments in Washington, New York and San Francisco. But under the current administration, the agency has stepped up its role in immigration enforcement, a shift from its traditional focus, according to former officers.
Videos collected and verified by The Times show members of the Park Police, trailed by homeland security agents, initiating traffic stops of landscaping, construction and food delivery vehicles around the city.
On Aug. 20, Park Police officers pulled over a truck that bore the logo of a Maryland landscaping business as it drove through Rock Creek Park, a national park that bisects the District of Columbia.
The officers said the vehicle was pulled over because its tags were obscured, and asked to see the identification of those inside the truck, according to the driver, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
When one member of the landscaping crew failed to provide a valid ID, he was pulled from the passenger seat, according to the driver, who filmed the arrest on his phone.
“This is an illegal detention,” he can be heard shouting in the video.
Ms. McLaughlin, the homeland security spokeswoman, said officers discovered during the stop that the man was a Honduran immigrant who had entered the United States illegally, adding that he had resisted arrest.
The next day, the landscaping company sent its clients an email saying that it would be forced to pause work in Washington “until we can determine how to ensure the safety of our team.”
Rock Creek Park, a forested greenway typically frequented by cyclists and joggers, has been a major area of focus of the joint immigration operations.
In late August, a junk removal truck driving through the park was pulled over by Park Police officers working with agents from Homeland Security Investigations. The alleged violation: driving a commercial vehicle through a federal park.
The two men inside the truck, one from Nicaragua and the other from Egypt, were placed in custody pending deportation, the Department of Homeland Security said.
A few days later, a Park Police officer pulled over Erminio Guevara, a native of El Salvador, for driving a landscaping truck through the same park. A local resident filmed Mr. Guevara as he was being arrested and loaded into an unmarked S.U.V. She asked the officers why he was being detained and whether they had racially profiled him. They did not respond.
According to the department, Mr. Guevara admitted to entering the United States illegally in 2001.
Since early August, residents have sent hundreds of videos, photos and tips to D.C. Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid, an immigrant support group that set up an ICE tip hotline.
Amy Fischer, who leads the organization, said the footage reflected a dramatic surge in dragnet-style arrest tactics.
“We just saw the roving patrols arresting anybody that looked brown, basically,” Ms. Fischer said.
The Department of Homeland Security has rejected such claims, saying that it uses “reasonable suspicion” to make arrests.
“What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S. — NOT their skin color, race, or ethnicity,” the agency wrote in a social media post.
The Park Police’s partnership with ICE has drawn the agency into the administration’s aggressive public campaign against undocumented immigrants.
In August, the two agencies worked together to detain Laith Husam Farah Zaza, a Jordanian man accused of overstaying his visa, as he worked in a food truck near the National Mall. Afterward, immigration officials posted his photo on social media, highlighting the role of the Park Police in “targeting unlawful food truck and cart vendors.”
Mr. Farah Zaza’s wife, Fatima Marroquin-Pineda, who is a U.S. citizen, said her husband had been working extra hours as a line cook to help pay the fees required to obtain legal status through their marriage.
She said she was shocked to see the government celebrate his arrest on social media. “He was not a criminal, and it’s not a crime to work on a food truck,” she said.
Aubrie Spady, an Interior Department spokeswoman, said in a statement: “U.S. Park Police are responsible for conducting common, legitimate traffic stops. If immigration violations are found, the U.S. Park Police allow the Department of Homeland Security to take it from there.”
Questions About Due Process
ICE has also worked on its own in Washington, targeting people in their cars and stopping others on the sidewalk for minor infractions.
Videos show some officers wearing masks while carrying out arrests — a practice that is now banned in California — creating confusion and alarm among local residents.
ICE officials have said the face coverings are necessary to protect the safety of their officers, noting they have been threatened and attacked. “The brave men and women of ICE choose to wear masks for safety, not secrecy,” the agency said in a statement.
On Sept. 2, Allison Price, 49, was walking her dog with her husband in D.C.’s Chevy Chase neighborhood when she saw two armed, masked agents in a beat-up minivan pull over a utility vehicle. In less than five minutes, the vehicle’s driver and passenger were in handcuffs and whisked away.
The Department of Homeland Security said that two men, Marvin Saul Alvarez from El Salvador and Daniel Misael Perez-Perez from Guatemala, had entered the United States illegally and were picked up during “a targeted enforcement operation.”
“It was like an abduction,” said Ms. Price, who recorded the arrest on her cellphone while unsuccessfully pressing an officer to identify his agency. No other police officers were present.
“I kept thinking, if it was me or my family and I was disappeared, how would you have any evidence?”
After the arrest, Ms. Price uploaded the video to YouTube and asked the community to help circulate it online.
“This is not acceptable,” Ms. Price said. “I’m a D.C. resident of 25 years. Like, how is this happening? What is the authority? What is due process?”
Campbell Robertson and Albert Sun contributed reporting.
The Transportation Security Administration is flagging passengers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to identify and detain travelers subject to deportation orders.
By Hamed Aleaziz
The Trump administration is providing the names of air travelers suspected of having deportation orders to immigration officials, substantially expanding its use of data sharing to expel people as they pass through U.S. airports.
Under the previously undisclosed program, the Transportation Security Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement of travelers are sharing names and birth dates of travelers believed to have been ordered out of the country by an immigration judge. ICE can then send agents to the airport to detain and quickly deport those people.
It’s unclear how many arrests have been made as a result of the collaboration. But documents obtained by The New York Times show that it led to the arrest of Any Lucía López Belloza, the college student picked up at Boston Logan Airport on Nov. 20 and deported to Honduras two days later. A former ICE official said 75 percent of instances in that official’s region where names were flagged by the program yielded arrests.
ICE has historically avoided interfering with domestic travel. But the partnership between airport security and the immigration agency, which began quietly in March, is the latest way the Trump administration is increasing cooperation and information sharing between federal agencies in service of the president’s goal of carrying out the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history.
“The message to those in the country illegally is clear: The only reason you should be flying is to self-deport home,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security.
Asked about the program before publication, Ms. McLaughlin confirmed that T.S.A. sends the information about all air passengers to ICE to check for potential deportation orders, adding that the data is sent in 24-hour batches. Two days after The New York Times published this article, Ms. McLaughlin said it was not the case that all passenger data is sent to ICE. Instead, she said, T.S.A. officials compare passenger information against a list of individuals with deportation orders provided by ICE. T.S.A. then flags any potential matches to ICE authorities. The Times was unable to reach other transportation officials for further details about the program.
Airline passengers have long been subject to some federal scrutiny. Airlines typically provide passenger information to T.S.A. after a flight is reserved. That information is compared against national security databases, including the Terrorist Screening Dataset, which includes the names of individuals on a watch list of known or suspected terrorists.
But the T.S.A. previously did not get involved in domestic criminal or immigration matters, said one former agency official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the issue freely. Among the concerns, the former official said, has been that enforcement activities at airports could distract from airport security and contribute to longer passenger wait times.
“If you have more officers conducting arrests at airports, it puts more strain on the system, delays and complications may annoy and frighten some travelers, and those who are unsure about their status will move away from air travel,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a senior ICE official during the Biden administration. “It will continue to reduce the space where people feel safe going about their business.”
The push to ramp up enforcement is pervasive inside the Department of Homeland Security, which houses both ICE and the T.S.A. Earlier this year, Stephen Miller, a top White House official, floated a goal of 3,000 immigration arrests a day and met with top ICE officials about how to increase deportations.
Some former ICE officials said the program would be a huge help to an agency struggling to meet the numbers of deportations sought by the Trump administration.
“The administration has turned routine travel into a force multiplier for removals, potentially identifying thousands who thought they could evade the law simply by boarding a plane,” said Scott Mechkowski, the former deputy head of the ICE office in New York City. “This isn’t about fear; it’s about restoring order and ensuring every American knows their government enforces its laws without apology.”
The airport has an added benefit to authorities of a location where potential targets have been scanned for weapons. And, as in the case of Ms. López, people flagged as part of the program have been able to be apprehended and deported very quickly.
Ms. López, 19, had a previous deportation order. In 2018, according to internal records, her case had been referred to ICE for potential arrest. Despite that, she said she did not know about the order and was able to continue to live in the country without issues. Most recently, she was attending Babson College, where she was studying business as a freshman.
Things changed on Nov. 20, when Ms. López arrived at the Boston Logan Airport on her way to Texas. She went through security with her Honduran passport without incident, she said, and arrived at her gate early enough to grab a cup of coffee.
When it was time to board, however, her boarding pass didn’t work.
The second time it was scanned, she noticed an X on the computer screen in front of the agent, who told her to go to customer service to figure out what was happening, she said.
“Oh, you’re Any,” one of the federal agents waiting for her said, according to Ms. López. Internal records show she was initially detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.
“He was like, well, you’re going to come with us. You’re going to be filling a bunch of paperwork,” she recalled. “I was like, well, I have to be boarding the plane because I have to leave right now. And he was like, well, I don’t think you’re even going to be on that flight.”
Activists blasted the airport deportation program as one intended to frighten immigrants.
“This is another attempt to terrorize and punish communities and will make people terrified to ever leave their homes for fear of being unjustly detained and disappeared out of the country before they have a chance to contest the detention,” said Robyn Barnard, senior director of refugee advocacy at Human Rights First, an immigrant advocacy organization.
Documents obtained by The New York Times show Ms. López’s arrest involved an ICE office in California that plays a key role in the airport program. The office, called the Pacific Enforcement Response Center, sends tips to immigration officers across the country and requests to local jails to hold immigrants. Documents show the office flagged Ms. López’s flight information to ICE officers in Boston.
The document details how this is part of a collaboration “with Transportation Security Administration to send actionable leads to the field regarding aliens with a final order of removal that appear to have an impending flight scheduled.”
A former senior ICE official with knowledge of the airport program said the California office often sent several tips a day on potential arrestees at airports in the region the official worked in. The former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal law enforcement matters, said ICE officers received the passenger’s flight number and departure time, as well as a photo of the target — sometimes just hours before the plane took off.
The program is particularly effective because it allows ICE to quickly deport those who are arrested, the former official said.
The arrest of Ms. López is not the only one from the program that has led to media attention.
In late October, Marta Brizeyda Renderos Leiva, a woman from El Salvador, was arrested at the airport in Salt Lake City. Ms. Leiva also had a final deportation order. Video of the arrest shows Ms. Leiva yelling as officers pulled her out of the airport.
Internal records obtained by The Times show that Ms. Leiva’s flight information had been tipped off to local officers by the California office as well.
The Trump administration has tried to leverage other databases to track down immigrants it wants to detain or deport, including the I.R.S., which earlier this year agreed to hand over the addresses of migrants to ICE. A federal court blocked the effort in November.
Ms. López’s case drew publicity in part because she had no criminal record. She had been planning to go home and spend Thanksgiving with her family, including going to church and eating Thanksgiving dinner together. It was a surprise trip.
“I was thinking, OK, this is what I’m going to do with them,” she recalled about the plans she had to spend time with her relatives. “This day I’m going to do this. This day I’m going to be with, like, friends, family and stuff like that. That was the only thing that was going through my mind.”
Now, in Honduras, she is trying to figure out a way to transfer colleges. She misses going to church with her family, to a Texas grocery chain and her mother’s cooking, she said.
A correction was made on Dec. 19, 2025: An earlier version of this article paraphrased comments from a government spokeswoman about information sharing between the Transportation Security Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement that she later said were imprecise. While the spokeswoman acknowledged that ICE and the T.S.A. were sharing passenger data, she said the T.S.A. did not provide lists of all travelers to ICE.
An official with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it would prioritize “those who’ve unlawfully obtained U.S. citizenship.”
By Hamed Aleaziz
The Trump administration plans to ramp up efforts to strip some naturalized Americans of their citizenship, according to internal guidance obtained by The New York Times, marking an aggressive new phase in President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The guidance, issued on Tuesday to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices, asks that they “supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the 2026 fiscal year. If the cases are successful, it would represent a massive escalation of denaturalization in the modern era, experts said. By comparison, between 2017 and this year to date, there had been just over 120 cases filed, according to the Justice Department.
Under federal law, people may be denaturalized only if they committed fraud while applying for citizenship, or in a few other narrow circumstances. But the Trump administration has shown a zeal for using every tool at its disposal to target legal and illegal immigrants, leading activists to warn that such a campaign could sweep up people who had made honest mistakes on their citizenship paperwork and sow fear among law-abiding Americans.
The guidance comes as Mr. Trump has spent much of this year closing loopholes in the immigration system and throwing up roadblocks for people seeking to enter and stay in the country. The sweeping campaign, which has gone further than purging the country of unlawful migrants, has included blocks on asylum at the southern border, a pause on asylum applications inside the United States, and a ban on entry for travelers from predominantly African and Middle Eastern nations. Officials say their actions will make the country safer and preserve the country’s values.
A targeted campaign to increase the number of American immigrants stripped of their citizenship represents an escalation of an already ambitious campaign.
“It’s no secret that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ war on fraud includes prioritizing those who’ve unlawfully obtained U.S. citizenship — especially under the previous administration,” said Matthew J. Tragesser, a U.S.C.I.S. spokesman. “We will pursue denaturalization proceedings for those individuals lying or misrepresenting themselves during the naturalization process. We look forward to continuing to work with the Department of Justice to restore integrity to America’s immigration system.”
In interviews, some former agency officials expressed concern at the scale of the case goals for denaturalization pushed by U.S.C.I.S. leadership.
“Imposing arbitrary numerical targets on denaturalization cases risks politicizing citizenship revocation,” said Sarah Pierce, a former U.S.C.I.S. official. “And requiring monthly quotas that are 10 times higher than the total annual number of denaturalizations in recent years turns a serious and rare tool into a blunt instrument and fuels unnecessary fear and uncertainty for the millions of naturalized Americans.”
Proponents of stricter immigration laws said it was necessary to more aggressively root out people who had been improperly granted citizenship.
“I don’t think we’re anywhere close to denaturalizing too many people,” said Mark Krikorian, the head of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors restrictive immigration policies. Mr. Krikorian said that the country was “so far from denaturalizing” enough people that such an effort would not pull in people who should not be targeted.
There are about 26 million naturalized Americans in the country, according to the Census Bureau. More than 800,000 new citizens were sworn in last year, most of whom were born in Mexico, India, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic or Vietnam, U.S.C.I.S. statistics show. Most people stripped of their citizenship revert to being legal permanent residents.
The new guidance on Tuesday was part of a document laying out U.S.C.I.S. priorities for the 2026 fiscal year, which began in October. Listed alongside such goals as “provide employee feedback opportunities” and “strengthen management of high-risk cases” was “pursue denaturalization.”
The Justice Department previously also said it would make denaturalization a priority this year. In a memo distributed in the summer, officials laid out their approach, saying they would target individuals in an array of categories beyond committing fraud in obtaining citizenship. Categories of eligible people include gang members, those who committed financial fraud, individuals connected to drug cartels and violent criminals, according to the department.
“The civil division shall prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence,” the agency wrote in June.
U.S.C.I.S. is a key player in the process of denaturalization. The agency refers cases to the Justice Department, which must go through a federal court to strip someone of their citizenship. The process can occur either through a civil or a criminal proceeding. During a civil case, government lawyers must have “unequivocal evidence” that someone obtained citizenship illegally or hid a material fact during the process.
Because the government must go through a challenging court process, denaturalization cases have been rare since the 1990s. A Bloomberg Law analysis found that denaturalization cases brought by the government since then peaked in 2018, when 90 criminal and civil cases were filed. “The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that citizenship and naturalization are too precious and fundamental to our democracy for the government to take it away on their whim. Instead of wasting resources digging through Americans’ files, U.S.C.I.S. should do its job of processing applications, as Congress mandated,” said Amanda Baran, a former senior U.S.C.I.S. official in the Biden administration.
Mr. Trump stepped up denaturalizations in his first term as well. In one widely publicized case, a New Jersey man born in India, Baljinder Singh, was stripped of his citizenship after the Justice Department found that he had arrived in the country without travel documents or proof of identity and that he had used a different name.
This year, the Justice Department has brought 13 denaturalization cases and won eight of them, according to Chad Gilmartin, an agency spokesman. Mr. Gilmartin said in a social media post earlier this year that there had been over 100 cases filed to the courts during the first Trump administration, compared with 24 during the Biden administration. In 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that the government must prove not only that someone had lied during the citizenship application process but that the lie had an impact on the underlying citizenship claim.
Experts said that despite the ramp-up in referrals, the process to actually denaturalize someone would likely remain quite difficult, raising questions on whether the government will actually be able to get many cases through.
Still, some had concerns about what the guidance could portend.
“My fear would be that as we have seen in the arrest and removal context when D.H.S. employees are given arbitrary targets what happens is people who shouldn’t be swept up, get swept up and that you’re going to see that happening to people in this context as well,” said Margy O’Herron, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan law and policy organization. “That could incite fear and terror amongst naturalized citizens.”
Biography
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy in the United States for The New York Times. He is most interested in the policies that impact the lives of immigrants as well as migrants coming to the United States, and the debates within the agencies charged with carrying out these policies.
He began covering immigration as a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle in 2017, continuing the beat at BuzzFeed News, The Los Angeles Times and now at The Times. He has also covered criminal justice policy and prisons. At the LA Times, he broke news about the Biden administration forcing out the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, about an accidental U.S. government leak of the personal information of thousands of ICE detainees seeking protection in the United States, and a new effort to place migrant families on home curfews.
Mr. Aleaziz grew up in Oregon. He decided he wanted to be a journalist at the age of 10, when a feature story in The Oregonian documented his family’s immigration dilemma about having to return to Iran, where his disabled older brother would not be able to get the critical medical care that he needed. The story sparked an outpouring of support, and his parents later became U.S. citizens. He spoke about the story and its impact on his life on NPR in 2020.
Mr. Aleaziz graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in journalism.