Immigration agents used or threatened to use force against immigrants, protesters, observers and bystanders in nearly 400 incidents in eight states last year, according to a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union.
The civil rights group, in the report published Thursday, said it sought to capture law enforcement conduct during immigration enforcement efforts by reviewing more than 1,200 incidents in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland and New Mexico.
Among the findings: Traffic stops led to immigration agents using their car to box in people 53 times, ramming other cars 14 times, pulling 76 drivers and passengers out of cars, smashing car windows 47 times and hitting people with cars six times, the report states.
“Agents used their vehicles recklessly to conduct enforcement,” the report, which calls for Congress to create a new Cabinet-level agency to manage immigration, reads. “Car chases and crashes were a feature, and agents appeared to use their cars as weapons.”
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The report comes just after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents fatally shot two drivers within the span of a week in Houston and Biddeford, Maine, led to a temporary pause on most traffic stops, though President Donald Trump quickly reversed the directive Wednesday.
The ACLU report concludes that agents used force and the threat of force as default tactics and tools to coerce immediate compliance rather than to respond to a threat, and that the incidents represent a small fraction of the immigration enforcement activity that “exploded to unprecedented levels” after Trump took office in January 2025.
“What happened in Minneapolis, where federal agents killed U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good, was not confined to that location or surge,” the report states. “Understood as part of the thousands of street arrests and law enforcement interactions in the interior of the United States that happened in 2025, these killings were not the excesses of a few rogue officers. They were part of a pattern of civil rights violations arising from immigration enforcement — at a scale and severity without precedent in our nation’s recent history.”
Despite Trump’s contradiction of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s earlier mandate to pause most traffic stops by immigration agents, the DHS head said on Wednesday that the two were on the same page.
“We want our @ICEgov officers to have all options available to keep them safe while executing our mission of deporting as many illegal alien criminals from our country as possible,” Mullin wrote on X.
And a DHS official on Wednesday issued a statement that blamed “dangerous smears and hoaxes” for an increase in vehicle attacks against officers by migrants and “anti-ICE agitators,” listing examples of what they called “hateful rhetoric.”
“We are once again calling on sanctuary politicians, agitators, and the media to turn the temperature down and stop calling for violence and resistance against ICE law enforcement,” Lauren Bis, an acting assistant secretary, said in a statement.
The ACLU reviewed encounters between law enforcement, immigrants, observers, protesters and bystanders, drawing from news reports, court documents, footage of the incidents, congressional investigations and press releases from the Trump administration.
Traffic stops are just one of the ways in which agents are arresting people outside of jails and prisons. Weekly street arrests, including car stops, increased from fewer than 1,000 in January 2025 to nearly 5,000 this January, according to an April report from the Deportation Data Project.
The ACLU review found law enforcement used unmarked cars in 310 instances. The agents involved in the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7 drove unmarked cars.
The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly said its agents have shot at drivers because they attempted to ram the agents. An MS NOW review of 15 such cases found that some of those cases were dropped, dismissed or charges were never filed. Four of the cases analyzed remained ongoing in January.
DHS’s statement following the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine on Monday said an ICE agent shot at Durán Guerrero as he attempted to drive away for a different reason — because the agent feared for public safety.
Two other people died this week in relation to Trump’s push for mass deportations. A 45-year-old Venezuelan man died from a suspected cardiac arrest on Monday in Georgia while in transport between ICE detention centers, and a Mexican man was killed by a tractor trailer Tuesday in Florida as he attempted to flee federal law enforcement.
“People are dying in ICE detention at a record-breaking rate, ICE agents are tearing families apart and shooting people on the streets, making people less safe, and causing chaos wherever they go — whether in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Biddeford, or beyond,” said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of the Detention Watch Network. “Make no mistake, we are witnessing a watershed moment.”
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