Forty members of the U.S. House of Representatives are demanding that the Department of Homeland Security explain how many American citizens its immigration agents have detained, how those encounters are tracked, and how agents verify citizenship during operations — after an investigation by the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica counted more than 500 U.S. citizens held by immigration agents during the Trump administration's enforcement drive.
Source: ProPublica, Nov 2, 2026
ProPublica published the lawmakers' renewed demand on Monday, November 2, 2026. The demand itself was made in an October letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, led by California Representative Lou Correa together with 39 other legislators. No one disputes the letter exists; what is disputed is what the numbers mean and whether citizens' rights were violated.
What ProPublica found
ProPublica's investigation, first published on October 6 and updated on October 29, documented citizens detained in case after case. Its updated database lists 519 citizens across 302 incidents, including 70 minors, according to a summary of the update published on October 31. ProPublica says the total is almost certainly an undercount, because the government does not transparently track these cases.
Within that total, ProPublica found more than 100 Americans who were questioned about their citizenship, 63 Americans detained while recording immigration agents, 36 held for at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or their family, and roughly a dozen citizens deported — most of them children. Experts told ProPublica the cases collectively show federal agents running roughshod over the constitutional rights of citizens.
"We remain concerned that the Department's actions are violating American citizens' constitutional rights to due process, equal protection, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and request transparency regarding the Department's actions." — Rep. Lou Correa and 39 other representatives, in their October letter to Secretary Mullin, as quoted by ProPublica.
What Homeland Security says
The Department of Homeland Security has long insisted that it is not arresting U.S. citizens, and it defended its immigration operations as "highly targeted." In its response to ProPublica, a department spokesperson pointed to victims of crimes committed by people in the country illegally — naming Morin, Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray — as the true victims of illegal immigration crime in America. The two sides are describing the same enforcement drive in completely different terms: oversight and rights on one side, targeted public-safety enforcement on the other.
How this fight built up
This is not the first round. Democrats in Congress have been pressing the second Trump administration for details of how immigration agents interact with U.S. citizens since early 2025. Last year, congressional Democrats announced a wide-ranging investigation after earlier reporting found that more than 170 citizens had been detained by immigration agents. The ProPublica count has now pushed the documented figure past 500, which is why the demand has been renewed.
There is also a bill. Last month, Representative Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico introduced the Justice for Citizens Wrongfully Detained by ICE Act, which would make it easier for citizens to sue immigration agents over wrongful arrests. The bill has been introduced, not passed — it is a proposal in Congress, not law.
Why this matters to diaspora families
For naturalized U.S. citizens — including Punjabi and other South Asian Americans who became citizens after immigrating — this argument is not abstract. The lawmakers' central questions are practical ones: what documents do agents accept as proof of citizenship during an operation, how is an encounter recorded, and what happens to a citizen who is wrongly held before the mistake is sorted out? Those are the answers the letter asks DHS to put on the record.
What happens next
As of November 2, DHS had not publicly released a count of citizens detained or a full account of how such encounters are tracked — that absence is the core of the lawmakers' complaint, and ProPublica notes the government does not transparently track the cases. Watch for a formal DHS reply to the Correa letter, for any hearing that follows, and for whether the Leger Fernández bill picks up support. Awaaz Punjab will update this story when the department answers.