ICE Out of Control:
Black Families Caught in Trump's Deportation Dragnet
By The Central Call News Desk
Ice Out of Control
Two American citizens are dead. Dozens more have been wrongfully detained. Federal judges in Oregon, Colorado, and the District of Columbia have issued injunctions condemning the agency’s tactics as unlawful. And still, Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues its nationwide sweep — a campaign so broad, so unchecked, and so suffused with racial profiling that civil rights groups say it represents a fundamental assault on the rights of every person of color in America, citizen or not.
On January 7, 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American mother, in her vehicle in Minneapolis. The county medical examiner ruled her death a homicide. Federal authorities immediately claimed jurisdiction and blocked Minnesota state investigators from accessing evidence. On January 24, another American citizen — Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse — was shot to death in the street by an ICE agent. Video footage contradicts the federal government’s claim that the shooting was self-defense.
Neither victim was an undocumented immigrant. Both were American citizens swept up in enforcement operations targeting their neighborhoods. Their deaths illustrate what experts at the Brookings Institution have called ‘racial profiling by ICE’ — the use of skin color and perceived ethnicity as a substitute for probable cause.
In Chicago, federal agents raided an apartment building and arrested 37 undocumented residents — but also detained American citizens living in the same building, including 67-year-old Rodrick Johnson. ‘I asked them why they were holding me if I was an American citizen,’ Johnson told the Chicago Sun-Times. ‘I asked if they had a warrant, and I asked for a lawyer. They never brought one.’ Toys, shoes, and food remained piled in the hallways hours after agents left.
For Black immigrants, the picture is even more alarming. Although Black immigrants account for only 6% of the ICE detention population, they represent 28% of all abuse-related calls to the National Immigration Detention Hotline, according to a landmark report by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and Freedom for Immigrants. Black detainees report being subjected to racist slurs, physical abuse, and medical neglect at rates far exceeding those reported by other detainees. The Trump administration has dramatically expanded the detention system — which 2025 was already the deadliest year on record — with plans to bring more than 100,000 detention beds online in 2026.
Federal judges have pushed back. In Oregon, U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai issued a scathing preliminary injunction on February 28, describing ICE operations as designed to ‘strike fear’ in communities. He found agents were casting ‘dragnets’ across the state, smashing car windows, handcuffing people, and detaining them without making individualized determinations of probable cause. Similar rulings have followed in Colorado and D.C.
The ACLU has filed a federal class-action lawsuit in Minnesota alleging that ICE and Customs and Border Protection are conducting suspicionless stops, warrantless arrests, and racial profiling — violating the Fourth Amendment rights of people who have never been accused of any crime. ‘The government cannot stop and arrest people based on the color of their skin,’ said Kate Huddleston, a senior ACLU attorney. ‘These kinds of police-state tactics are contrary to the basic principles of liberty and equality.’
The Trump administration argues it is targeting criminals. But data tells a different story: one-third of all people arrested in ICE operations have no criminal record. Overall ICE arrests have quadrupled since Trump took office, with street arrests — the kind most likely to ensnare American citizens — increasing by a factor of eleven.
For African Americans, this is familiar terrain. The criminalization of Black bodies, the presumption of guilt, the law enforced selectively by race — these are the same patterns that built the plantation, the convict leasing system, and mass incarceration. The only thing new is the uniform. The Central Call will continue to document these abuses, amplify the voices of those affected, and hold power accountable.
