U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 9, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

In a report published in mid-October, ProPublica's Nicole Foy detailed 4th Amendment abuses against United States citizens by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) agents — including 170 detentions.

Legal expert and former federal prosecutor Harry Litman, in an article published by The New Republic on November 6, emphasizes that "lawless" ICE's abuses against U.S. citizens go way beyond the "harrowing" accounts described in Foy's piece.

ProPublica's reporting, according to Litman, "puts the lie to the declaration of the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson that 'we don’t arrest U.S. citizens for immigration enforcement.'"

"The facts on the ground tell a very different tale," Litman warns. "ProPublica's report chronicled a series of ICE arrests that would be hard to believe if they weren't backed by official complaints and eyewitnesses ... Each time a citizen is wrongly detained or beaten by federal agents, the injury extends beyond the individual: It erodes the shared understanding that government power must answer to the Constitution."

Litman continues, "What the ProPublica investigation reveals is not simply a rogue agency but a government willing to tolerate — and at times encourage — lawlessness in its name. In community after community, ICE has created zones of fear where both citizens and noncitizens tread carefully, knowing that a routine errand or encounter could end in detention."

ICE's "abuses," according to Litman, point to a broad pattern of the Trump administration attacking the civil liberties of its opponents.

"The same authoritarian reflex that animates the president's contempt for judges and journalists is now operating in street-level enforcement, where ordinary Americans are discovering that their citizenship is no shield against state violence," Litman explains. "The lesson of abusive, unconstitutional treatment of American citizens is thus not limited to immigration. It is a warning about the corrosion of constitutional culture itself. A government that flouts the Fourth Amendment and then lies about it to courts and the people has already crossed a moral and legal frontier. The question is whether the country will fight back before the border between law and lawlessness disappears altogether."

Harry Litman's full article for The New Republic is available at this link.