‘There’s no due process’: ICU nurse, army veteran among U.S. citizens caught in ICE dragnet

Amanda Trebach, an intensive care nurse who has been trying to keep her migrant patients safe from immigration raids, never expected American law enforcement to use the same kind of violence against her, a U.S. citizen.

But video filmed and posted by fellow organizers during one confrontation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in August shows Trebach forced to the pavement and roughhoused by federal agents, who violently arrest and detain her.

“You don’t know who they are. They don’t identify themselves. There’s no due process,” she told CBC News.

The incident occurred as Trebach and other members of a Los Angeles activist group called Harbor Area Peace Patrols had been circulating images of licence plates on nondescript vehicles to alert migrant communities to their presence.

On Aug. 8, volunteers were photographing ICE agents leaving a staging site for raids on Terminal Island, whose Japanese residents were the first in America to be displaced and forcibly detained in internment camps during the Second World War.

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Amanda Trebach, an ICU nurse and activist with Harbor Area Peace Patrols, says migrants from local communities are avoiding hospitals because masked agents have been known to patrol around them and other public institutions, looking for people to arrest, detain and deport.

Shortly after, the officers stopped their vehicle and jumped out; Trebach says they knelt on her head, handcuffed her and threw her into the back of a black van.

She says ICE “kidnapped” her and told her to stop taking photos.

“I just said, ‘Let me go. We’re here. It’s our right to monitor you,’” said Trebach. “I’m a citizen.”

Trebach was released without charge hours later.

“As is her constitutional right, Amanda was documenting the movements of the masked kidnappers,” Harbor Area Peace Patrols’ parent organization, Union del Barrio, wrote in a social media post detailing Trebach ’s detainment.

ICE officers themselves have leaned into characterizations of their arrests as abductions. In an incident two weeks later, agents were videotaped taunting Peace Patrol activists from their van saying, “Good morning ladies! A-kidnapping we will go.”

Trebach is hardly the only U.S. citizen arrested and detained without charge. In a recent investigation, ProPublica found that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by immigration enforcement as of Oct. 5.

University of California in Los Angeles law professor Jonathan Zasloff says ICE has effectively been operating with “impunity” despite the growing cases of U.S. citizens and legal immigrants getting caught up in their raids.

“They could break all these constitutional rights and nothing could happen to them,” he said.

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ICE raids and fear tactics: Is America becoming a police state?

U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is supposed to be targeting criminal illegal immigrants, but more American citizens and legal immigrants are being rounded up. For The National, CBC’s Terence McKenna talks to people who have been dragged away by ICE agents and asks: Is America becoming a police state?

‘The constitution is right there’

Even citizens not actively involved in advocacy have been swept up in violent immigration raids.

George Retes, a U.S. army veteran, was on his way to work as a security guard at a legal marijuana grow operation called Glass House Farms in Ventura County, Calif., when he got caught between an active ICE raid and an organized protest.

In a FOX 11 Los Angeles livestream, Retes is seen driving up to a wall of federal officers in military gear. Within two minutes, dozens of agents advance across the road, unleashing tear gas on the crowd of demonstrators.

After smoke from the tear gas can be seen engulfing his car, Retes, in an account of his arrest, writes that despite having identified himself as a citizen, ICE agents “smashed my driver-side window, and pepper-sprayed my face” as “others stood by and watched.”

“Even though I’m just complying, an agent puts his knee on my back and another agent puts his knee on my neck. And as they’re doing that I’m just telling them I can’t breathe,” Retes, 25, told CBC News.

WATCH | George Retes says he was choked, arrested by ICE:

Retes said this kind of behaviour seems to contravene U.S. laws.

“The constitution is right there,” he said. “I mean, that’s everything we stand for.”

In a statement, ICE claimed Retes was “violent and refused to comply with law enforcement,” and blocked agents by “refusing to move his vehicle out of the road.” But ICE did not address why agents escalated the matter so quickly.

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This U.S. army veteran alleges he was choked, zip-tied by ICE as he was on his way to work

Security guard George Retes says he was just ‘trying to get to work’ when he found himself caught between an ICE raid and a counter-demonstration. Arrested by immigration agents, the 25-year-old describes his arrest to CBC News, including how an agent kneeled on his neck, choking him. Retes was released without charge after three days.

During the marijuana farm raids, federal authorities arrested more than 360 people — one of the largest ICE operations since Donald Trump became U.S. president for a second time in January. Among those arrested were four U.S. citizens, charged with assaulting or resisting officers.

Retes was held for three days before being released. He was in such a state of distress over what happened that the detention facility put him on suicide watch, he told The Associated Press.

Retes missed his daughter’s third birthday while locked up, he said, and is now suing the federal government for unconstitutional detention. He has not been charged.

“It’s just crazy that all this can happen,” he said. “But it doesn’t change what the flag stands for or what it means to be an American.”

ICE operating with ‘impunity’

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said ramped-up immigration enforcement is removing the worst kind of “criminal illegal aliens” off U.S. streets and sending a message: “Self-deport or we will arrest and deport you.”

Survey data from February 2024 to March 2025 shows about one-third of Americans agree that immigrants in the country illegally should be deported — though most believe arrests should not happen in places like schools and hospitals.

Masked immigration enforcement agents have arrested people in and outside of public institutions — including hospitals, schools and courthouses — on multiple occasions. This has caused some migrants to avoid medical care out of fears they’ll be detained, including at the hospital in South Los Angeles where Trebach works.

“What Trump is doing is placing fear in the communities,” Trebach said. “They’re trying to make us fearful so they can take over more power.”

There is also an explicit mandate for ICE officers to arrest as many people as possible to meet Trump’s mass deportation quota of 3,000 people a day, or over a million a year.

In June, California Gov. Gavin Newsom decried the “chaotic federal sweeps” across his state to meet an “arbitrary arrest quota” that is “reckless” and “cruel.”

Based on government figures from last year showing the number of immigrants with criminal convictions and pending charges being tracked by ICE, the administration is about 350,000 “illegal aliens” short of its target.

Social media accounts, websites and even dedicated apps have documented sightings of immigration agents across the country, including a widely used phone app called ICEBlock.

Under pressure from the administration, Apple and Google removed ICEBlock from the app store earlier this month. Apple told the app’s creator it had violated the company’s policies because “its purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”

In September, the U.S. Supreme Court paused an injunction by a California district court to block “roving” immigration patrols on the basis that ICE was stopping people based on their race, language, employment or location.

In her dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the Fourth Amendment “prohibits exactly what the government is attempting to do here: seize individuals based solely on a set of facts that ‘describe[s] a very large category of presumably innocent people.’”

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The American Civil Liberties Union called the Supreme Court ruling “outrageous,” saying it normalizes a culture of fear for anyone perceived as Latino who are subjected to increased racial profiling, arbitrary inspections and detentions.

Zasloff, the UCLA law professor, told CBC News this is an effort to return America from “a modern, more diverse” country to “what it might have been in the 1830s.”

Al Muratsuchi, a California state assemblymember who represents the South Bay region of Los Angeles, says his constituents, many of whom are working-class immigrants in industries like landscaping and construction, are being systematically victimized.

“We’re seeing similar themes of immigrants being a threat and being targeted based on their race,” Muratsuchi, who is a son of Japanese American immigrants, told CBC News.

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Al Muratsuchi, a Japanese American assemblymember for California, says the goal of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown goes beyond deportation to create ‘an overall atmosphere of fear,’ especially after incidents like U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla being tackled and the National Guard being sent into Democratic cities.

U.S. not a police state ‘yet’

ICE routinely promotes its activities on social media, including its use of force against migrants whom Trump has repeatedly described as “vermin.” One shows ICE agents dragging away a Portland protester on a cart. Officers tackle a man in another action-packed arrest compilation.

Rock video-style clips posted by Greg Bovino, commander and nearly 30-year veteran of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), depict everything from clashes with protesters to an alternative take on Star Wars that likens his agency to Darth Vader.

CBC News made detailed requests for an interview with Bovino through CBP. Three weeks later, the agency has still not responded.

Despite the risks, a growing number of Americans like Trebach — millions in recent weeks — are fighting for what they believe the nation represents.

In Illinois, the latest epicentre of Trump’s crackdown on immigration and “domestic terrorism,” demonstrators sued law enforcement, accusing them of violating their constitutional rights through excessive crowd control tactics like tear gas.

Two National Guard members recently told As It Happens they are refusing orders to deploy to Chicago.

Zasloff doesn’t think America is a police state “yet,” though he believes the Trump administration is trying to turn it into one.

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Trump losing support among young Latino, Asian men, says UCLA law professor

Trump has broken much of the trust needed to govern effectively, especially among younger Latino and Asian men, says Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. ‘The tide is turning,’ he told CBC News, while also asking, ‘Is it too late? Is it going to matter?’

“But that’s always the case with any competitive authoritarian system,” said Zasloff, pointing to Trump’s declining approval ratings and the growing movement to stop his administration.

“For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction.”

Meanwhile, the raids and deportations continue.

On Thursday afternoon, ICE boasted on X about having deported “over 5,300 criminal aliens throughout the Los Angeles area.”

That same hour, DHS posted a Halloween-themed montage of agents clashing with demonstrators and arresting immigrants, with the caption: “There will be no sanctuary for creatures & criminals of the night.”