ICE Enforcement Investigations

The story so far

As of September 24, 2026

This story is about how federal immigration enforcement is playing out on the street, in hospitals, and at work sites, and what those tactics now amount to. The latest flashpoint is Evanston, Illinois, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents trying to find a fugitive detained the wrong man and left him injured. Police found him around 9:49 a.m. with head, neck and dental injuries; surveillance and cellphone video show a struggle, the man insisting he was a U.S. citizen, and two agents leaving as bystanders called for help. An officer noted blood on an agent’s hands; five agents had been operating in separate vehicles. Evanston police are preserving body-camera footage and interviewing witnesses.

Two other recent episodes show the same operation style creating safety risks for the public and bystanders. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a Guatemalan man, Mario David Coronado Juarez, died after crashing during an ICE pursuit, prompting Governor Gretchen Whitmer to order a state investigation. In Florida, officers detained Grace Calero and her teenage daughter at a hospital after a car crash, even though Calero had entered legally, had a pending asylum case, a work permit, and a driver’s license. A policy that once discouraged arrests at places like hospitals has ended, and arrests in those settings are now occurring on camera.

The legal frame explains the on-the-ground choices and the pushback. The Department of Homeland Security is defending stops like the one in Evanston by pointing to a Supreme Court opinion from last year that said immigration agents can stop people on reasonable suspicion, a lower bar than proving a crime. At the same time, a federal judge in Alabama has temporarily blocked warrantless ICE raids at construction sites after a U.S. citizen was detained three times despite showing a Real ID, signaling courts are drawing lines around searches and detentions without warrants. These rulings help explain why agents press stops in public while judges scrutinize raids at workplaces.

What’s at stake now is the boundary between targeted immigration enforcement and the constitutional limits that protect everyone, citizen and noncitizen alike. Local and state officials are moving to assert oversight: Evanston police are investigating the injury case, Michigan’s state police will review the fatal pursuit, and even a Republican senator from Kansas is urging ICE to coordinate with sheriffs during raids to avoid public confrontations. With more than 440,000 people ordered removed since the president returned to office, the volume of operations is up; the question now is how agents identify targets, when they can act without a warrant, and who steps in when they get it wrong.