Uncommon detainees are bringing new attention to the U.S. immigration detention system
A British backpacker. A Harvard researcher. A Canadian actress. An Australian mixed martial arts coach. Dozens of international college students.
The Trump administration’s sweeping immigration-and-visa crackdown has begun ensnaring a class of people long-accustomed to being welcomed with open arms into the United States.
And those uncommon detainees are bringing new attention to the often-harsh U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention system, where people can be held without charge indefinitely, sometimes in shocking conditions, or abruptly removed from the country.
This type of treatment has long been the case in ICE detention, but the people held by the government often didn’t have the resources ‒ the access, language or middle-class expectations ‒ to denounce the conditions.
Now, with President Donald Trump’s crackdown, native English speakers, people with PhDs, and others are getting the word out to a broader public about a system they describe as arbitrary and punishing ‒ although ICE detention is not supposed to resemble prison.
“It’s insane how easily someone can take away your freedom, lock you in a federal prison, without a clear reason. No explanation. No warning,” Australian MMA coach Renato Subotic wrote in an Instagram post after being detained in early April. “Just like that, you’re treated like the worst criminal.”
Like the other detained travelers, Subotic said he was trying to enter the U.S. with a visa and was handcuffed after customs officers identified a paperwork problem. Instead of being refused entry to the United States and put on a flight back home, Subotic said he was taken to a chaotic federal detention center for 24 hours.
Trump campaigned on tough new immigration enforcement, particularly targeting violent offenders living illegally within the United States. But the crackdown has swept in everyday foreign travelers and tourists, too ‒ resulting in detention for infractions that previously would have gotten a severe glare or a $500 fine.
“I believe in respecting the rules. But putting someone in federal prison over a missing detail in a visa application?” Subotic wrote in his post. “Now I’m back in Australia, I’ll speak with my lawyers. Something has to be done about the way I was treated. Hope this never happen to nobody else.”
USA TODAY asked ICE whether foreign travelers should expect to be detained on an infraction of customs or immigration law. The agency didn’t respond to a request for comment regarding its detention practices.
Not supposed to be punishment
Because immigration and visa violations are civil, not criminal matters, ICE detention is supposed to be “non-punitive,” according to the agency’s own guidelines.
But conditions vary widely in the sprawling detention network overseen by ICE, which includes government-run and contracted facilities, said Deb Fleischaker, a former ICE official who served under the Biden administration and the first Trump administration.
“Legally, it is civil detention, not criminal detention,” Fleischaker said. But “by and large, people are treated like they are in jail.”
When the system gets overcrowded, conditions can deteriorate, she said. ICE held nearly 48,000 people in detention in early April, according to agency data. Last year, Congress provided funding for a daily average maximum of 41,500 immigration detention beds.
“Obviously, things get worse when the system is overburdened, when ICE contractors are overwhelmed and overworked,” Fleischaker said, adding that problems used to be detected and fixed by internal review systems.
But the Trump administration recently eliminated two key oversight offices, the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman.
Detention or ‘kidnapping’?
Canadian entrepreneur-turned-actress Jasmine Mooney described an experience similar to Subotic’s, but far longer. She described her 12-day ICE detention in The Guardian newspaper as a “kidnapping.” She was shuffled from site to site after she tried to enter the U.S. at the Mexican border, as she’d done many times before.
ICE officials left her shivering in cold rooms as she tried to make sense of her detention, she wrote.
Legally, immigration officers couldn’t send her back to Mexico, because she’s a Canadian citizen. But in years past, agents might have escorted her to the San Diego airport and put her on a one-way flight to Vancouver, experts told USA TODAY.
“One minute, I was in an immigration office talking to an officer about my work visa, which had been approved months before and allowed me, a Canadian, to work in the U.S.,” she wrote. “The next, I was told to put my hands against the wall, and patted down like a criminal before being sent to an ICE detention center without the chance to talk to a lawyer.”
