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A U.S. Citizen Detained by ICE for Three Days Tells His Story - The Atlantic
The Atlantic - Gift LinkGeorge Retes is a 25-year-old U.S. Army veteran who served a tour in Iraq. On July 10, while on his way to work as a security guard at a Southern California cannabis farm, he was detained by federal immigration agents, despite telling them that he is an American citizen and that his wallet and identification were in his nearby car, Retes told me. While arresting him, the agents knelt on his back and his neck, he said, making it difficult for him to breathe. Held in a jail cell for three days and nights, he was not allowed to make a phone call, see an attorney, appear before a judge, or take a shower to wash off pepper spray and tear gas that the agents had used, according to the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm that is representing Retes. He worried about his two young children and missed his daughter’s birthday.
Mistreatment of American citizens by immigration authorities is not new. According to a 2021 Government Accountability Office report, the best available data indicate that Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 674 “potential” U.S. citizens, detained 121, and removed 70 during a five-year, six-month period that ended in 2020. We don’t yet know if detentions of U.S. citizens are becoming more common in President Donald Trump’s second term, but news outlets have documented more than a dozen such cases. And the Trump administration has ramped up immigration raids, rolled back due-process protections, and secured funding to quickly hire 10,000 additional ICE officers, all of which creates the conditions for more erroneous detentions—and raises the question of whether ICE can violate the rights of citizens with impunity.
“There must be some avenue to hold the federal government or its officers liable for violating George’s constitutional rights,” Marie Miller, one of Retes’s attorneys, told me.
Her strategy is to seek relief for Retes under the Federal Tort Claims Act, a law that allows private parties to sue for negligent or wrongful acts committed by federal employees acting within their job. The government has six months to resolve a claim, after which the claimant can sue. The hope is that the case “will chart a path to holding federal officers or their employer accountable,” Miller explained, “and that blazing the path to accountability will discourage this kind of treatment.” She said that ICE has acknowledged receiving Retes’s claim but has not yet responded.
Mistreatment of American citizens by immigration authorities is not new. According to a 2021 Government Accountability Office report, the best available data indicate that Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 674 “potential” U.S. citizens, detained 121, and removed 70 during a five-year, six-month period that ended in 2020. We don’t yet know if detentions of U.S. citizens are becoming more common in President Donald Trump’s second term, but news outlets have documented more than a dozen such cases. And the Trump administration has ramped up immigration raids, rolled back due-process protections, and secured funding to quickly hire 10,000 additional ICE officers, all of which creates the conditions for more erroneous detentions—and raises the question of whether ICE can violate the rights of citizens with impunity.
“There must be some avenue to hold the federal government or its officers liable for violating George’s constitutional rights,” Marie Miller, one of Retes’s attorneys, told me.
Her strategy is to seek relief for Retes under the Federal Tort Claims Act, a law that allows private parties to sue for negligent or wrongful acts committed by federal employees acting within their job. The government has six months to resolve a claim, after which the claimant can sue. The hope is that the case “will chart a path to holding federal officers or their employer accountable,” Miller explained, “and that blazing the path to accountability will discourage this kind of treatment.” She said that ICE has acknowledged receiving Retes’s claim but has not yet responded.
Link to tweet
"What they did wasn’t warranted. I know for an absolute fact I did nothing wrong."
— (@mpowerdance.bsky.social) 2025-09-11T03:04:43.021Z
A U.S. CITIZEN DETAINED BY ICE FOR THREE DAYS TELLS HIS STORY. A conversation with George Retes, an Army veteran swept up in a California raid
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www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...