'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.

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.