DHS Campaign Against US Citizens Exposed

On the evening of January 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old American woman, was sitting in her car on a Minneapolis street when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross circled her vehicle on foot, then fired three shots through her windshield as her car turned away from him. She died at the scene [1].

Seventeen days later, on January 24, Alex Jeffrey Pretti — a 37-year-old intensive care nurse at the Department of Veterans Affairs, an American citizen filming federal agents on his phone — was pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground by six federal agents, and shot dead [2].

These killings did not occur in a vacuum. They emerged from a vast, escalating campaign by the Department of Homeland Security that has, over the past year, turned the tools of immigration enforcement — surveillance technology, mass detention, biometric databases, and now lethal force — against U.S. citizens on American soil. The scope of this campaign, a Crowdbyte investigation has found, extends far beyond Minneapolis. It encompasses a nationwide voter fraud dragnet targeting naturalized citizens, a facial recognition app deployed without meaningful oversight, the wrongful detention of at least 170 Americans, and a budget that is set to triple to $30 billion [3][4][5].

Operation Metro Surge: The Largest DHS Operation Ever

The immediate trigger for the Minneapolis crisis was Operation Metro Surge, launched in December 2025 as what DHS called "the largest DHS operation ever" [6]. The Trump administration flooded the Twin Cities metropolitan area with roughly 3,000 federal agents — five times the size of the Minneapolis Police Department — ostensibly targeting criminal undocumented immigrants [7].

The operation's official statistics tell one story: DHS claimed more than 4,000 arrests of "criminal illegals" [8]. But the data tells a different one. Across public registries and press releases, only 335 names could be independently identified out of the reported thousands of arrests [7]. On February 3, 2026, Judge Jerry W. Blackwell said that the "overwhelming majority" of cases brought to him by ICE involved people lawfully present in the United States [6].

Source: GDELT Project

Data as of Mar 9, 2026CSV

The legal system was overwhelmed. On January 28, Minnesota's chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz found that ICE had violated at least 96 court orders in the state since January 1, 2026 [6]. Federal judges across the country have ruled more than 4,440 times that ICE is detaining immigrants illegally [9]. Senator Cory Booker placed the number of American citizens wrongly detained at 170 [9].

White House "border czar" Tom Homan announced on February 4 that 700 agents would be withdrawn, and on February 12 declared the surge would wind down [7]. But by then, two Americans were dead, and the constitutional damage had spread far beyond Minnesota.

The Surveillance State Comes Home

Perhaps the most alarming dimension of the DHS campaign is the surveillance infrastructure now aimed at American citizens. At the center is Mobile Fortify, a facial recognition app built by NEC Corporation and deployed to ICE field agents on their smartphones [10].

Mobile Fortify connects to DHS biometric databases containing records on more than 270 million individuals — including every person who has entered or exited the United States — and can return a subject's name, birthdate, alien number, citizenship status, and "possible overstay status" [10]. Critically, the app can be used on anyone regardless of citizenship or immigration status, and individuals cannot decline to be photographed. Photos are stored for 15 years, even when there is no match [10][11].

During Operation Metro Surge, ICE agents were routinely spotted holding their smartphones up to people's faces in Minneapolis neighborhoods. In one documented case, Mobile Fortify was used to scan a woman twice in the same encounter and returned two entirely different — and both incorrect — names [10].

No known formal policies exist governing who may use Mobile Fortify, which populations it targets, how long data is stored, or what legal authorities justify its deployment [11]. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and more than a dozen rights organizations have demanded a halt to the program [11].

But the surveillance extends well beyond facial recognition. Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine demanded an investigation into DHS's procurement of cellphone surveillance tools from companies like Penlink and Paragon, which collect location data and enable access to mobile devices [12]. An NPR investigation in March 2026 found that DHS is "using a broad web of surveillance tools to monitor, apprehend and intimidate both the people it seeks to deport and the U.S. citizens critical of its policies, in the real world and online" [13].

The ACLU has documented that DHS is circumventing the Fourth Amendment by purchasing commercial data that would normally require a warrant to access [14]. DHS entered into data-sharing agreements with the IRS and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, creating what civil liberties experts call an unprecedented linkage of government databases on American citizens [12].

The Denaturalization Dragnet

In February 2026, an internal DHS memo headlined "Potential Voter Fraud — Denaturalization" revealed a nationwide campaign to investigate and potentially strip citizenship from naturalized Americans [15].

The memo, from Homeland Security Investigations' Identity and Benefit Fraud Unit, directs HSI offices across the country to identify naturalized citizens who may have registered to vote or voted in elections before completing the naturalization process [15]. The initiative stems from President Trump's executive order on voting integrity, and represents one of the most aggressive uses of federal law enforcement to police the voting behavior of citizens in modern American history [15].

The practical results have been sobering. In Idaho, a search of voter data flagged 760 potential non-citizens among over 1 million residents on the rolls. After further review by election officials, the list was narrowed to roughly a dozen cases referred for possible criminal investigation [15]. In the handful of cases where judges have issued rulings, they have all ruled against the Trump administration [15].

Legal scholars have raised alarm that the campaign is designed less to uncover actual voter fraud — which extensive research shows is vanishingly rare — than to create a chilling effect on naturalized citizens' political participation. The federal criminal statutes involved require proof that a person knowingly voted when ineligible, a high bar that has historically resulted in very few convictions [15].

DHS is simultaneously expanding a citizenship verification system that civil liberties experts call "unprecedented" — a single federal database linking citizenship records with information on political donations, government benefits, and other sensitive personal data [16].

A Budget Built for Mass Enforcement

The institutional infrastructure behind these operations has been backed by historic funding increases. ICE's base FY2026 budget is $11.3 billion — a $960 million increase over the prior year [5]. But the real money came through the budget reconciliation bill enacted in July 2025, which allocated roughly $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement [5].

Within that, $45 billion was earmarked for building new immigration detention centers, representing a 265% increase to ICE's detention budget. Another $29.9 billion went to enforcement and deportation operations. When reconciliation funding is combined with the regular budget, ICE's budget is projected to triple to approximately $30 billion for 2026 [5].

Source: TRAC Reports / Cato Institute / FactCheck.org

Data as of Feb 7, 2026CSV

The expansion of the detention system has been dramatic. As of February 7, 2026, ICE held 68,289 people — nearly double the roughly 40,000 at the start of 2025 [17]. The composition of that population has shifted even more radically. In January 2025, just 6% of ICE detainees had no criminal conviction. By February 2026, that figure had risen to 73.6% — meaning nearly three-quarters of the people ICE holds have never been convicted of a crime [17][18].

The Cato Institute found that only 5% of ICE detainees have a violent criminal conviction [18]. The Brennan Center for Justice characterized the funding as creating a "deportation-industrial complex" [5].

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics (CES9091912001)

Data as of Feb 1, 2026CSV

Constitutional Confrontation

The legal pushback has been fierce. The ACLU of Minnesota filed a class-action lawsuit on January 15 accusing immigration agents of racially profiling Somali and Latino residents through unlawful stops during Operation Metro Surge, citing violations of the Fourth Amendment and the equal protection guarantees of the Fifth Amendment [19].

In Southern California, workers, family members, and advocacy groups sued DHS for what they described as "abducting and disappearing community members using unlawful stop and arrest practices," alleging violations of Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights [20]. In Pennsylvania, the ACLU moved to quash a DHS administrative subpoena seeking Google subscriber records about a critic of DHS conduct — a case raising direct First Amendment concerns about government retaliation against speech [14].

A GAO report published in 2025 found that DHS "could better address bias risk and enhance privacy protections for technologies used in public," a measured bureaucratic assessment of what critics describe as an apparatus of racial profiling [12].

The Fall of Noem — and What Comes Next

The political reckoning arrived on March 5, 2026, when President Trump fired Kristi Noem as DHS Secretary [21]. During contentious Senate hearings in the days prior, Noem notably refused to retract her characterization of the American citizens killed by federal agents in Minneapolis as "domestic terrorists" [22]. Administration officials cited "unfortunate leadership failures," staff mismanagement, and feuding across DHS [21].

Trump named Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma as her replacement. If confirmed, Mullin — a citizen of the Cherokee Nation — would be the first Native American to lead DHS [21]. But critics note that Noem's firing appeared driven not by the substance of DHS's policies but by her handling of the political fallout.

The institutional machinery she oversaw — the $30 billion budget, the 50,000 detention beds, the Mobile Fortify app, the denaturalization campaign, the data-sharing agreements — remains fully operational. An American Immigration Council report released in March 2026 concluded that "immigration detention is harsher and less accountable than ever" [23].

The Broader Pattern

What distinguishes the current DHS campaign from previous immigration enforcement eras is the degree to which its tools have been turned inward — toward American citizens, legal residents, and constitutionally protected activity.

The federal government has long maintained the right to enforce immigration law. But the current operation represents something qualitatively different: a domestic security apparatus that deploys military-scale personnel to American cities, kills U.S. citizens during enforcement operations, scans the faces of passersby without consent, investigates the voting history of naturalized citizens, surveils critics online, and detains tens of thousands of people — nearly three-quarters of whom have no criminal record — while repeatedly violating court orders.

DHS continues to maintain that "ICE does NOT arrest or deport U.S. citizens" [24]. The documented record — the dead, the detained, the surveilled, and the subpoenaed — tells a different story.

This investigation was produced by Crowdbyte's investigative team. If you have information related to DHS enforcement operations, contact us securely through our encrypted tip line.