These are some of the many people legally in the US who have been detained by ICE or refused entry

Permanent residents in the U.S. have faced detention and deportation, while even tourists have been turned away under the new immigration regime taking shape under the Trump administration.

The White House has been accused of targeting activists with opposing views, especially on the Israel-Hamas war, and rushing to deport people before they can fully access legal counsel.

When asked last month about the administration’s record of controversial and mistaken deportations, which has included deporting people protected by court rulings, President Trump brushed off any criticisms.

“Let me tell you that nothing will ever be perfect in this world,” he told The Atlantic.

Here are some of the most notable cases.

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On May 11, Hasan Piker, the most popular progressive online video streamer, was stopped for additional questioning as he traveled through a Chicago airport. There, Piker, a U.S. citizen who has nearly 3 million followers on Twitch, said agents subjected him to lengthy questioning about his views on Trump and the war in Gaza.

“The reason for why they’re doing that is I think to try to create an environment of fear, to try to get people like myself, or at least others that would be in my shoes that don't have that same level of security, to shut the f*** up,” Piker, an outspoken critic of the Israeli war effort, later said on a stream.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection told The Independent that Piker was stopped for routine additional inspection, and said, “Claims that his political belief triggered the inspection are baseless.”

Civil rights groups criticized the questioning.

“No U.S. citizen should be detained by law enforcement, at the border or anywhere, because of their protected speech,” Ari Cohn, of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression free speech watchdog group, wrote on X.

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Also this month, Nicolle Sourokos of Sydney, Australia, had alarming issues of her own at a U.S. airport.

She and her mother had arrived at the airport in Honolulu, Hawaii, on their way to visit Sourokos’s husband, a U.S. Army lieutenant stationed in Oahu. Sourokos, 25, had made the visit three times already since she married her husband Matt last December, so she wasn’t expecting any issues, she said.

Soon, however, security agents allegedly began yelling at her and the pair were selected for additional screening. Officers then allegedly searched their bags and phones while questioning Sourokos about whether her tattoos were gang-related and allegedly subjecting her to a cavity search.

Sourokos said she was held in detention overnight, then sent out of the country with her mother.

“It’s not only myself, it’s my mother and my husband that also had to endure that pain, my husband being a current serving member, to serve his country and to be treated in that way I find very disgusting,” she told Hawaii News Now.

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Last week, a pregnant Mexican mother in Ohio sued the Trump administration, arguing a likely deportation order would separate her from her U.S. citizen child, a 9-year-old who receives special needs care for autism, and amount to illegal treatment of her unborn child.

Carmen G. Guerrero Sandoval, who was reportedly denied asylum five years ago, was recently ordered to present herself to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in June, raising fears she would join the many arrested at routine check-ins.

Under Ohio law, unborn children are legally considered people, and people in the state can sue if the government interferes with their family relations against the best interest of the child. The lawsuit argues that removing Sandoval would violate her son’s due process rights and amount to unconstitutional cruel punishment, as well as differential treatment of the child based on his ethnicity. It also raises the question about what rights Sandoval’s unborn child, due in October, has in the situation.

This week, a federal judge denied a request to temporarily pause the immigration appearance request, and Sandoval has appealed before an immigration panel.

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In late April, immigration agents apprehended a pregnant Guatemalan migrant, identified by her attorney only by her first name, Erika, who had been wandering alone for two days in the Arizona desert.

Erika was taken to a hospital where she gave birth on April 30, as federal authorities waited outside. The new mother was then immediately separated from her child and put into immigration detention, where she was fast-tracked for removal. Her attorney told The Independent he scrambled to reach the woman and ensure the child, a U.S. citizen, was protected, but said he was denied entry to the hospital and had calls to officials ignored.

Soon, calls began to flood the Tucson Medical Center and federal offices, a development attorney, Luis Campos, thinks was pivotal to securing Erika a temporary reprieve.

“In the end, it was a grassroots effort that turned the tide,” he told The Independent.

Erika has since been discharged and is living in Tennessee as she prepares to appear before an immigration judge, where she will likely seek asylum.

Others are raising alarms about deportations that have already taken place.

Last month, a two-year-old U.S. citizen was deported alongside her mother, a Honduran citizen, after the family was arrested at an immigration check-in in New Orleans.

Federal officials say the mother requested her children be deported alongside her, but a Trump-appointed federal judge, Terry Doughty, wrote with concern that the government “just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

“The government contends that this is all OK because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” he wrote. “But the court doesn’t know that.”

The child’s father is seeking to return the girl to the U.S.

On April 17, Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a 20-year-old citizen of the U.S., was held in a Florida jail at the request of federal immigration authorities, despite his mother presenting his birth certificate and Social Security information to a judge.

Lopez-Gomez was taken to Leon County Jail after a traffic stop, accused of being undocumented.

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The charge was dropped, but the Leon County judge said that she did not have jurisdiction to release him after Immigration and Customs Enforcement requested that he remain in detention, according to court records. He was released hours later, though it is not clear what led to the change.

Activists have also been targeted, though the Trump administration has suffered repeat setbacks in court.

Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University doctoral student, was detained by ICE on March 25 near her home in Massachusetts.

Surveillance footage captured plainclothes federal agents approaching Öztürk, 30, from the street outside her off-campus apartment before putting her in handcuffs, even though there were no criminal charges against her.

Öztürk is a PhD student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the university and is legally in the United States on a non-immigrant F-1 visa.

On May 9, Öztürk was released from detention, and she continues to challenge her immigration proceedings and the constitutionality of what her attorneys argue is a retaliatory arrest.

A judge wrote in releasing Öztürk that the government had “no evidence” justifying putting the scholar in detention, beyond an op-ed she wrote that was critical of Israel.

Mahmoud Khalil, a former graduate student at Columbia University, was detained by federal agents on March 8 – despite being a lawful permanent resident – due to his involvement in last year’s protests and encampments in support of Palestine.

His wife, a U.S. citizen who was eight months pregnant at the time, said that he was seized by agents in front of her at their university-owned apartment.

Federal officials said they collected evidence that Khalil, 30, was actively, but not materially, supporting Hamas – a designated terrorist organization.

A DHS spokesperson said that Khalil was detained "in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism."

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Officials concede that Khalil has not committed any crimes but are relying on a rarely used Cold War-era statute to justify his deportation. It gives Secretary of State Marco Rubio the power to deport those who pose “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Last week, Khalil briefly met his newborn son, but he remains in immigration detention. He is challenging his arrest and deportations in court, arguing they are retaliatory and will put him at risk of “assassination, kidnapping, [and] torture.”

Georgetown University postdoctoral scholar and Professor Badar Khan Suri, originally from India, was detained on March 17 at his home in Arlington, Virginia. Masked agents said his J-1 visa had been revoked.

A spokesperson for DHS accused Suri of "spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media" as well as having “close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior advisor to Hamas.”

Suri is in the country on a J-1 visa – issued for people who take part in approved programs of teaching, studying, training and research.

By May 15, Suri was released from detention, and he continues to challenge his detention as a violation of the First Amendment.

“Justice delayed is justice denied," Suri told reporters after his release from a detention facility near Dallas.

A French researcher, whose name has not been made public, was reportedly stopped from entering the U.S. earlier in March because of text messages criticizing the Trump administration’s academic research policies.

The scientist was on his way to a conference close to Houston at the time, according to Le Monde.

A spokesperson for DHS denied the text messages were responsible for blocking the researcher, saying instead that the man was found to have “confidential” data from a U.S. lab. He did not elaborate.

The French minister of higher education and research, Philippe Baptiste, said in a statement that "freedom of opinion, free research, and academic freedom are values ​​that we will continue to proudly uphold. I will defend the right of all French researchers to be faithful to them while respecting the law.”

Baptiste took to X to say that he had asked for an emergency meeting with other European ministers to establish a plan to defend academic freedom.

"Europe must rise to the occasion to protect research and welcome the talents who can contribute to its success," he said.

Ma Yang, a 37-year-old Hmong American, was detained and then deported in March to Laos, a country she had never been to, nor a country where she speaks the language.

Yang was stripped of her green card by the Trump administration in February, some two-plus years after being released from federal prison, where she served 30 months on marijuana-related charges.

Although she was born in Thailand, Yang had been living in the U.S. since she was a baby and was a legal resident with a green card.

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ICE told Yang to report to the agency’s Milwaukee facility. When she showed up, agents detained Yang, sent her to Indiana, then Chicago, and finally she was shipped off to Laos. She says she doesn’t know anyone in the Southeast Asian country and can’t speak the language.

In a previous interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Yang said her attorney in the case never told her deportation was a possibility.

Defense attorney Matt Ricci, who represented Ma Yang in the 2020 marijuana case, disputed this, saying his files and notes showed otherwise. He said he told Yang at the time that deportation “could happen,” but that he didn’t think it “would happen.”

Rebecca Burke, 28, a Welsh artist, was detained on February 26 after she “set off on the trip of a lifetime across North America,” according to a GoFundMe page. She was reunited with her family in March after spending 19 days in a processing center after being denied entry at the border between the U.S. and Canada.

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Burke had been residing with host families, with whom she helped out with chores in exchange for her stay. As she attempted to enter Canada, authorities informed her she needed a work visa, and she was told that she had to go back to the U.S.

"She was refused re-entry and classified as an 'illegal alien,'" her father wrote. "Despite being a tourist with no criminal record, she was handcuffed and taken to a detention facility in Tacoma, Washington."

Her father complained she had been led onto the plane in chains “like Hannibal Lecter.”

With reporting from Rhian Lubin, Kelly Rissman, Ariana Baio, Alex Woodward, Justin Rohrlich and Joe Sommerlad