House Bill Would Pay Citizens Held by Immigration Officers at Least $500,000 and Strip the Immunity That Blocks Most Suits Today

A House bill filed Oct. 15 would let U.S. citizens arrested or held by immigration officers without a warrant or probable cause sue for a fixed $500,000, plus $100,000 for each additional day in custody. Its real target is the set of legal shields that make such suits hard to win today.

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat, has introduced a bill that would let U.S. citizens arrested or detained by immigration officers without a warrant or without probable cause sue both the officers and the federal government for at least $500,000. The measure, H.R. 10826, would also bar those officers from claiming qualified immunity, waive the government’s sovereign immunity and give citizens five years to file, and it would reach every such arrest made since Jan. 20, 2025. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey is the only cosponsor so far, and the bill has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee.

How many people it would cover is itself disputed. Leger Fernández cited a ProPublica count of 506 citizens detained by immigration agents since January 2025, a figure Newsweek also reported; the government publishes no count of its own. DHS has rejected the premise. A department spokesperson told ProPublica last year, “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement.”

A fixed price where today there is mostly a closed door

A citizen held by ICE or the Border Patrol now has few dependable routes to damages. A constitutional suit against the officer personally, a Bivens claim, has been all but closed since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Egbert v. Boule, which refused that remedy against a Border Patrol agent. The Federal Tort Claims Act requires an administrative claim within two years, is tried to a judge rather than a jury, and pays only proven harm.

H.R. 10826 replaces that with a schedule. A court finding for the citizen “shall award” $500,000 plus $100,000 for each day of detention after the day of arrest, with attorney’s fees, on top of anything available under other law. A citizen held four days, the length of one detention described in a December 2025 Senate Democratic report covered by ProPublica, would receive $800,000 under the bill’s formula. Local deputies working under 287(g) agreements with ICE are covered too.

One word in the trigger does most of the work

Liability turns on an arrest or detention made “without a warrant or without probable cause.” Read as written, the lack of a warrant is enough on its own. That is significant because most immigration street arrests are warrantless: 8 U.S.C. 1357(a)(2) allows officers to arrest without a warrant when they have reason to believe a person is removable and likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained. Under the bill, a citizen detained in that setting would appear to qualify even if the officer acted on probable cause. The bill’s findings point to racial profiling, but nothing in the operative text requires a plaintiff to prove it.

The practical effect is close to strict liability for detaining a citizen, the outcome qualified immunity exists to prevent when an officer’s mistake was reasonable. The bill would not change how stops are made; the Supreme Court’s September 2025 order in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, letting roving stops resume around Los Angeles, still shapes that. It changes only who pays when a stop ends with a citizen in custody.

Section 4 would permanently rescind unspent funds from section 100052 of Public Law 119-21, the 2025 budget reconciliation law, which the sponsor describes as ICE money. If all 506 people in ProPublica’s count qualified, base awards alone would reach $253 million before daily add-ons, a calculation from that count and the bill’s figures.

Long odds this Congress, and a template for the next

Newsweek noted the bill faces a difficult path in a Republican-controlled Congress, and no Republican has signed on. Its more realistic role is as a template likely to resurface in oversight or appropriations fights if control of the House changes after the Nov. 3 midterms. The open question for any later version is whether the “or” survives, because that choice decides whether the bill pays for wrongful arrests or for every warrantless one that happens to catch a citizen.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds a LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Deigo and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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