As Trump cracks down on immigration, U.S. citizens are among those snared
For one man, it happened when he stepped out of a Chicago pizza shop after an afternoon of job hunting. For a 10-year-old girl and her siblings, it began at a Border Patrol checkpoint in South Texas as their family rushed to the hospital. For a man in Virginia, it started with immigration agents surrounding his truck, guns in hand.
All those people are U.S. citizens who were detained, deported or otherwise swept up in immigration enforcement actions under the Trump administration’s intensifying crackdown.
Although wrongful detentions and deportations of U.S. citizens aren’t unheard-of, recent news reports of at least seven alleged cases have alarmed attorneys, civil rights advocates and immigration scholars who say they reveal the dangers of a system accelerating with few safeguards. As the Trump administration pushes for mass deportations, expands federal enforcement and shutters oversight offices, experts warn citizens are increasingly at risk of getting caught in the dragnet.
“As immigration officials become more indiscriminate about who they’re targeting - all while they’re pressured to deport people faster and to avoid immigration court proceedings - it creates a situation in which the possibility of illegally detaining and deporting a U.S. citizen rises immensely, because citizenship is not something that we can spot on people’s foreheads,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to several questions from The Washington Post about recent enforcement actions involving citizens.
The U.S. government does not release data on how often ICE wrongfully detains or deports U.S. citizens. But investigations by media outlets, research institutes and oversight agencies have revealed that ICE has arrested, detained, deported and issued detainers - requests to local jails to hold a person in custody - for thousands of citizens since the agency was created in 2003. One 2011 study estimated that roughly 1 to 1.5 percent of deportees are U.S. citizens.
While that’s a small share of total deportations, the consequences can be severe. For citizens mistakenly swept up in the system, the experience is often traumatic, financially draining and hard to undo.
10 hours in custody
Though García Hernández said the lack of data makes it “statistically impossible” to know whether detentions and deportations of citizens are increasing, he considers the steady trickle of cases reported in the first few months of Trump’s term to be cause for concern.
Among those detained was Julio Noriega, who after buying himself a slice of pizza on Jan. 31, wound up held by ICE for more than 10 hours, according to his attorneys.
Noriega, a 54-year-old man born and raised in Chicago, said in court documents that he had just finished handing out résumés when ICE officers grabbed him from behind, handcuffed him and put him in a van with other detainees. He said he managed to send a few texts to a loved one before officers confiscated his phone and wallet, which held his Social Security card and driver’s license - documents proving his citizenship.
Noriega alleges that he spent the next several hours in ICE custody - first in the van and then in a processing center, handcuffed and without food, water or access to a bathroom. After midnight, he said in the court documents, officers checked his wallet, realized he was a citizen and let him go.
“They just sent him out to the street, even though he had no money and had no idea where he was,” said Mark Fleming, who represents Noriega and 21 others in a lawsuit accusing ICE of unlawful arrest.
Fleming, associate director of litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center, said officers never questioned Noriega or tried to verify his citizenship. ICE later claimed it had no record of the arrest, Fleming said.
“They never took any of the normal steps that one would take to ascertain whether they had probable cause,” he said. “But it’s incredibly important that even when they do things like this, that they better be documented. Even in that regard, they’re making it seem like it never happened - and that’s incredibly concerning.”
Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law expert and retired Cornell Law School professor, said he fears that the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement risks sidelining core legal protections.
“I think that numbers are what are driving this administration, and due process be damned,” he said. “That’s a real danger. These wrongful detentions and deportations are part of this growing trend of depriving people of due process, which is a fundamental right in the Constitution.”
‘No guardrails’
In Texas, a family with mixed immigration statuses ran into trouble at a Border Patrol checkpoint, where they were detained while rushing their 10-year-old daughter - a U.S. citizen - to the hospital.
The girl had been diagnosed with a brain tumor so rare that her physicians are “planning to write a study about it for a journal,” said Danny Woodward, policy attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. Though she survived emergency surgery, swelling remained in her brain, and she still needed regular doctor visits and medication to prevent seizures. (Woodward spoke on the condition that the family’s names not be published because they fear for their safety.)
When the girl woke up with a headache and dizziness on Feb. 3, her undocumented parents - who were in the process of applying for T visas, which are granted to victims of human trafficking - packed her and her four siblings into the car. They brought birth certificates for their five U.S.-born children, medical records, and letters from doctors and lawyers.
The family had made this drive before, and those documents had always been enough, Woodward said. But this time, they were held at the Border Patrol checkpoint for six hours and then transported to a detention center.
“One of the first things [Customs and Border Protection] did was call the hospital, and a social worker confirmed everything and made it pretty clear that they needed to be let through because of the nature of her condition,” Woodward said. “But rather than do anything to make sure that this U.S. citizen child got treatment she needed, they detained the whole family and took away the girl’s medication.”
Inside the detention center, the family was separated by gender and held in a brightly lit, sweltering room the mother described to Woodward as “an incubator.” Several times, agents threatened to take away their children if the parents refused to sign papers agreeing to be deported, Woodward said.
The family was taken the next day to a port of entry in Hidalgo, Texas, and made to walk across a bridge into Reynosa, Mexico. A Mexican official told the mother she couldn’t understand how the U.S. could expel its own citizens - especially one with a serious medical condition - and warned them not to reveal their children’s citizenship while in Mexico because they could be kidnapped, Woodward said.
The family stayed in a shelter for five days, Woodward said, before a taxi driver agreed to take them to a rural property where they had relatives. “I’m not going to turn you in to the cartels,” he said, according to Woodward. “But if we get stopped, I might not have a choice.”
Now, the family lives in hiding in Mexico. The children haven’t gone to school or seen a doctor since being deported. The mother is struggling to get medication from the U.S. Her oldest son, still in Texas, is working to make rent and finish high school alone.
“The administration talks a lot about targeting criminals, but they’re just not,” Woodward said. “This is what happens when you scale up immigration enforcement with no guardrails.”
Last month, Woodward filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. DHS shut down the office less than a week later, along with two other internal watchdog agencies, saying they had “obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles.”
And that, García Hernández said, is one of the biggest barriers to keeping U.S. citizens out of immigration operations.
“My biggest concern isn’t that mistakes happen, because, at the end of the day, we’re dealing with laws that are implemented by humans, who are prone to erring,” García Hernández said. “My biggest concern is when we start to attack the oversight mechanisms that are intended to limit the number of mistakes and to remedy the mistakes that do occur. That’s when you have a really big and dangerous problem.”
An information black hole
In Manassas, Virginia, Jensy Machado, 38, was driving to work with two other men on March 5 when ICE officials stopped him near his home and surrounded the car. Machado told NBC 4 Washington that the agents were looking for someone else - a man he had never heard of, but who had apparently listed his address somewhere.
Though Machado offered to show the officials his ID, they ordered him out of the car and handcuffed him anyway, he told the news station.
“I told him I was an American citizen, and he looked at his other partner like, you know, smiling, like saying, can you believe this guy? Because he asked the other guy, ‘Do you believe him?’ ” Machado told NBC4.
The incident prompted Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia) to send a letter to top immigration officials, demanding answers about how ICE ensures U.S. citizens aren’t mistakenly detained.
A 2021 report from the Government Accountability Office suggests there may be no clear answer. The agency found that ICE wasn’t training officers to follow internal policy requiring them to consult supervisors before detaining someone who claims to be a citizen - or to back off if the evidence of citizenship outweighs the evidence against it. Neither ICE nor Customs and Border Protection is required to track such detentions. Officers aren’t always obligated to verify legal status before making an arrest. And unlike in criminal cases, immigration enforcement agents aren’t required to show probable cause to a judge before taking someone into custody.
Experts say the lack of oversight is part of a deeper problem: ICE operates with little transparency and few mechanisms for accountability, especially when it comes to U.S. citizens.
The agency “is an information black hole,” said Jacqueline Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University who founded the school’s Deportation Research Clinic.
Since 2007, Stevens has tried to do what the federal government won’t: track the number of U.S. citizens expelled from their own country. Through years of interviews and public records requests and by combing through government records, she has estimated that up to 1.5 percent of deportees are American.
In a system this vast and secretive, Stevens said, the deportations of U.S. citizens offer rare, undeniable proof of its cracks - “the canary in the mine.”
“But it’s not even a canary,” Stevens added. “It’s like the 900-pound gorilla in the mine. Because if you go into deportation proceedings with all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and you still end up getting deported, that tells us a lot about the low level of legal protections available to everyone else.”