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About a week after President Donald Trump took office, Jonathan Guerrero was sitting in a car wash in Philadelphia.
The agents didn’t say why they were there and didn’t show them the badge, Guerrero recalled. So, the 21-year-old, whose parents were from Mexico, had no chance to explain that he was born in Philadelphia.
“They looked at me and let me raise their hands without letting them explain that I was from here,” Guerrero said.
The agent pointed his gun at Guerrero and handcuffed him. They then brought in other car wash workers, including Guerrero’s undocumented father. When the agents began checking their ID, they eventually realized that Guerrero was a citizen and quickly let him go.
“I said, ‘Look, man, I don’t know who these guys are and what they’re doing,” Guerrero said. “Anything related to the law, I’m just quiet.”
Less than two months after the new Trump administration, there were small but stable beats of reported cases like Guerrero.
In Utah, agents pulled and detained a 20-year-old American after he rang them. In New Mexico, members of the Mezcarero Apache Nation were questioned by agents who requested to see their passports from more than two hours from the border. Earlier this month, Trump voters in Virginia were handed over and handcuffed by gun-wielding immigration agents.
In Texas, a 10-year-old citizen recovering from brain cancer was detained at a Border Patrol checkpoint and eventually deported to Mexico in February along with his undocumented parents and other civic siblings. The family said they were rushing for an emergency appointment in Houston when Border Patrol agents ignored a hospital letter their families had previously used to pass through the checkpoint. A spokesperson for the agency said the family accounts were inaccurate but refused to provide details.
So far, it is unclear exactly how many citizens are facing Trump administration’s Dragget. And while previous administrations mistakenly had Americans, there are no solid numbers of those cases either.
The government has not released figures on citizens held by immigration authorities. Neither border patrols nor immigration and customs enforcement agencies are responsible for enforcing domestic immigration, and the number of Americans in mistaken detention is advertised.
Experts and advocates say what is clear to them is that Trump’s aggressive immigration policies, such as assigning the arrest of enforcement agents, are likely to see more citizens getting caught up in the immigrant sweep.
Cody Woffey, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigration Rights Project, said:
Asked about reports that Americans were caught up in administrative enforcement policies, an ICE spokesman told Propublica in a written statement that agents were permitted to seek the identity of citizens. The agency did not answer questions about the specific case.
The United States has experienced the convulsions of detaining and deporting many citizens. In the 1930s and 1940s, federal and local governments forced expel an estimated million Mexican-Americans, including hundreds of thousands of American-born children.
Parent Relative and friends say goodbye to the train carrying 1,500 people who were exiled from Los Angeles to Mexico in August 1931. Credit: New York Daily News Archives/Getty Images/Public Domain
Spanning both the Obama administration, where the NPR investigation was discovered, immigration officials have called on local authorities to detain about 700 Americans. Meanwhile, a report from the US Government’s Accountability Office found that immigration officials had asked to retain about 600 potential citizens during Trump’s first term. GAO also discovered that Trump actually deported around 70 possible citizens.
The GAO report did not address individual cases. However, the lawsuit filed against the federal immigration agency details dozens of cases in which plaintiffs have been settled.
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When a local deputy in Pierce County, Washington, arrested Carlos Rios on suspicion of drunk driving in 2019, even the fact that he had a US passport could not convince the agent who said he was a citizen, or the ice agent who took him to federal custody.
Rios, who emigrated from Mexico in the 1980s and became a citizen in 2000, often carried his passport in case he received welding work on a Coast Guard ship or in the commercial fishing work that took him to international waters. However, no one heard him when Rios repeatedly claimed he was a citizen and asked Pierce County Jail officials and ice officers to check his bags. Rios was held in custody for a week. ICE did not comment on the incident.
Rios received a $125,000 settlement, but is troubled by the time he was detained.
“You don’t even have to close your eyes,” Rios said. “I remember every second.”
There are other recent instances too. In January this year, on the last day of President Joseph Biden’s inauguration, the Border Patrol raided in Kern County, California for more than four hours from the border.
Among those detained was Ernesto Campos, a US citizen and owner of the Bakersfield Landscaping Company. The agent stopped the Campos truck and slashed the tire when he refused to hand over the keys.
At that point, Campos began recording on his phone, protesting that he was a US citizen.
In the video, the agent said he was arresting Campos for “smuggling alien.” (His undocumented employee was in the truck with Campos.) Border Patrol told local television stations that agents were also concerned about human trafficking.
Campos has not been charged yet. His lawyer said he was in custody for four hours.
The Campos lawsuit is mentioned in a recent lawsuit by the ACLU in Southern California and United Farm Worker who alleges that agents from the same operation were taken into custody and handcuffed his 56-year-old grandmother, a legal permanent resident. The lawsuit alleges that Border Patrol agents “go on a fishing expedition” introducing Latinos and farm workers.
Asked about Campos’ case and lawsuit, Border Patrol said it had not commented on the ongoing lawsuit.
There are many amendments that governments can make to limit illegal detention of citizens, but immigration authorities often fail to follow.
After a series of lawsuits against the Obama administration, ICE began requiring officers to consult with supervisors before detaining anyone who claims to be a citizen, preventing anyone from arresting them if evidence of citizenship “does not exceed the evidence of the opposite.” However, GAO’s report on the false detention of citizens noted that ICE does not actually train officers to follow the policy. (In response to GAO’s report, Ice said it had revised its training materials. He told Propublica that the agents are still following these policies to determine citizenship.)
Border patrols and ice are not necessary to track the frequency of citizens holding in immigration accusations, GAO found. ICE agents can make notes in the database if the person they investigated is found to be a citizen, but GAO found that it is not necessary to do so. As a result, even after the agent is informed of a mistake, the records are often wrong and uncorrected. Those who accidentally flagged the ICE database may be forced to deal with citizenship questions for years.
Trump’s pressure on national and international organizations erodes protections for asylum seekers
Peter Sean Brown, another American citizen born in Philadelphia, was mistaken for a Jamaican citizen who lives illegally in the United States more than 20 years ago. When he was arrested for a probation violation in 2018, immigration officials demanded that he be held in custody despite their own records documenting cases of false identity, his lawyers said.
Brown repeatedly claims he is a citizen, and billing agents are supposed to review them soon.
“I am trying to get information about invalid ice holds,” Brown wrote to security guards on April 19, 2018, and is being held at the Monroe County Jail in Florida. “I’m a US citizen… how is this possible?”
Ice eventually released him – three weeks after being in custody.
Pratheek Rebala contributed to his research.
