About a week after President Donald Trump took office, Jonathan Guerrero was sitting at the Philadelphia car wash where he works when immigration agents burst in.
The agents didn’t say why they were there and didn’t show their badges, Guerrero recalled. So the 21-year-old didn’t get a chance to explain that although his parents were from Mexico, he had been born right there in Philadelphia.
“They looked at me and made me put my hands up without letting me explain that I’m from here,” Guerrero said.
An agent pointed his gun at Guerrero and handcuffed him. Then they brought in other car wash workers, including Guerrero’s father, who is undocumented. When agents began checking IDs, they finally noticed 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,” said Guerrero. “With anything law-related, I just stay quiet.”
Less than two months into the new Trump administration, there has been a small but steady beat of reported cases like Guerrero’s.
In Utah, agents pulled over and detained a 20-year-old American after he honked at them. In New Mexico, a member of the Mescalero Apache nation more than two hours from the border was questioned by agents who demanded to see their passport. Earlier this month, a Trump voter in Virginia was pulled 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 with her undocumented parents and other citizen siblings in February. The family said it was rushing her to an emergency checkup in Houston when Border Patrol agents ignored a hospital letter that the family had used to go through checkpoints before. An agency spokesperson said the family’s account was inaccurate but declined to provide specifics.
It’s unclear exactly how many citizens have faced the Trump administration’s dragnet so far. And while previous administrations have mistakenly held Americans too, there’s no firm count of those incidents either.
The government does not release figures on citizens who have been held by immigration authorities. Neither Border Patrol nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles interior immigration enforcement, would provide numbers to ProPublica on how many Americans have been mistakenly detained.
Experts and advocates say that what is clear to them is that Trump’s aggressive immigration policies — such as arrest quotas for enforcement agents — make it likely that more citizens will get caught up in immigration sweeps.
“It’s really everyone — not just noncitizens or undocumented people — who are in danger of having their liberty violated in this kind of mass deportation machinery,” said Cody Wofsy, the deputy director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Asked about reports of Americans getting caught up in administration’s enforcement policies, an ICE spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that agents are allowed to ask for citizens’ identification: “Any US immigration officer has authority to question, without warrant, any alien or person believed to be an alien concerning his or her right to be, or to remain, in the United States.” The agency did not respond to questions about specific cases.
The U.S. has gone through spasms of detaining and even deporting large numbers of citizens. In the 1930s and 1940s, federal and local authorities forcibly exiled an estimated 1 million Mexican Americans, including hundreds of thousands of American-born children.
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Spanning both Obama administrations, an NPR investigation found, immigration authorities asked local authorities to detain about 700 Americans. Meanwhile, a U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that immigration authorities asked to hold roughly 600 likely citizens during Trump’s first term. The GAO also found that Trump actually deported about 70 likely citizens.
The GAO report did not get into any individual cases. But lawsuits brought against federal immigration agencies detail dozens of cases where plaintiffs received a settlement.
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When local deputies in Pierce County, Washington, arrested Carlos Rios on suspicion of drunken driving in 2019, not even the fact that he had his U.S. passport could convince the deputies — or the ICE agents who took him into federal custody — that he was a citizen.
Rios, who immigrated from Mexico in the 1980s and became a citizen in 2000, often carried his passport with him in case he picked up a welding job on a Coast Guard ship or a commercial fishing job that took him into international waters. But no one listened to him when Rios insisted repeatedly that he was a citizen and begged Pierce County jail officials and ICE officers to check his bag. Rios ended up being held for a week. ICE did not comment on the case.
Rios received a $125,000 settlement but is still haunted by his time in detention.
“I don’t even have to close my eyes,” Rios said. “I remember every single second.”
There are other, more recent instances too. This January, in the last days of President Joseph Biden’s time in office, Border Patrol conducted raids in Kern County, California, more than four hours from the border.
Among those detained was Ernesto Campos, a U.S. citizen and owner of a Bakersfield landscaping company. Agents stopped Campos’ truck and slashed his tires when he refused to hand over his keys.
At that point, Campos began recording on his phone and protested that he is a U.S. citizen.
In the video, agents said they were arresting Campos for “alien smuggling.” (His undocumented employee was in the truck with Campos.) Border Patrol told a local TV station that agents were also concerned about human trafficking.
Campos has still not been charged. His lawyer said he was held for four hours.
Campos’ case is mentioned in a recent lawsuit by the ACLU of Southern California and the United Farm Workers contending that agents in the same operation detained and handcuffed a 56-year-old grandmother who is a legal permanent resident. The suit argues that Border Patrol agents “went on a fishing expedition” that profiled Latinos and farmworkers.
Asked about Campos’ case and the lawsuit, Border Patrol said it does not comment on ongoing litigation.
While there are a number of fixes the government could make to limit the wrongful detention of citizens, immigration authorities have often failed to follow through.
After a series of lawsuits against the Obama administration, ICE began requiring officers to consult with supervisors before detaining someone who claims to be a citizen, and to not arrest someone if the evidence of citizenship “outweighs evidence to the contrary.” But the GAO report on mistaken detention of citizens noted that ICE wasn’t actually training officers to follow the policy. (In response to the GAO report, ICE said it revised its training materials. It told ProPublica that agents are still following those policies for determining citizenship)
Border Patrol and ICE are not even required to track how often they hold citizens on immigration charges, the GAO found. While ICE agents could note in their database if someone they’ve investigated turns out to be a citizen, the GAO found that they are not required to do so. As a result, records are often wrong and left uncorrected even after agents have been told of a mistake. Someone flagged incorrectly in an ICE database once may be forced to deal with questions about their citizenship for years.
Peter Sean Brown, another U.S. citizen born in Philadelphia, was mistaken more than 20 years ago for a Jamaican national living in the U.S. illegally. When he was later arrested in 2018 for a probation violation, immigration officials requested he be held, despite their own records documenting the case of mistaken identity, his lawyer said.
Brown repeatedly insisted he was a citizen, a claim agents are supposed to immediately review.
“I’M TRYING TO OBTAIN INFORMATION CONCERNING A UNVALID ICE HOLD,” Brown wrote to guards on April 19, 2018, while still detained at the Monroe County jail in Florida. “IM A US CITIZEN…HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE?”
ICE eventually released him — after three weeks in detention.
Pratheek Rebala contributed research.
