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Since 2012, ICE has released from its custody more than 1,480 people after investigating their citizenship claims, according to agency figures. And a Times review of Department of Justice records and interviews with immigration attorneys uncovered hundreds of additional cases in the country’s immigration courts in which people were forced to prove they are Americans and sometimes spent months or even years in detention.
Victims include a landscaper snatched in a Home Depot parking lot in Rialto and held for days despite his son’s attempts to show agents the man’s U.S. passport; a New York resident locked up for more than three years fighting deportation efforts after a federal agent mistook his father for someone who wasn’t a U.S. citizen; and a Rhode Island housekeeper mistakenly targeted twice, resulting in her spending a night in prison the second time even though her husband had brought her U.S. passport to a court hearing.
They and others described the panic and feeling of powerlessness that set in as agents took them into custody without explanation and ignored their claims of citizenship.
The wrongful arrests account for a small fraction of the more than 100,000 arrests ICE makes each year, and it’s unclear whether the Trump administration’s aggressive push to increase deportations will lead to more mistakes. But the detentions of U.S. citizens amount to an unsettling type of collateral damage in the government’s effort to remove undocumented or unwanted immigrants.
The errors reveal flaws in the way ICE identifies people for deportation, including its reliance on databases that are incomplete and plagued by mistakes. The wrongful arrests also highlight a presumption that pervades U.S. immigration agencies and courts that those born outside the United States are not here legally unless electronic records show otherwise. And when mistakes are not quickly remedied, citizens are forced into an immigration court system where they must fight to prove they should not be removed from the country, often without the help of an attorney.
The Times found that the two groups most vulnerable to becoming mistaken ICE targets are the children of immigrants and citizens born outside the country.
Matthew Albence, the head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, declined to be interviewed but said in a written statement that investigating citizen claims can be a complex task involving searches of electronic and paper records as well as personal interviews. He said ICE updates records when errors are found and agents arrest only those they have probable cause to suspect are eligible for deportation.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement takes very seriously any and all assertions that an individual detained in its custody may be a U.S. citizen,” he said.
But The Times’ review of federal documents and lawsuits turned up cases in which Americans were arrested based on mistakes or cursory ICE investigations and some who were repeatedly targeted because the government failed to update its records. Immigration lawyers said federal agents rarely conduct interviews before making arrests and getting ICE to correct its records is difficult.
A big mistake
Sergio Carrillo had already been handcuffed in the Home Depot parking lot in Rialto on a July morning in 2016 when an officer in Homeland Security uniform appeared.
“Homeland Security?” Carrillo asked. “What do you want with me?”
Ignoring Carrillo’s demands for an explanation, the officer ordered the 39-year-old landscaper taken to a federal detention facility in downtown Los Angeles.
“You’re making a big mistake,” Carrillo recalled saying from the back seat to the officers driving him. “I am a U.S. citizen.”
Born in Mexico, Carrillo has lived nearly his entire life in the United States and automatically gained citizenship as a teen in 1994 when his mother became a citizen. He received a certificate of citizenship from the U.S. government and a passport to document his status.
Federal policies require ICE agents to “carefully and expeditiously” investigate any claim of U.S. citizenship. But throughout his detention, Carrillo said, ICE officers either ignored or scoffed at his repeated claims. When his son rushed to the downtown booking facility with his father’s passport and citizenship certificate, ICE officers refused to consider the documents, he said.
After he was moved to a privately run immigration detention center 85 miles outside Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert, Carrillo’s hope that ICE would quickly remedy its mistake gave way to a sense of despair.
“Inmates were telling me, ‘You’re not going to see a judge for weeks. In here, you don’t have any rights,’” he said. “I started getting real scared: How long was I going to be in here? How could this be happening?”
It was not until Carrillo’s fourth day in detention, when an attorney intervened and presented agents with Carrillo’s passport, that ICE corrected its error. Carrillo emerged from custody to find his phone filled with messages from angry clients. Several fired him.
“For ICE, it’s like, ‘Oops, we made a mistake,’” Carrillo said. “But for me on the other end, it tears up your life.”
Carrillo sued for false imprisonment and was awarded a $20,000 settlement, but ICE made no admission of wrongdoing. An agency spokeswoman declined to comment, citing Carrillo’s right to privacy.
Carrillo’s arrest highlights pitfalls in ICE’s digitally driven search for the deportable. At the core of the hunt are massive federal databases containing records on citizenship, crime, foreign travel, education and work.
Deportation officers and contract analysts ply these databases from cubicles on the second floor of a pyramid-shaped building in Laguna Niguel, one of the nerve centers ICE relies on to determine whom to target for deportation.
When a person is arrested in the U.S., their fingerprints are sent electronically to the FBI and automatically checked against those of millions of immigrants in Homeland Security databases. Where there is a match, deportation officers in Laguna Niguel and elsewhere scour other databases for indications a person is in the country illegally. Last year, they identified some 70,000 people they concluded should be deported.
Homeland Security computers also flag people with past criminal convictions. Carrillo had been convicted years earlier of carrying a concealed weapon and sending sexually explicit material to a minor — crimes that would have made him a priority for deportation had he been in the country illegally.
Digital copies of Carrillo’s fingerprints and certificate of citizenship had never been entered into federal databases, and his name was misspelled “Cabrillo” in a central database used heavily by ICE officers. There also was no evidence ICE agents checked if Carrillo held a passport.
Agents simply assumed he was in the country illegally because they could not find any evidence to the contrary, Carrillo alleged in his lawsuit.
Similarly, in three dozen false arrest lawsuits, Americans caught in the ICE dragnet alleged that officers took them into custody on the basis of cursory computer searches. The agents, according to the lawsuits, often overlooked evidence of citizenship, such as passports, and failed to examine paper files or conduct interviews to confirm the accuracy of their database searches.
“We could, but we don't interview because we have all of the information, all of the facts,” an ICE agent said in a federal court deposition, explaining how he used database searches to mark a Chicago man for deportation.
The 2011 mistake led to the man, a Belarusian native convicted of burglary, being booted from an early release program and into prison, though his paper files noted he was the son of a U.S. citizen and himself an American.
Assuming they are lying
For a decade, ICE administrators have sought to end such mistakes. In 2009, after repeated warnings to agents from top ICE officials and a series of embarrassing deportations of U.S. citizens, then-ICE Director John Morton mandated that citizenship claims be investigated and reviewed by agency lawyers within 48 hours. A hotline was later set up to receive the claims.
In 2015, ICE officials again instructed agents to conduct deeper investigations into a person’s possible citizenship, requiring them to check if a person met any of a number of indicators of citizenship, such as whether they had served in the military or were adopted by a U.S. citizen. Last April, ICE abandoned a policy that allowed agents to ask local police to detain people born abroad if there was no evidence in the databases showing they were citizens.
That standard, however, persists in immigration court, where those born outside the country must prove why they belong in the U.S.
A former senior attorney for ICE’s regional office in Los Angeles said the 2009 directive to conduct legal reviews of all citizenship claims brought dozens of cases to her desk every week. The people were all in custody, and agents, she said, generally assumed they were lying.
ICE held an American man in custody for 1,273 days. He’s not the only one who had to prove his citizenship