Could you prove your US citizenship if stopped by ICE?

It’s harder than you think. Journalist Jack Herrera has uncovered some disturbing facts.

Photo by Melina Mara / The Washington Post via Getty Images

Picture this: you’re driving to work, grabbing pizza after a job interview, maybe picking up a screw driver at Home Depot or simply going about your daily routine when federal agents approach you. They suspect you’re in the country illegally (a much greater likelihood if you’re Black or Brown) and demand immediate proof of your citizenship. Your driver’s license won’t cut it. Your Social Security card might not be enough. Do you carry your birth certificate everywhere? Your passport? What if you were born abroad to American parents and your citizenship is “derived” through complex legal statutes you’ve never heard of?

This scenario isn’t hypothetical. Since President Trump returned to office, over a dozen U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained, and some deported, as part of the administration’s mass deportation campaign. The cases range from a Chicago man detained despite having his Social Security card, to families with mixed citizenship status stopped at checkpoints, to citizens held for days or weeks while bureaucrats sorted through paperwork that should have immediately established their legal status.

For those of you who subscribe to The Latino Vote on YouTube or via the podcast, you may be familiar with journalist Jack Herrera. Some of his most recent work explores this topic in detail, and this essay pulls from his recent writings in The Intelligencer, New York Magazine. Read it here.

American citizenship isn’t as straightforward as many assume. As Professor Jacqueline Stevens of Northwestern University explains, “It’s a legal status that has a lot of complexities. It’s unreasonable to expect people to know what the legal basis might be for their claims of U.S. citizenship, especially if it’s acquired or derived after being born abroad. There are these arbitrary rules that change in different time frames.”

The most challenging cases involve “derived” or “acquired” citizenship—legal concepts that can make someone a citizen without them ever knowing it. Take the case profiled by The Marshall Project of a man facing deportation who discovered through his legal aid attorney that he might have been a citizen all along through his naturalized grandfather. The process of proving this required “historical records and internal USCIS documents,” but unlike criminal defendants, immigrants facing deportation have no right to legal discovery, which would require the government to hand over evidence.

Immigration attorneys report seeing clients who lived their entire adult lives believing they were non-citizens, only to discover during deportation proceedings that a parent’s military service or a grandparent’s naturalization had actually conveyed citizenship years or decades earlier. The rules vary dramatically based on when someone was born, their parents’ marital status, and how long their citizen parent lived in the United States.

The current scale and speed of immigration enforcement have created a perfect storm for wrongful detentions. The Trump administration has directed ICE officials to “aggressively ramp up the number of people they arrest, from a few hundred per day to at least 1,200 to 1,500,” enlisting personnel from the FBI, U.S. Marshals, DEA, ATF, and Federal Bureau of Prisons to meet these goals. News reports indicate that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has demanded even more aggressive targets, setting a quota of 3,000 arrests per day as part of the administration’s goal to deport one million immigrants in Trump’s first year—a pace that would be unprecedented in modern American history.

“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,” warns César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University.

The cases documented so far include troubling patterns: a Chicago man detained despite carrying his Social Security card, a family with mixed citizenship rushing their sick child to the hospital who were stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint, and a Virginia man whose vehicle was surrounded by armed immigration officials after they wrongly identified him as someone else entirely.

Perhaps most telling was the reaction of one naturalized American citizen who was temporarily detained by ICE. After the ordeal, he reflected that when he voted for Donald Trump, he thought they wouldn’t go after “every Hispanic-looking” person, but now believes, “That’s what they’re doing, now. They’re just following Hispanic people.”

The situation becomes even more precarious when you consider that people detained by ICE have no right to a court-appointed attorney. Unlike in criminal cases, where the Constitution guarantees legal representation, immigration proceedings are considered civil matters. This means detained individuals—including citizens wrongfully caught in the system—must navigate complex legal questions about citizenship and immigration status without professional help, unless they can afford to hire private counsel or find pro bono representation.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Since ICE’s creation in 2003, investigations have found the agency has detained, removed, or issued detainers for thousands of U.S. citizens. A 2011 study estimated that citizens make up roughly 1 to 1.5 percent of all removals. Research has consistently shown that wrongful deportations of citizens occur regularly, though the government doesn’t track or release comprehensive data on these cases.

A recent investigation by the Los Angeles Times found ICE released 1,480 people since 2012 because of citizenship claims. Some cases involve clear mistaken identity or officials refusing to accept passports, but many involve the complex legal questions around derived or acquired citizenship.

Research by investigative reporters like Pablo Manriquez, who writes the only immigration news outlet on Capitol Hill, has documented the troubling scope of this problem. Manriquez’s reporting points out that there are currently 70 known cases of US citizens being deported

ICE Has Deported at Least 70 U.S. Citizens

During the first Trump administration, studies found that dozens of U.S. citizens were wrongfully deported—a pattern that appears to be accelerating under current enforcement policies. As journalist Jack Herrera, who has been producing some of the best journalism on immigration enforcement since Trump took office, reports, the combination of aggressive tactics and complex citizenship laws creates a perfect storm for constitutional violations.

Herrera documents the shocking case of Davino Watson illustrates the system’s failures dramatically. Watson, a U.S. citizen, was held in immigration detention for 1,273 days, nearly three and a half years, despite repeatedly asserting his citizenship to officers, jail officials, and judges. A federal judge later found the government’s investigation was marked by “mindless failure,” “carelessness” and “easily avoidable error”, noting that with proper legal representation “plaintiff probably promptly would have been declared a citizen and released almost immediately after he was arrested, if he were arrested at all”. Yet Watson had no right to a lawyer during his detention, highlighting how the absence of guaranteed counsel can trap even citizens in the deportation system for years.

The speed and scope of current operations have amplified these risks. Immigration lawyers report it’s “increasingly difficult to represent their clients that are being targeted for deportation because the Trump administration is moving these migrants from jurisdiction to jurisdiction,” with lawyers having “limited access to their clients to get interviews and information from them”.

The administration’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to rapidly deport suspected gang members without normal due process has raised particular concerns. This rarely used act “allows the government, if at war, to deport immigrants without allowing them to go before a judge”. Multiple cases have emerged of people caught in these sweeps who maintain they are not gang members and were targeted based on appearance or tattoos rather than evidence.

Meanwhile, President Trump has explicitly stated his desire to “bypass due process required by the Constitution,” saying “you can’t have a trial for all of these people” and that immigration judges “can’t say, no, you have to have a trial.”

For most Americans, proving citizenship on demand would be surprisingly difficult. A driver’s license proves identity and state residence, not citizenship. A Social Security card can be issued to non-citizens. Many Americans don’t carry passports or certified birth certificates in their daily lives. Those born abroad to American parents may have never obtained a U.S. passport or may not understand that their citizenship was acquired through their parents’ status.

The complexity increases for adopted children, military families stationed overseas, and anyone whose citizenship derives from naturalized grandparents or parents under statutes that have changed multiple times over the decades. USCIS has a guide to when someone might be a citizen through their parents, based on factors like the year they were born and their parents’ marital status, but few Americans are familiar with these intricate rules.

The fundamental question isn’t whether immigration enforcement should exist, but whether the current system adequately protects citizens’ rights while pursuing its goals. As one immigration law expert warns, “Without these structures, these pillars of due process, we are going to end up erroneously deporting a lot of individuals into very extreme conditions…this is really even like — it wouldn’t be in exaggeration to say this is a life-or-death situation to provide fair procedures for our immigrants and for people who aren’t even immigrants who are citizens”.

The cases emerging from the current enforcement surge suggest that in the rush to deport, the system is increasingly willing to err on the side of removal rather than protection. For American citizens, particularly those who are Hispanic, Black, or foreign-born, this creates a chilling reality: your citizenship may be just a bureaucratic confusion away from being questioned, and proving it may be harder than you think.

In a country where citizenship is supposed to provide fundamental protection from arbitrary government action, these cases reveal how fragile that protection can be when enforcement priorities override due process safeguards. The question every American should ask isn’t just whether they support immigration enforcement, but whether they’re confident they could prove their own citizenship if stopped on the street tomorrow.

It’s clearly harder to do than you might think.