As the Trump administration intensifies its policy of mass deportations, concern is growing about the increase in errors in immigration enforcement actions, which have affected not only immigrants but also citizens and legal residents of the United States.

A recent Washington Post survey revealed that at least seven U.S. citizens have been illegally detained by ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) since the beginning of Trump's new term in January. These cases add to a broader history: previous investigations show that thousands of citizens have been arrested, detained or even deported since the agency's creation in 2003.

According to a publication by Immigration Impact, a 2011 study showed that ICE held about 20,000 U.S. citizens in custody between 2003 and 2011. More recently, a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) pointed out that, between 2015 and 2020, 70 possible American citizens were deported, even though it is illegal to deport citizens from the country. In total, in this period, 674 potential citizens were arrested, 121 detained and 70 deported, although the federal agencies themselves admit that the real numbers may be even higher due to the lack of accurate records.

The problem is related, in part, to structural flaws in ICE, such as inconsistent training of agents and gaps in data systems. While the agency's official policy calls for suspected U.S. citizenship to be reviewed with supervision, training materials indicate that agents can conduct interviews on their own, leaving room for poor decisions. In addition, the agency's database systems do not require automatic updating of citizenship status, which makes it difficult to track errors and facilitates new wrongful arrests.

The system's flaws also reveal a persistent racial bias. Also according to the publication, studies show that both ICE and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) have a history of racial discrimination, which makes non-white people more often the target of unjustified stops and arrests. This exacerbates the impact of more aggressive immigration policies, particularly for Black and Latino communities.

Cases such as that of Davino Watson, a U.S. citizen detained for three years without a lawyer in a detention center in Alabama, illustrate the dramatic consequences of these failures. Despite having proven his citizenship, Watson did not receive any compensation, as the court understood that the deadline for claiming had expired. His experience, although extreme, is not isolated and exposes the vulnerability of citizens in the face of a system that, according to experts, urgently needs reforms to avoid new errors and injustices. Meanwhile, with the tightening of migration policy, the risk increases that more citizens will be unduly deprived of their liberty or even expelled from their own country.