At least 70 U.S. citizens were unlawfully deported between 2015 and 2020, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The report raises serious concerns about systemic failures within Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and potential violations of constitutional rights.
The GAO found that ICE arrested 674 individuals flagged as potential non-citizens during this period. Of those, 121 were detained, and 70 were deported, despite indications that they were in fact U.S. citizens. The agency’s actions, the GAO said, went beyond clerical errors and represented serious breaches of civil liberties.
ICE and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) lacked effective systems to verify citizenship status or correct erroneous deportation orders. The agencies were found to have no formal procedures in place to track, audit, or revise citizenship status once flagged. ICE’s internal operations were described as structurally flawed—both in terms of digital infrastructure and agent protocol.
Although policy requires agents to consult a supervisor when an individual claims U.S. citizenship, the report found this rule is often ignored. In practice, current training materials allow field agents to make citizenship decisions alone, often without sufficient legal knowledge. As a result, critical errors continue to occur with little oversight.
Even when citizenship is confirmed, ICE often fails to update its internal records. Many citizens remained classified as “removable” in the system, placing them at ongoing risk for further enforcement.
This is not a new issue. According to a study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, at least 2,840 U.S. citizens were misclassified as deportable by ICE between 2002 and 2017, and 214 of them were detained. One notable case is Davino Watson, a New York-born citizen who was held in immigration detention for nearly three years without a lawyer and released without any compensation.
Civil rights experts cite racial profiling as a major factor in these wrongful detentions. ICE and CBP have long been accused of disproportionately targeting Black and Latino individuals, resulting in citizens being stopped, arrested, or deported based on appearance alone. The problem is compounded by the fact that immigrants in civil detention are not guaranteed access to public defenders, limiting their ability to contest their status in court.
Despite repeated findings of unlawful detention and deportation, the federal government has yet to implement significant reforms. The GAO report criticized ICE for continuing to operate without a clear system for reviewing wrongful arrests or updating outdated data. The agency still allows citizenship status decisions to be made without supervisor oversight.
Legal advocates warn that the current system fails to adequately distinguish between U.S. citizens, legal immigrants, and undocumented individuals, creating structural conditions that threaten due process and constitutional rights.
BY HYOUNGJAE KIM [kim.ian@koreadaily.com]
