The Death of Due Process

Federal audits, court filings, and recent investigative reporting reveal a persistent pattern of U.S. citizens being swept into the immigration enforcement system, detained, and in some cases deported, due to errors embedded in government databases that were never designed to reliably distinguish citizens from noncitizens. While a GAO review documented seventy wrongful deportations between 2015 and 2020, newer disclosures show that ICE databases have, at various points, listed thousands of citizens as potentially removable, with no mechanism to detect or correct the mistakes before enforcement occurs. Recent sweeps in 2025 detained more than 170 citizens in a single operation, exposing a broader vulnerability that the United States continues to operate a removal system capable of expelling its own citizens without generating a record sufficient to account for the harm.

The United States maintains one of the largest civil enforcement systems in the world, yet the records that determine who may be removed from the country remain inconsistent enough to jeopardize even those who are not subject to its authority. In the past decade, federal auditors, immigration courts, and investigative reporters have identified cases in which U.S. citizens were detained, classified as removable, and, in dozens of instances, deported. One audit found that ICE databases had, at various points, listed thousands of citizens as potentially subject to removal, with no reliable mechanism in place to identify or correct the errors before enforcement actions occurred. The true scope cannot be measured with certainty because the agencies involved do not maintain dependable data on their own mistakes.

A Government Accountability Office review of ICE operations, covering 2015 through 2020, offers one of the few official windows into this problem. Over that five-year period, ICE arrested 674 people who were, according to the watchdog’s audit, very likely U.S. citizens. One hundred twenty-one of them were held in detention. Seventy were deported. These are not allegations from advocacy groups; they are findings recorded by the government’s own auditors, who, with bureaucratic restraint, noted that the agencies lacked “consistent procedures” for identifying citizenship and maintaining accurate records. In the language of federal auditing, this is a damning conclusion.

The TRAC project at Syracuse University, which compiles immigration data through Freedom of Information Act litigation, found similar patterns extending back further. Between 2002 and 2017, ICE classified 2,840 U.S. citizens as potentially deportable in its internal databases. At least 214 of them were arrested on that basis. The numbers reveal a structural flaw where once a person is misclassified as removable, the error persists. Any later encounter with law enforcement—an airport screening, a traffic stop, the renewal of a driver’s license—can trigger detention.

In 2025, the issue resurfaced during large enforcement sweeps in multiple states. A ProPublica investigation identified more than 170 U.S. citizens detained by immigration officials in those operations alone. Some were detained for days despite presenting identification. Among them were children, elderly Americans, and pregnant women—citizens whose legal status should have been unambiguous. Their cases did not hinge on disputed paperwork or complex nationality claims; they hinged on the simple fact that, once entered into a database, an error is treated as fact until someone with authority corrects it.

These wrongful detentions and deportations occur within a broader shift in immigration enforcement toward accelerated procedures. Since mid-2023, tens of thousands of people each month have been pushed through “expedited removal,” a process that denies them a hearing before a judge, limits access to counsel, and leaves no opportunity for appeal. It is designed for speed. DHS acknowledged in 2024 that the share of asylum seekers subject to this process tripled under the agency’s new “Securing the Border” rule. Legal organizations have argued—correctly—that a system that eliminates independent review increases the likelihood of removing individuals who are legally entitled to remain in the country, including citizens and lawful residents.

What connects these cases is the fragility of the administrative record. Citizenship, in practice, is not safeguarded by birth certificates or passports alone. It is safeguarded by the accuracy of the systems that claim to verify them. When those systems are inconsistent, the burden of proof shifts to the individual, who must convince an institution that has already declared them deportable that it has erred. Some succeed. Others do not.

The injured parties seldom have a platform. Many of the U.S. citizens deported in the GAO sample did not locate counsel in time to challenge the removal order. Others were poor, lacked legal representation, or lived in communities where documentation was inconsistent or difficult to obtain. Their stories are scattered across administrative files, sheriff’s logs, and interviews conducted long after the harm occurred. There is no single database from which one can determine how many citizens have been wrongfully removed. The government itself concedes that the true scope is unknown.

This uncertainty is the problem. A system that can revoke someone’s right to live in their own country should be capable of accounting for its errors. Yet here, the data vanishes into gaps created by incompatible databases, unverified entries, and the velocity of enforcement mechanisms designed to close cases quickly. Once a deportation occurs, the file is closed. Unless a journalist, attorney, or family member intervenes, there is no subsequent review.

The #ForThePeople series exists in the shadow of this silence. It is not tasked with producing legal remedies, nor is it designed to adjudicate the underlying policies. Its purpose is quite simple, and, in many ways, more urgent: to create a space where the individuals affected by these failures—whether directly or through the experiences of their families—can document what happened. In a landscape where official records are incomplete or inaccurate, testimony becomes the only durable accounting.

The stories that emerge from this system are not abstractions. They involve citizens detained during routine traffic stops, green-card holders removed without access to counsel, asylum seekers denied the hearings guaranteed under federal law, and families separated because a database entry listed the wrong birthplace. These accounts are rarely recorded in a way that allows the public to understand the human consequences of administrative error.

By gathering these narratives, the project builds its own archive—a counter-record that restores detail where the official file has failed. It asks contributors to record what took place in their lives, not for catharsis but for accuracy. The goal is not to persuade, but to document. In a system in which due process can be reduced to a checklist and citizenship can be erased by a keystroke, the act of writing becomes a form of evidence.