4,000 U.S. Citizens Wrongly Detained By ICE

What are the odds of an American citizen being accidentally detained or deported by U.S. federal officials?

It’s not the kind of thing that Vegas book makers would think of; it’s not sport, nor is it funny. But you have to wonder. Given normal circumstances the probability would be very low. But given the recent spate of state-level anti-immigrant laws, I’d bet the odds would increase. Add to that the aggressive deportation record set by the Obama administration, and we may have something to talk about.

During the recently ended federal fiscal year there were a record 396,ooo deportations – most of them detained in routine raids (there’s a word pairing that shouldn’t exist), others held by police after routine arrests. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think that among those hundreds of thousands of people deported there would be maybe a handful that were American citizens, that slipped through the detention cracks. Hard as it may be to imagine, sometimes people get lost in a legal immigration limbo or are not believed when they declare their citizenship.

Northwestern University political science professor Jacqueline Stevens has been looking into the matter, to see if she could quantify the incidents of citizen detentions. She was interviewed for an NPR story:

“I think it’s pretty fair to say that there’s a low but persistent rate of people who are being held by ICE in violation of the law, who are U.S. citizens,” Stevens says.

The “low” part of the incident equation doesn’t bother me – low is relative. It’s the persistent part that I don’t like. Persistence implies repeating mistakes.

Stevens looked at about 8,000 cases in just two immigration detention facilities. She found that about 1 percent of the time, people were eventually let go because they were U.S. citizens. However, that meant the citizens were held between one week and four years in detention.

Eight thousand, statistically, is a pretty good sample, so her 1% finding would withstand scrutiny. Now lets crunch the numbers: according to professor Stevens 1% of the cases studied resulted in a citizen detention. There were a total of 396,000 deportations during the past fiscal year. That means that, statistically, 3,960 citizens may have been detained, maybe even deported, over the last 12 months.

That relatively “low” number of citizens detained by I.C.E. bothers me now – almost 4 thousand is not low. Truth told, one, is one too many.

And here’s something that would be a sure bet – none of those persons detained could have been confused for Canadian citizens overstaying their visas. The problem is that 1% is easily brushed aside as too low a percentage to matter.  But it shouldn’t be – we’re talking about the basic guarantees of citizenship.

“However, if we think about the magnitude of our deportation process, that means that thousands of U.S. citizens each year and tens of thousands in the course of a decade will be detained for substantial periods of time in absolute violation of the law and their civil rights,” she says.

No member of congress has officially commented on the matter, so far.