This man is a U.S. citizen by birth. Why did ICE mark him for deportation — again?

San Francisco Chronicle​

25-07-2025

As Miguel Silvestre stared at the government document he'd been emailed, he couldn't believe what he was reading. His full name was atop the 'Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien' form from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, but just about everything else on the page was false.
Silvestre, a 47-year-old construction worker, was born in Stockton, but the document listed his birthplace and country of citizenship as Mexico. At the bottom were words that Silvestre didn't understand completely, though well enough: 'Received … on June 26, 2025 at 11:31. Disposition: Expedited Removal.'
'Now I have to be looking over my shoulder,' he said in a recent interview. 'It's hurtful.'
Despite being a U.S. citizen by birth, Silvestre had reason to be paranoid about his status. Remarkably, this was not the first time the government had targeted him for deportation. After Stockton police arrested him for public drunkenness in 1999, Silvestre, then 21, was deported to Nogales, Mexico — twice — under an erroneous removal order.
U.S. citizens cannot legally be deported. An immigration judge finally overturned the removal order in 2004, ruling Silvestre was indeed an American.
It remains unclear why federal authorities created the new expedited removal paperwork. Known as an I-213, it's an internal record of people believed to be deportable created before the government initiates the deportation process.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, said Silvestre was deported in 1999, under President Bill Clinton's administration, because he 'claimed to be a Mexican citizen without any legal status to remain in the U.S.,' an assertion Silvestre denies.
'This individual has no active immigration case and is not a target of ICE,' McLaughlin said. She did not deny that the agency had created the new expedited removal paperwork. Asked if it was created by mistake and whether it had been withdrawn, she did not immediately respond.
'ICE does NOT deport U.S. citizens,' McLaughlin said. 'We know who we are targeting ahead of time. If and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, our law enforcement are trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine status and removability.'
When the Chronicle told Silvestre on Thursday about DHS' statement, he said he was relieved to learn he is not an ICE target. But he said he wanted to be certain that the removal paperwork had been or will be withdrawn.
'What they did to me was kidnapping,' he said of the 1999 deportations. 'The biggest thing is they humiliated me.' He said he wants the government to tell him, 'We've corrected it, you're an American and we apologize.'
The latest threat of removal for Silvestre came as the Trump administration ramped up its mass deportation campaign of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, widening the net to include green card holders and floating the idea of shipping U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to Salvadoran prisons.
But Silvestre's saga — propelled by government failures and complicated by his own struggles with the law — spans across administrations, exemplifying what experts say are due process violations in a deportation system that can ensnare vulnerable people with little understanding of what's happening to them.
Although the immigration detention and deportation of U.S. citizens is illegal, it does happen, according to research, media reports, first person accounts and the U.S. government's federal watchdog agency.
The Government Accountability Office said in a 2021 report that ICE safeguards against wrongfully deporting U.S. citizens are 'inconsistent,' resulting in the agency not knowing the extent to which its officers are arresting, detaining or deporting such people. Moreover, deportation can create a permanent stain, given that a person who is removed can be barred from entering the U.S. again for 10 years.
A 2011 study by Jacqueline Stevens, director of Northwestern University's Deportation Research Clinic, estimated that 1% of people in ICE detention and 0.05% of those deported are U.S. citizens. ICE's own data, which Stevens said is probably an undercount, indicates the agency arrested 674 U.S. citizens from mid-2014 to mid-2020, removing 70.
Most of the wrongfully deported weren't born in the U.S. but obtained citizenship through citizen parents — either at birth or because children under 18 generally become citizens when a parent naturalizes. Many don't have passports. Proving their citizenship in immigration court can involve tracking down their parents' or even grandparents' birth certificates. The deportation of American-born citizens like Silvestre is more uncommon.
'At best, the case is one of gross incompetence,' said Kevin Johnson, a UC Davis immigration law expert. 'The U.S. authorities were not careful with Silvestre's case and still are not being careful.'
Catherine Seitz, legal director of the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, said she'd heard of cases in which the government deemed birth certificates fraudulent because their holders were delivered by midwives. But to learn of a case with a hospital birth surprised her.
It is concerning that the DHS created new removal paperwork, Seitz said: 'You would think they'd check with the court records. They should be able to see the termination. It could be an indication that they're going too fast and they're not doing their due diligence.'
It was Northwestern's Stevens who unearthed the latest removal paperwork. In 2021, Silvestre had contacted her for help. She filed Freedom of Information Act requests with three Homeland Security agencies on his behalf.
Last month, on June 30, she was checking her inbox when she found that Customs and Border Protection had finally responded to her inquiry. The records, shared with the Chronicle, reveal that immigration officials created the new paperwork for Silvestre's expedited removal, or deportation without a hearing, effective June 26.
Stevens called Silvestre immediately, unsure whether he'd already been picked up. On July 4, he returned her call, and that's when she emailed him the deportation record.
'If U.S. citizens, who under the U.S. Constitution have full due process protections, are being detained and deported, that tells us an awful lot about the treatment of other people,' Stevens said, referring to immigrants seeking legal status. Silvestre's case, she said, is like a '900-pound gorilla in a coal mine.'
A minor arrest goes wrong
Silvestre was born on Feb. 16, 1978, at Dameron Hospital in Stockton. His parents, Ernestina and Raul, were working-class immigrants from Mexico. Raul, also a construction worker, was a U.S. citizen through his own father.
By his own admission, Silvestre ran afoul of the law.
Coming of age on Stockton's south side during a time of rampant gang violence, Silvestre said he grew up too fast. The baby of the family, he followed his two older brothers to car shows and hung out with the wrong crowd. He started drinking and smoking marijuana at around 11, tried methamphetamine soon after and was expelled from Franklin High School in 12th grade. He recalled his brothers warning him, 'You're not going to live to see 21.'
At 18, with his father's help, he joined the local laborers union and started working. But before long he got into trouble, drawing a 1998 conviction for possessing meth and carrying a concealed gun without a permit. He was released on probation.
On Super Bowl Sunday in 1999, Silvestre's dad kicked him out and told him he needed to get his life together. He sent the 21-year-old man to stay with his mother — the couple had separated — but on his way, Silvestre recalled, he ran into friends who invited him drinking. By the time he showed up at his mom's house, it was late, he was intoxicated and his family wasn't having it. His mom called the cops, telling him, 'Don't run.'
Police officers took him to San Joaquin County jail, where he was stripped to his boxers and sent to the drunk tank. (He was not charged.) As he was trying to sober up, he said, three men in green uniforms came in and started questioning him in Spanish.
' De donde eres?' they asked. Where are you from? He said he replied in English that he was from Stockton.
'They're like, 'That's not what our paperwork says.''
The men loaded him onto a bus and drove to what Silvestre recognized as the Port of Stockton, the shipping hub on an eastern finger of the delta. Silvestre assumed he was being transferred to prison for violating the terms of his probation. He didn't know it at the time, but the men in green were from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency known as INS that handled immigration before being split into three departments in 2003, including ICE.
In a holding cell, he was surrounded by people speaking many languages. A man handed him a Bible and asked whether he was scared. 'We're being deported,' he told Silvestre, who didn't know what the word meant.
'I ain't scared of nothing,' he recalled saying. He was hotheaded. He'd always been scared of God, but not prison.
Hours later, for reasons neither the Chronicle nor Silvestre nor Stevens could determine, the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office released Silvestre to Border Patrol, which placed him in deportation proceedings, INS records show.
'The subject was interviewed at the San Joaquin County Jail after his arrest for DUI,' a Border Patrol agent wrote in a document dated Feb. 1, 1999. 'The subject said that he was a citizen of Mexico without immigration documents to enter or remain in the United States. He also said that he entered the United States at a place other than a port of entry to avoid immigration inspection.'
Stevens called the record a 'fiction' contradicted by Silvestre's U.S. birth certificate.
In a warrant for Silvestre's arrest, a Border Patrol agent claimed he was a Mexican national who entered the U.S. illegally near Nogales, Ariz., two weeks earlier — even though a litany of public records showed him to reside in California.
Silvestre remembered a terrible journey south. After he and other men were loaded onto a bus, his stomach started hurting. He needed to use the bathroom badly but couldn't. As the sun rose, they arrived somewhere in Los Angeles.
Shackled, he and the others were ordered onto a plane and flown to Arizona, where Silvestre was placed in a two-man cell with seven other men. His stomach still hurt. He recalled telling a guard he desperately needed to use the bathroom. His hands were in zip ties, so he had no choice but to defecate in his pants.
When a guard returned to his cell and opened the food tray slot, Silvestre spat at him, he said. Soon, he heard the slot open again and felt something hit him in the eye that burned like mace. The door opened and he felt two to three men grabbing him. He was sprayed again, he said, burning his genitals. He felt like he was going to pass out.
Silvestre's next memory is of being at a court hearing, though he remembers little of what happened. According to records, he told the judge he was a U.S. citizen, but the judge deferred to INS. The judge ordered him deported on Feb. 5, 1999.
He was bused to the Arizona-Mexico border, where he was instructed to get out and continue on foot. He said he walked into Nogales, Sonora, hungry, thirsty and cold.
Using the phone at a church, he called his parents and told them he was in Mexico. They were incredulous. His mom asked whether he was really out partying with his friends.
'I'm not lying to you,' he recalled saying.
His father drove to Mexico armed with his son's birth certificate. Rescuing him took two tries: During the first attempt, Silvestre was stopped at the border, detained and swiftly deported. When he tried again, he showed his birth certificate and an officer admitted him.
Detained again
Silvestre found that the ordeal did not end with his return.
Often, he said, he woke up terrified in the middle of the night, not knowing where he was. He felt nobody believed his account of what had happened. He was left with almost no proof except for a flimsy wristband that immigration officers put on him in detention. He began to feel suicidal and used drugs heavily.
As years passed, he kept working, but also partying and getting into trouble. In 2004, his mother told him he needed to change his life. He decided to move to Arizona, where he found a job packing vegetables.
One weekend that year, believing he was safe because five years had passed, he joined a friend from work on a weekend trip to Mexico, where they had pizza and beers. Upon trying to reenter the U.S. with his birth certificate and California ID, he was once again detained and held in Yuma, Ariz.
'Silvestre is a citizen and national of Mexico and of no other country,' ICE records from the time state. 'He does not have nor has he ever had documents with which to enter, live, work or stay in the United States.' ICE moved to deport him, alleging he was falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen.
ICE made the claim even though, two years earlier, the agency had run Silvestre's fingerprints after an arrest and correctly determined that Silvestre was who he said he was, records show.
From detention in Yuma, Silvestre called his mother, who rushed to free him. She handwrote and notarized an affidavit in Spanish, stating, 'I am sending the evidence proving that my son Miguel Silvestre was born in the United States, in the city of Stockton, California.'
Silvestre spent two weeks in detention before an immigration judge ruled on March 24, 2004, that he was indeed a U.S. citizen — and ordered him released. Homeland Security terminated deportation proceedings the same day.
Back in California, Silvestre returned to more familiar problems. Later in 2004, he was convicted of carjacking with a gun and went to prison for three months. He bounced in and out of jail, as well as addiction treatment. Last year, his older brother accused him of threatening him, resulting in criminal charges. Silvestre maintains he's innocent.
'The truth is, it doesn't matter if this guy was a mass murderer,' said Johnson, the UC Davis law professor. 'He could go to prison and be punished but you couldn't deport him, as long as he's a citizen.'
Though there is no evidence, Johnson said it's likely that racial and class profiling played a role in Silvestre's deportation. 'It's hard to imagine,' he said, 'the same kind of mix-up with a John Smith who goes to Pacific University.'
In 2021, the Government Accountability Office reported that ICE policy did not require officers to update the citizenship field in their data systems after identifying evidence that a person could be a U.S. citizen. In Silvestre's case, the original 1999 mistake that seeded his long predicament was apparently unremedied in immigration records.
In 2015, Silvestre said, he sobered up and devoted himself to God. But his mother's death in 2023 plunged him into grief that he hasn't recovered from.
When he learned about the latest deportation paperwork, he said he felt suicidal. He got into his car and started driving recklessly, hoping police would pull him over. But then he sensed his mom was watching over him. 'Calm down, go back to your room, and go to sleep,' he heard her say. So he did.
For 21 years, Silvestre hasn't left the country, fearful of being barred again. A drawstring bag that he carries everywhere contains his birth certificate, along with the immigration judge's order affirming his citizenship.