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Comment by papercrane | Hacker News Reader

ICE deporting US citizens is not a new problem. In 2021 the GAO estimated that between 2015-2020 70 potential U.S. citizens were removed.

There are also cases where children who are citizens have been removed with a parent. In those cases the US government claims that they parents voluntary took the children, while the families claim that little no chance was given for the families to arrange for the children to stay.

GAO Report: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-487

Wikipedia has a good round of sources for the recent removals of US children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_and_deportation_of_A...

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I am reading “potential citizen” as “a detainee who claims to be an American citizen whose citizenship status was not ascertained.” The article doesn’t really give a good indication of if these cases had any merit. Since officers are supposed to stop the interview if they believe the individual is a US citizen, I suspect that these deportations were warranted. Law enforcement can get things wrong, but in this case, I haven’t heard of any documented instances where this has happened.

> Wikipedia has a good round of sources for the recent removals of US children:

This article cites two examples, and in both instances the parents were residing in the country illegally with children who were not even in grade school yet. Jus Soli leads to all kinds of absurdities like this. The idea that a 2 year old being sent back to his mother’s country of origin is comparable to “American citizens being deported” is farcical; it’s technically true, but completely misleading. The people making these claims intend to frighten the audience into believing that regular immigration enforcement actions like these are somehow comparable to kidnapping people off of the street.

> I am reading “potential citizen” as “a detainee who claims to be an American citizen whose citizenship status was not ascertained.”

That's not what it means in this context. The GAO report is based on ICE's own database records, they found 70 deportees that records indicated they were potentially citizens.

> Law enforcement can get things wrong, but I haven’t read of any documented instances of this happening.

Wikipedia has an article that lists documented instances of citizens being removed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Americans_from_...

> Wikipedia has an article that lists documented instances of citizens being removed.

Thanks. It looks like the article lists 8 instances where deportation occurred. In 3 of those instances, the deportee sued and successfully returned, and in 2 they appear to have failed to return after their deportation. This is more like 3 / 5 though as the examples involving children were not technically deportations of the children but of the parents, who were not US citizens.

So it’s more than 0, but so far as I can tell none of the counted deportations occurred when Trump was in office; the last one was in 2008.

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