Brian José Morales García was riding beside his boss through the Texas Hill Country, bound for an air-conditioning job near Fredericksburg, when a state trooper stopped their pickup truck.
Over the next four days, the 25-year-old was shuttled through a succession of detention facilities. Along the way, his attorney said, he was stripped, shoved and threatened with years in prison. By April 7, he was aboard a deportation flight to Mexico.
The country sending him away was his own.
Morales García was born in Denver, according to a copy of his birth certificate reviewed by USA TODAY.
He is part of a long, largely uncounted history of U.S. citizens swallowed by the nation’s immigration system. The federal government does not release data on how often
its agents detain or deport U.S. citizens, but investigations by journalists, researchers and oversight agencies have documented thousands of citizens detained, deported or otherwise targeted by immigration authorities across decades. One study estimated that U.S. citizens account for as many as 1.5% of all deportees.
A Government Accountability Office report from 2021 offers one glimpse of how often Americans may become entangled in immigration enforcement. Between fiscal year 2015 and the first two quarters of fiscal year 2020, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 674 potential U.S. citizens, detained 121 and deported 70, according to the report. The majority of those deportations — 66 people — occurred during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Yet, even those numbers do not tell the full story. The watchdog agency found that ICE did not consistently track cases involving potential U.S. citizens, making it impossible to know how many people were actually swept into the system.
The problem has persisted through successive Republican and Democratic administrations. Now, experts fear a persistent failure is colliding with a rapid expansion of immigration enforcement — one pushed to deliver record numbers of arrests, increasingly aided by state and local police and operating with fewer internal checks. The result, they warn, is that more citizens could be swept into the dragnet and have fewer places to turn once they are.
“This is a system that is advancing with less accountability now than before,” said Jacqueline Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University and founder of the school’s Deportation Research Clinic. “And less oversight because they’re not producing the records that they should be producing on these cases.”
Citizens represent a sliver of those targeted by immigration authorities. But for those who are wrongfully detained or deported, the experience can leave lasting trauma, mounting legal costs and consequences that take years to resolve.
For Morales García, returning home required a federal lawsuit — and nearly five months outside his own country.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to USA TODAY's requests for comment. The Department of Justice declined to comment on Morales García's case, citing pending litigation. In court filings, however, the government said Morales García told federal agents he was born in Mexico and freely chose to return there.
How a traffic stop ended in deportation
In 2001, Morales García was born in Denver to two young Mexican parents who had come to the United States in search of better opportunities. Later that year, he was baptized at St. Therese Catholic Church in Aurora, Colorado, where a baptismal record lists Denver as his birthplace. Morales García also has a Social Security card, a copy of which USA TODAY reviewed. Like cards issued to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, his bears no restriction requiring DHS authorization to work.
But the family’s life in the United States was brief. After Morales García’s younger brother was born in 2002, his parents returned to Mexico to raise their sons close to family, Lincoln-Goldfinch said. Morales García would spend most of the next two decades there, growing up speaking Spanish and eventually getting married.
As he prepared to become a father, Morales García returned to the United States to find work and support his growing family in Mexico, including his wife who was pregnant with their first daughter. He drove north from Aguascalientes — a sunbaked city in Mexico’s central highlands — in January 2025. At the port of entry, Morales García showed a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer his Colorado birth certificate, said his attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch. The officer let him through.
He settled in Austin, moving through a series of construction jobs before landing one installing air-conditioning units.
On April 3, he was riding to one of those jobs when Texas Department of Public Safety troopers stopped his employer’s pickup near Fredericksburg for an alleged window tint violation, according to the federal lawsuit his attorneys later filed. No one in the truck received a citation as a result of the stop, Lincoln-Goldfinch said.
Morales García repeatedly told the state troopers — and, later, the Gillespie County sheriff's deputies who were called in to translate — that he is American. He explained in Spanish that he had been born in Denver and asked for an opportunity to retrieve his documents, Lincoln-Goldfinch said.
The officers, however, contacted ICE. The agency instructed them to hold Morales García and another passenger, according to the lawsuit, and Morales García was booked into the Gillespie County Jail. Both Texas DPS and the Gillespie County Sheriff’s Office have formal partnerships with ICE, part of a growing network of state and local agencies enlisted to help enforce federal immigration law.
“There's no law in this country that says that U.S. citizens have to have ID on them when they're going out or riding as passengers in a car,” Lincoln-Goldfinch said. “What's happening in the streets is that DPS, ICE and all the sheriffs are just stopping people with brown skin and asking them what their status is, and if they don't have an answer that they like, they're taking them. And it's quiet and it's silent what they're doing, but it's a slippery slope.”
Morales García was ultimately transferred into CBP custody. There, Lincoln-Goldfinch said, agents ridiculed his repeated claims that he was American and warned that, if he continued making them, he could face as many as five years in prison.
“At that point, he'd been abused for four days straight, and he believed that he was going to either sign the paperwork they told him to sign or go to jail for years,” Lincoln-Goldfinch said. “So he signed these documents... under duress.”
With his signature, Morales García had agreed to be deported to Mexico.
'The 900-pound gorilla in the coal mine'
Morales García’s ordeal fits a pattern Stevens, the political scientist, has spent decades tracing. Some people discover only after they are detained that they have a claim to U.S. citizenship. Others, like Morales García, know they are American from the beginning, yet watch as officers dismiss their claims and the deportation process moves forward anyway.
Stevens calls these cases “the 900-pound gorilla in the coal mine.”
“I study U.S. citizens not because I care more about U.S. citizens being wrongfully deported than anybody else,” she said. “But if even U.S. citizens can’t survive the lawlessness of the deportation process, that tells us a lot about what’s happening to everybody else.”
Claims of citizenship are supposed to interrupt the machinery of deportation. Federal regulations require unresolved claims to be referred to immigration court. ICE policy also requires officers to consult supervisors and attorneys to put their findings in writing. If the evidence suggests the person might be American — even inconclusively — they should be released while the government decides.
Whether those safeguards were followed in Morales García’s case remains unclear.
Still, the 2021 GAO investigation found that the protections were unevenly understood and applied. Some ICE officers had not been trained to follow the agency’s own guidance, and neither ICE nor CBP reliably tracked every citizen that's been detained or removed, the report found. Agents are also not required to correct their databases if someone they investigated turned out to be a citizen.
On paper, it's the government’s job to prove that someone is not a citizen. In reality, Stevens said, the burden often flips — a result, in part, of Supreme Court rulings that have given immigration authorities broad power and few judicial checks, she said.
Yet, what feels different now, Stevens said, is DHS’s growing willingness to double down even after evidence of citizenship emerges.
“Information that’s consistent with deportation is treated as accurate,” she said. “And information that’s inconsistent with deportation is treated as inaccurate and fraudulent.”
Last year, 22-year-old Dulce Consuelo Diaz Morales spent 25 days in ICE custody while DHS challenged her Maryland birth certificate. Months later, she received a U.S. passport, and the government dropped its effort to deport her, the Baltimore Banner reported. In Florida, Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, 20, remained jailed even after a judge verified that he was American, while DHS maintained that he had told officers he was undocumented, per the Oklahoma Voice.
From Mexico, Morales García could do little more than wait while his attorneys tried to reconstruct the paper trail of his life. In May, they filed a federal lawsuit accusing federal, state and local officials of violating his constitutional rights and asking a judge to order the government to bring him home.
Back across the bridge
Three weeks after Morales García’s attorneys sued, the government told a different story.
In a May 21 court filing, Justice Department attorneys said Morales García initially claimed citizenship and told a Border Patrol agent that he had entered the country with a birth certificate. But after the agent warned him that lying could bring criminal charges, they wrote, Morales García stated that he had been born in Zacatecas.
The DOJ denied that he was threatened or coerced, stating in court documents that he freely signed documents requesting a voluntary return to Mexico. It also pointed to Mexican records bearing another birth date, the spelling “Bryan” and an identity code associated with Zacatecas, Mexico.
Lincoln-Goldfinch said Morales García’s mother registered his birth in Mexico in 2004. According to the family, the registrar entered a different date and changed “Brian” to “Bryan,” a spelling more commonly used there. Having records in two countries — and discrepancies between them — is common among dual citizens, both Lincoln-Goldfinch and Stevens said.
After nearly five months — and a growing file of evidence — the Justice Department agreed to let Morales García return to the United States, Lincoln-Goldfinch said.
On Aug. 30, after a bus ride north from Aguascalientes, Morales García found himself at the border once more. In his hands was the Colorado birth certificate his lawyers had spent months trying to make the government believe. This time, it was enough.
On the other side, his attorneys took him to Starbucks for coffee.
But coming back did not erase what had happened, Morales García said, alleging officers had judged him by how he looked and by the English he could not speak. He worried another traffic stop could end the same way.
“That fear will always be with me,” he said in Spanish during a news conference. “It happened once and it can happen a second time.”
His return did not end the lawsuit. Richard “Dicky” Grigg, one of his attorneys, said they plan to seek damages to keep other citizens from going through the same ordeal.
“They sent this man, a U.S. citizen, to Mexico, took four months of his life and then let him back in the United States when they realized they'd made a mistake,” Grigg said. “To prevent this from happening in the future, we’re going to do what we can to make sure government officials, state and federal, are held accountable and responsible.”
Morales García’s own plans are simpler. He wants to return to work and do what he came to the United States to do in the first place.
“Echarle ganas,” he said — to keep going, keep working and keep giving it his all.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Born here but deported. A Texas man's harrowing ordeal.
