Vox Populi:

We are law professors who have studied civil litigation involving citizenship disputes and thousands of cases involving citizens caught up in immigration cases. That includes the U.S. citizens who have been accidentally swept up in the government’s immigration enforcement efforts since the mid-19th century. In many cases, they have been detained and even deported.

In fact, more than 1,500 U.S. citizens spent time in immigration detention between 2007 and 2015 before the government acknowledged the mistake, federal records indicate. Northwestern University political scientist Jacqueline Stevens estimated that approximately 1% of all immigration detainees from more than 8,000 cases between 2006 and 2008 that she studied were U.S. citizens.

Chinese Exclusion Act

Following its founding and for more than a century, the United States allowed foreigners to voluntarily settle here. The Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first of several measures designed to restrict immigration from China, limited immigration for the first time.

The Supreme Court made it clear in 1920 with a ruling related to those curbs on Chinese immigrants that it is illegal for immigration authorities to deliberately detain or deport U.S. citizens. The case resolved a dispute between Kwock Jan Fat, a man born in California who was denied permission to return to the United States after a trip to China, and the immigration authorities.

The unanimous ruling included a warning about the risks of accidentally deporting citizens. “It is better that many Chinese immigrants should be improperly admitted than that one natural born citizen of the United States should be permanently excluded from his country,” Justice John Hessin Clarke wrote in the court’s opinion.

More than 75 years after the Chinese Exclusion Act’s repeal in 1943, we believe that the court’s concerns about protecting the rights of U.S. citizens during immigration enforcement actions remain relevant.

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