As Jaime Diez, a lawyer in Brownsville, Texas who works on such cases, puts it: Maybe 2% of my cases I have found out that the person was not born here. All of the others were born here. So what’s the benefit in taking someone who was a teacher, whose parents by mistake and without that person’s participation decided to do something that’s incorrect, which is registering somebody who was not born here as if he had been born here. You find out when you’re 40 that everything that you have done, including your education, is worthless because you were not born here and all your documentation is fraudulent. What is the benefit of finding out for that person that he was not born here? Well, you’re pretty much destroying his life. I don’t see what’s the benefit of it. But to spend all the money, all the resources they are spending—I really would like to know how much money the Department of State has spent in defending and prosecuting these cases. U.S. Citizens Detained under Secure Communities and Similar Programs Since the DHS and FBI databases (IDENT and NGI) were linked under the Secure Communities program (2008-2014), thousands of U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, and authorized immigrants have been mistakenly held under ICE detainers for suspected immigration law violations.602 Officials charged with implementing immigration database checks under this program operate from flawed database records and the assumption that if an individual has no record this creates probable cause to issue a detainer. More likely than not, the lack of a record in an immigration database is an indicator that the individual concerned is a U.S. citizen, but since the program is designed to root out “criminal aliens,” the absence of a record is condemning. Local officers are often unable to tell if the detainee is a citizen based on evidence presented to them.603 While federal policies require ICE agents to “carefully and expeditiously” investigate any claim of U.S. citizenship made by an arrested individual,604 there have been cases where ICE officers refuse to consider the arrested person’s passport or citizenship certificate as evidence of citizenship, which in some cases has led to suits for false imprisonment.605 An April 2018 Los Angeles Times article captured examples of such detentions: Victims include a landscaper snatched in a Home Depot parking lot in Rialto and held for days despite his son’s attempts to show agents the man’s U.S. passport; a New York resident locked up for more than three years fighting deportation efforts after a federal agent mistook his father for someone who wasn’t a U.S. citizen; and a Rhode Island housekeeper mistakenly targeted twice, resulting in her spending a night in prison the second time even though her husband had brought her U.S. passport to a court hearing.606 136 UNMAKING AMERICANS