{"id":223421,"date":"2026-09-08T00:25:27","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T00:25:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/born-here-but-deported-a-texas-mans-harrowing-ordeal-usa-today\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T00:25:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T00:25:27","slug":"born-here-but-deported-a-texas-mans-harrowing-ordeal-usa-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/born-here-but-deported-a-texas-mans-harrowing-ordeal-usa-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Born here but deported. A Texas man's harrowing ordeal. – USA Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brian Jose\u0301 Morales Garci\u0301a 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 Garci\u0301a 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\u2019s immigration system. The federal government does not release data on how often its agents detain or deport U.S. citizens, but investigations by journalists<\/a>, researchers<\/a> and oversight agencies<\/a> have documented thousands of citizens detained<\/a>, deported or otherwise targeted by immigration authorities across decades. One study<\/a> estimated that U.S. citizens account for as many as 1.5% of all deportees.
A Government Accountability Office report<\/a> 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 \u2014 66 people \u2014 occurred during President Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s 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 \u2014 one pushed to deliver record numbers of arrests<\/a>, increasingly aided by state and local police<\/a> and operating with fewer internal checks<\/a>. The result, they warn, is that more citizens could be swept into the dragnet and have fewer places to turn once they are.
\u201cThis is a system that is advancing with less accountability now than before,\u201d said Jacqueline Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University and founder of\u00a0the school\u2019s Deportation Research Clinic<\/a>. \u201cAnd less oversight because they\u2019re not producing the records that they should be producing on these cases.\u201d
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 Garci\u0301a, returning home required a federal lawsuit \u2014 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 Garci\u0301a’s case, citing pending litigation. In court filings, however, the government said Morales Garci\u0301a told federal agents he was born in Mexico and freely chose to return there.
In 2001, Morales Garci\u0301a 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 Garci\u0301a 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\u2019s life in the United States was brief. After Morales Garci\u0301a\u2019s younger brother was born in 2002, his parents returned to Mexico to raise their sons close to family, said his attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch. Morales Garci\u0301a 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 Garci\u0301a 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 \u2014 a sunbaked city in Mexico\u2019s central highlands \u2014 in January 2025. At the port of entry, Morales Garci\u0301a showed a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer his Colorado birth certificate, Lincoln-Goldfinch said. 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\u2019s 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 Garci\u0301a repeatedly told the state troopers \u2014 and, later, the Gillespie County sheriff’s deputies who were called in to translate \u2014 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 Garci\u0301a and another passenger, according to the lawsuit, and Morales Garci\u0301a was booked into the Gillespie County Jail. Both Texas DPS and the Gillespie County Sheriff\u2019s Office have formal partnerships with ICE, part of a growing network of state and local agencies enlisted to help enforce federal immigration law.
\u201cThere’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,\u201d Lincoln-Goldfinch said. \u201cWhat’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.\u201d
Morales Garci\u0301a 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.
\u201cAt 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,\u201d Lincoln-Goldfinch said. \u201cSo he signed these documents… under duress.\u201d
With his signature, Morales Garci\u0301a had agreed to be deported to Mexico.
Morales Garci\u0301a\u2019s 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 Garci\u0301a, 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 \u201cthe 900-pound gorilla in the coal mine.\u201d
\u201cI study U.S. citizens not because I care more about U.S. citizens being wrongfully deported than anybody else,\u201d she said. \u201cBut if even U.S. citizens can\u2019t survive the lawlessness of the deportation process, that tells us a lot about what\u2019s happening to everybody else.\u201d
Claims of citizenship are supposed to interrupt the machinery of deportation. Federal regulations<\/a> require unresolved claims to be referred to immigration court. ICE policy<\/a> also requires officers to consult supervisors and attorneys to put their findings in writing. If the evidence suggests the person might be American \u2014 even inconclusively \u2014 they should be released while the government decides.
Whether those safeguards were followed in Morales Garci\u0301a\u2019s 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\u2019s own guidance<\/a>, 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\u2019s job to prove that someone is not a citizen. In reality, Stevens said, the burden often flips \u2014 a result, in part, of Supreme Court rulings<\/a> that have given immigration authorities broad power and few judicial checks, she said.
Yet, what feels different now, Stevens said, is DHS\u2019s growing willingness to double down even after evidence of citizenship emerges.
\u201cInformation that\u2019s consistent with deportation is treated as accurate,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd information that\u2019s inconsistent with deportation is treated as inaccurate and fraudulent.\u201d
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<\/a>. 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, according to the Oklahoma Voice<\/a>.
From Mexico, Morales Garci\u0301a 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.
Three weeks after Morales Garci\u0301a\u2019s attorneys sued, the government told a different story.
In a May 21 court filing, Justice Department attorneys said Morales Garci\u0301a 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 Garci\u0301a 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 \u201cBryan\u201d and an identity code associated with Zacatecas, Mexico.
Lincoln-Goldfinch said Morales Garci\u0301a\u2019s mother registered his birth in Mexico in 2004. The registrar, according to the family, entered a different date and changed \u201cBrian\u201d to \u201cBryan,\u201d a spelling more commonly used there. Having records in two countries \u2014 and discrepancies between them \u2014 is common among dual citizens, both Lincoln-Goldfinch and Stevens said.
After nearly five months \u2014 and a growing file of evidence \u2014 the Justice Department agreed to let Morales Garci\u0301a return to the United States, Lincoln-Goldfinch said.
On Aug. 30, after a bus ride north from Aguascalientes, Morales Garci\u0301a 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 Garci\u0301a 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.
\u201cThat fear will always be with me,\u201d he said in Spanish during a news conference. \u201cIt happened once and it can happen a second time.\u201d
His return did not end the lawsuit. Richard \u201cDicky\u201d Grigg, one of his attorneys, said they plan to seek damages to keep other citizens from going through the same ordeal.
\u201cThey 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,\u201d Grigg said. \u201cTo prevent this from happening in the future, we\u2019re going to do what we can to make sure government officials, state and federal, are held accountable and responsible.\u201d
Morales Garci\u0301a\u2019s 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.
\u201cEcharle ganas,\u201d he said \u2014 to keep going, keep working and keep giving it his all.<\/p>\n

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Brian Jose\u0301 Morales Garci\u0301a 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":223422,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}