Mass Deportations- in a big picture sense it is possible that any American can be at risk

Echo opinion - written by Judge Nancy Gertner, published in The Boston Globe:

The premise of President-elect Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan is that the government will be able to accurately identify who is or who is not lawfully here. That may be true of certain people — those with a pending order of deportation, even DACA recipients, to name a few.

Ironically, however, American citizens are not so easily identified.

If you were born here, your proof is your birth certificate. (Racial segregation of hospitals left many Black Americans without a government-issued birth certificate. Likewise, many Native American citizens born on reservations were not issued a birth certificate.) 

If you are a naturalized citizen, you would have your naturalization certificate. If you were born abroad to American citizens, you would use your passport or your parents’. But few citizens carry their documents around with them — democracies typically do not mandate identity cards. And getting copies of official documents takes time and money. The government usually relies on its notoriously inaccurate database.

There is no central index for naturalization records. Indeed, there is not even a national database of all citizens or noncitizens. The ICE databases that exist are riddled with “significant errors” and have “incomplete data” as one district court found in a challenge to immigration detainers in the Central District of California. Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse reports consistent errors in the ICE databases and worse, ICE’s lack of cooperation in improving them. The result: “A small but not insignificant number of detainers are issued each year to what was recorded by ICE as U.S. citizens.”

Mass deportation based on error-filled databases risks rounding up, detaining, and even deporting people just because they don’t speak English, or their last name suggests that they came from somewhere else, or from certain neighborhoods, a grotesque and dehumanizing prospect in this nation of immigrants.

Nancy Gertner is a retired federal judge in Boston and a law professor at Harvard Law School.

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