The fact that Busse was almost deported from a country where he should have been protected by law as a citizen should not be understood as a freak mistake. For decades, U.S. citizens have been deported repeatedly, in isolated cases and en masse, due to racism and bureaucratic indifference, as well as the complexity of federal immigration laws, which can make it difficult for some bona-fide U.S. citizens to understand and document their status.

…In July, 2017, after some back-and-forth with Customs and Border Protection, Busse returned to J. F. K. for what he thought was a routine appointment. He found himself in a room with eight to ten officers. As he recalled, someone informed him, “You’re going into the deportation process.” He was handcuffed, shackled, and transported to the immigration detention wing of the Bergen County Jail, in Hackensack, New Jersey.

Busse found the detention facility “pretty hard to deal with,” he told me later. He shared a cell with a detainee from Guyana and encountered others in the facility who had been there for as many as five years.

…Two months after he was detained, Busse received his first hearing in immigration court, on Varick Street, in Manhattan. Immigration detainees arrive there early most weekday mornings, in shackles, wearing orange jumpsuits. When Busse arrived, he encountered a lawyer for the first time since his detention, thanks to a recent program enacted by the New York City Council, which pays lawyers to represent poor immigrant detainees. At “intake,” Gregory Copeland, a staff attorney at Legal Aid, appeared before a group of between ten and twenty detainees, and he and a colleague made a short presentation in English and Spanish.

…In the labyrinth that is U.S. immigration law, certain immigrants automatically become citizens if, when they are minors, their parents become naturalized citizens.

…The obvious solution to avoid mistakenly deporting citizens would be to provide lawyers conversant with immigration law to represent people in detention and at deportation proceedings, when they lack resources to find their own lawyers. …Yet the Supreme Court has not recognized that people facing immigration detention and deportation have a universal, constitutional right to a lawyer.

…Busse is back at his financial firm. Given the number of people like him who pass through immigration detention but have no lawyer to represent them, it is hard to know how many Americans have been inadvertently banished from their country during the last decade. To an extent, their typical profile is not hard to guess at: people with low incomes, without a high level of education, or who belong to certain ethnic or religious groups. Or maybe, some days, just Americans with bad luck.

When ICE Tries to Deport Americans, Who Defends Them? | The New Yorker

Jeezus….