Donald Trump’s mass deportation raids that kicked off last week were meant to show the country he’s aggressively moving on one of his key campaign promises and to send a jolt of fear through migrant communities. But they’re also showing the country something else: that the plan is a direct, major threat to ordinary American citizens and their basic constitutional rights.

This is because in the course of rounding up in massive numbers people they suspect are undocumented, federal agents inevitably end up snatching up, imprisoning, and even deporting American citizens — which is illegal under US law. The numbers over the years are shocking.

According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), between 2015 and March 2020, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested 674 people who may have been US citizens, detained 121 of them, and “removed,” or deported, seventy. Between 2007 and 2015, the number of Americans held by immigration enforcement was more than 1,500. One researcher, Jacqueline Stevens, a political scientist at Northwestern University, crunched the numbers and found that between 2003 and 2010, more than 20,000 US citizens were detained or deported.

Davino Watson, a Jamaican native who has citizenship through his naturalized father, was imprisoned for three and a half years after an ICE agent mistakenly pulled up the name of a different, noncitizen man with a similar name to his dad. Even after they realized their mistake, ICE refused to free him and even kept on trying to deport him, inventing a loophole in Jamaican law that they argued meant he wasn’t a real citizen.

ICE likewise ignored the protestations of another man it arrested, Brian Bukle, who had held citizenship for fifty years after arriving in the country from the British Virgin Islands as a two-year-old, and it even refused to speak to Bukle’s brother after Bukle called him to confirm Bukle’s status. Bukle was only saved from deportation when he was able to get in touch with an immigration lawyer near the end of his thirty-six-day ordeal.

Lorenza Palma, who had lived his whole life in the United States and whose grandfather was born here, was held at the request of immigration officials for one and a half years, even after having given immigration authorities his grandfather’s birth certificate weeks earlier. Despite being ordered by a judge to look for the birth certificate, the ICE lawyer on his case said he never found it and had to be ordered by the judge to go through his briefcase in the middle of the hearing to pull it out, saving Palma from deportation at the last minute.

Certain things are common to these and other stories: often it was simple human error that upended the lives of citizens wrongly targeted for deportation; once inside the deportation system, they had virtually no rights or avenues for appeal taken for granted in the US justice system; and ICE agents routinely ignored their protests and failed or actively refused to “carefully and expeditiously” investigate their citizenship claims as they are required by law.

These are just droplets in an ocean of similar tales. And there may be many more to come, as two weeks in, Trump’s immigration raids have already led to ICE agents arresting, detaining, and interrogating a spate of American citizens.

That includes the veteran arrested during a warrantless raid on a New Jersey workplace last week, and the Puerto Rican family of three — a toddler and his mother and grandfather — arrested in Milwaukee after being overheard speaking Spanish while shopping, and forced by ICE after their release to find their own way back from the facility they had been taken to.

“We have been very much aware they won’t just go after immigrants, but after people of color who they will racially profile,” says Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition.

Maybe most egregious, more than a dozen indigenous Americans have been stopped, questioned, and detained by ICE agents over the past week, leading tribal authorities to urge people to brief their kids about the situations, keep their doors closed, and other protective measures if ICE come knocking, and to carry around their proof of citizenship and other IDs. But even that only goes so far: some of those detained report that ICE agents, unfamiliar with tribal IDs, simply didn’t treat their documents as proof of citizenship.

Even if you’re a conservative who views the border as a top issue, are you comfortable with the federal government sending out thousands of armed officers who end up violating citizen’ basic rights, breaking US law, and creating a climate of fear in US communities that leads Americans to have to carry around papers when they leave the house?

Beyond the obvious moral and practical issues with Trump’s mass deportation plan, this is the part that hasn’t been talked about enough: large-scale immigration raids and arrests, coupled with the racial profiling that is being reportedly used by federal agents, don’t just negatively affect migrants — they also threaten American citizens, dramatically raising the risk that they’ll be mistakenly imprisoned and bounced out of their own country.

“When anyone’s constitutional rights are violated, all of our constitutional rights are at risk,” says Awawdeh.

The stakes have been raised even further with Trump’s announcement he is having a 30,000-person migrant detention facility built on Guantanamo Bay, which begs the question: How long before the mass deportation program sees US citizens sent to the famously lawless ex–torture dungeons of that naval base? Bear in mind the US government has expressly argued it can hold a US citizen without charge for as long as it wants if it deems them an “enemy combatant,” an especially ominous fact when Trump and his allies are reframing migration as an “invasion” and invoking war powers to deal with it.

That many of the citizens deported in the past were serving prison time shouldn’t put anyone at ease. Americans are detained every day for a variety of nonviolent crimes, from stealing to driving drunk and taking part in protests, that could put them at the mercy of some bureaucratic error. And as many as one in three Americans have a criminal record, almost as many as have college diplomas, and some of the items on their rap sheet, no matter how old, can turn them into contenders for deportation.

“Deportation laws and regulations in place since the late 1980s have been mandating detention and deportation for hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people each year without attorneys or, in many cases, administrative hearings,” Stevens wrote in 2011. “It would be truly shocking if this did not result in the deportation of US citizens.”

As a result, we may well remember Trump’s raids as more than just an assault on migrants trying to build a better life. We may look back on it as an assault on Americans’ own basic rights and the very concept of citizenship.