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.