When De Facto Americans Are Deported.

• Author: Nathan, Debbie

PETER SEAN BROWN was jailed in Florida last year for a probation violation. Three weeks passed before the charge was dismissed. During that time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) mistakenly thought Brown, who was born in Philadelphia and raised in New Jersey, was a deportable Jamaican.

ICE asked the county jail to honor what's called a "detainer"--a request that Brown be held for ICE pickup. Brown repeatedly told his jailers that he was an American citizen, but they ignored him. After a judge dismissed the probation violation, he was turned over to ICE, which recognized its error in a few hours and released him. Brown is now suing the sheriff who runs the jail for illegally holding him for ICE.

You may have heard about that case. You're less likely to have heard about millions of other people, people who have been in this country practically for their entire lives, who really have been deported, often accompanied by spouses and children who are U.S. citizens. The courts provide these deportees no relief, because they were neither born here nor naturalized. They might as well be citizens--they've lived in the United States for years and we know them as Americans. But de facto does not equal de jure.

This disconnect between life and the law is the theme of Beth C. Caldwell's Deported Americans. Many people in the United States have no papers but are wed to American citizens; about half have U.S.-born children. Two-thirds have been here for more than a decade. Many came when they were so young that they have no memories of the countries where they were born. Their language is English. They celebrate the Fourth of July. But they're at risk of banishment.

That risk precedes the current president. From 2009 to 2013, during the Obama administration, 1.5 million non-citizens were deported. The Trump administration has continued the expulsions. More than a quarter of a million people were sent packing in fiscal year 2018, a 13 percent increase over 2017. Most of the deported are Latino men who were adjudged as criminals--though the crimes that most committed were traffic infractions, driving under the influence, or immigration violations, such as coming back to the country illegally after being kicked out.

Today, more than a million children in the United States, most of them citizens, have parents who have been deported. Many suffer from depression, conduct disorders, and, in Caldwell's words, the "constant sense of a diminishing and...