Every detention in the United States starts with a sentence about who someone is. This man is a danger to himself. This woman matches the fingerprint on file. This man scored eight points. Whoever writes that sentence first decides who you are for every official who touches the file afterward, and no rule in any of these systems obliges a single human being to check it before the door closes.
Every detention begins with a claim, and the claim is always about identity. In a psychiatric emergency it arrives as a telephone call: somebody tells somebody that a person is a danger, and in most American jurisdictions the somebody can be any adult at all. In the District of Columbia, D.C. Code § 21-521 lets an officer take a person into custody without a warrant on reason to believe. In civil immigration enforcement the claim arrives as a database hit or a fingerprint "possible match," which becomes a detainer asking a jail to hold someone past their release. In summary removal it arrives as an officer's conclusion that you cannot prove two years in the country, and under the Alien Enemies Act in 2025 it arrived as a score sheet.
Each of those is defensible on its face. You want a neighbor who hears something to be able to call, and you want an officer who finds a match to be able to act, because every emergency system runs on unverified first reports. The flaw sits in what happens next. No part of any of these chains is required to go back and test the claim. The crisis team, the transporting officer, the jail, the admitting clinician, the immigration officer and the court all receive it from the step before and pass it to the step after, and by the time anyone with authority reads the file, the claim about who you are has become the file.
Clinicians call the person who supplies the claim a collateral informant, and clinical training says to weigh what that person says against other sources. ICE calls a database result a hit. The 2025 Alien Enemies Act guide called a score of eight a validation. In every case the paperwork records the input as a finding, and nothing in the workflow connects the two.
Systems tell you what they care about by what they give you a box for. Read the forms and the guidance behind five doors into custody, and the same absence repeats in every one.
Verification appears in none of these workflows, so none of these instruments has anywhere to record it. A form is a workflow rendered in ink: you cannot record that you checked, you cannot record that you did not, and no downstream reader can tell the difference. Now hold the first entry against what it actually held. The box reserved for the circumstances under which the District takes a person's liberty carried an opposing party's litigation posture, and nobody in the chain could object, because the page has nowhere to put an objection.
Every one of these instruments has a box for the claim and no box for checking it. A form is a workflow rendered in ink.
Identity theft usually means a stranger opening a credit card in your name. The versions that end in a cell run three ways, and each one has already happened to someone with a name. The FTC logged 1,135,291 identity theft reports in 2024, 70,332 of them involving government documents or benefits, and 38,736 of them from servicemembers, veterans and their families.
Matthew Keirans used William Woods's identity for about 30 years, starting when the two men worked at a hot dog cart in Albuquerque in the late 1980s. In 2019 Woods tried to reclaim his own name. Keirans convinced police that Woods was the impostor, and Woods was charged with identity theft and false impersonation. He spent 428 days in jail and 147 days in a state mental hospital, where he was medicated after a judge found him incompetent to stand trial, and in March 2021 he was convicted and ordered to use the name Matthew Keirans. DNA settled the question in 2023, and on April 23, 2026 the Eighth Circuit affirmed Keirans's 12-year sentence. Every institution Woods passed through, the police, the jail, the court and the hospital, acted on the predicate it was handed, and the one person who knew the truth was the one person whose account each of them treated as a symptom.
In April 2018 the Monroe County sheriff's office in Florida held Peter Sean Brown, a United States citizen, on an ICE detainer issued from a fingerprint "possible match." ICE's own records already noted his citizenship, along with an erroneous detainer from 2005, and he faced deportation to Jamaica until ICE reviewed his birth certificate and he was released on April 27. GAO counted the pattern at scale: from fiscal 2015 through the middle of fiscal 2020, ICE arrested 674 potential U.S. citizens, detained 121 and removed 70, and it issued detainers for at least 895, about 74 percent of which it later cancelled. ProPublica counted more than 170 citizens held by immigration agents in the first nine months of 2025, nearly 20 of them children, and reported that the government does not track the number. Outside immigration the ACLU counts 14 known wrongful arrests on facial recognition matches, among them Robert Williams in Detroit in January 2020 and Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, in February 2023.
The third direction needs no impostor. In April 2025 the Social Security Administration entered at least 6,300 living immigrants, children and people in their 70s and 80s among them, into its death file, renamed the "ineligible master file," and the White House said the aim was to encourage them to self-deport. That May the SAVE system began checking citizenship against Social Security numbers. More than 65,000,000 voter records from 26 states have gone through it and 28,635 were flagged, and in Texas about 20 percent of the flags turned out to be citizens. On September 25, 2026 the Supreme Court let the system keep running while the challenge proceeds. Monograph No. 6, The Bearer Credential, follows a Medicaid identifier created in a man's name without his knowledge. A record an institution writes about you, in your absence, carries the same authority as one you wrote yourself, and it moves faster than anything you can file to correct it.
Two groups sit where these predicates cut deepest: people whose right to stay depends on paperwork the government holds, and people whose service the government promised to weigh and then declined to record.
As of February 2026, 49,709 noncitizens were serving in the active and reserve components, and an estimated 125,440 noncitizen veterans live in the United States. Service opens a path to naturalization under sections 328 and 329 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, and 817,991 service members have taken it since 1918. The path requires an application, and a veteran who never filed one is a noncitizen to every database that reads his record. In June 2019 GAO examined how ICE handled veterans. ICE policy required a field office director's approval, and after 2015 a headquarters review, before placing a veteran in removal proceedings, with military service weighed alongside criminal history, family ties and rehabilitation. ICE skipped the first requirement in 18 of 87 cases and the second in 26 of 37. About 250 veterans were placed in removal proceedings from fiscal 2013 through 2018, and 92 were removed. GAO also found that ICE had no policy to identify and document the veterans it encountered, so the one fact that was supposed to change the outcome was the one fact nobody had to write down.
In April 2025 a memo from acting ICE director Todd Lyons superseded the 2022 directive that treated military service as a mitigating factor. DHS data for January 20, 2025 through January 26, 2026 show 125 veterans arrested, 73 detained and 34 issued notices to appear. George Retes, an Army veteran and a U.S. citizen, was detained in a raid in Camarillo, California on July 10, 2025 and held three days, and he was never charged and never brought before a judge. Sae Joon Park, shot in the 1989 invasion of Panama and awarded the Purple Heart, left for South Korea in June 2025 under an ICE ultimatum after nearly 50 years in the country. José Barco, an Army veteran with two Iraq tours and a Purple Heart, was detained in January 2025, and an April 2025 attempt to deport him to Venezuela failed when officials rejected his birth certificate as possibly fraudulent. He was deported to Mexico on November 14, 2025. The Immigrant Military Members and Veterans Initiative brought 138 deported veterans home after 2021, and in June 2026 Senator Tammy Duckworth wrote to DHS and the VA demanding it be restored to full capacity.
On January 21, 2025 DHS extended expedited removal to the statute's limit, nationwide, for anyone who was never admitted or paroled and cannot show two years of continuous presence (90 Fed. Reg. 8139). In that process the predicate is the officer's own conclusion about how long you have been here, and the removal order follows without a judge. A district judge stayed the expansion on August 29, 2025, and in November the D.C. Circuit declined to lift that stay, finding DHS unlikely to show its procedures give people an adequate opportunity to prove two years' presence. On June 23, 2026 a merits panel vacated the stay, the expansion has been in effect since July 17, 2026, and a petition for rehearing en banc is pending. In DHS v. Thuraissigiam (2020) the Supreme Court held that the limits on court review in expedited removal are constitutional.
On July 8, 2025 DHS reclassified everyone who entered without inspection as an applicant for admission held without bond, and on September 5, 2025 the Board of Immigration Appeals held in Matter of Yajure Hurtado that immigration judges lack authority to grant them bond. Nine federal circuits have since rejected that reading and two have accepted it, and three petitions asking the Supreme Court to settle the split went to the justices' September 28, 2026 conference. The Laken Riley Act, signed January 29, 2025, made detention mandatory for a noncitizen who lacks lawful admission or valid documents and is charged with, arrested for, or admits theft, burglary, larceny or shoplifting, and it took custody review away from immigration judges. An arrest is the predicate in its purest form: one officer's claim, untested by any court, now sufficient on its own to hold a person for the life of a case.
On March 14, 2025 the President invoked the Alien Enemies Act against alleged members of Tren de Aragua. The guide agents used to validate membership scored tattoos at 4 points, dress at 4, and hand signs, social media symbols, group photos and living with alleged members at 2 each, and it set validation at 8. A Border Patrol document added that "Chicago Bulls attire, clocks, and rose tattoos are typically related to the Venezuelan culture." On March 15, 238 Venezuelans were flown to CECOT, the mega-prison in El Salvador, and held about four months until a prisoner exchange on July 18. Of the 226 with ICE records, at least 48.8 percent had no criminal history in the United States. On December 22, 2025 Chief Judge James Boasberg held that 137 of them had been denied due process.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia held a 2019 order from an immigration judge barring his removal to El Salvador. He was sent to CECOT on March 15, 2025 anyway, and the government called it an administrative error. The Supreme Court required the government to facilitate his return, he came back in June 2025 to face a smuggling indictment, and in December 2025 Judge Paula Xinis ordered him released from ICE custody, writing, "No such order of removal exists." On May 22, 2026 a federal judge in Nashville dismissed the indictment as vindictive. Where removal to a person's own country is barred, the government has also sent people to countries they never lived in: eight men to South Sudan and five to Eswatini in July 2025, from Cuba, Laos, Myanmar, Sudan, Vietnam, Jamaica, Yemen and Mexico. On September 18, 2026 the First Circuit required effective notice of the destination and a meaningful chance to challenge it, and the Solicitor General has asked the Supreme Court, for the third time, to set that aside.
Once the predicate has done its work, the length of custody depends on which statute the government says holds you, and the courts have spent 25 years narrowing the clock.
Zadvydas v. Davis (2001) read a six-month presumption into detention after a final removal order. Jennings v. Rodriguez (2018) held that the detention statutes give no right to periodic bond hearings, and Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez (2022) held that the post-order statute requires no bond hearing at six months either. Add Yajure Hurtado and the Laken Riley Act, and a person can sit in a detention bed on an untested claim with no hearing scheduled and no date by which one must occur. The statute grants the right to a lawyer in removal proceedings only "at no expense to the Government" (8 U.S.C. § 1362), so the detainee finds and pays for one from inside. TRAC counted 70,766 people in ICE detention on January 25, 2026, the most since it began tracking in 2019, and 65,765 on July 11, 2026, 70.6 percent of them with no criminal conviction. The Marshall Project counts more than 610,000 people detained since the inauguration.
Every item in the second column falls to the person least equipped to perform it, from inside the building, against an institution that controls the paper. Peter Brown's citizenship was already in ICE's file, and the retraction in the District case below was already in the government's, and in both the correction sat in a record nobody was assigned to read. The one person with the strongest interest in testing the predicate is the one person the structure has locked away from the records that would test it.
The failure mode is ordinary: a person with a reason to want someone else out of the way, and a system that will accept their word without asking who they are.
In April 2024 a woman was detained at a District psychiatric hospital on her husband's claim that she was suicidal. The claim was false, and a judge vacated the hold after four days. In her own chart, over the days she was held, the treating psychiatrist recorded her as calm, cooperative and of good judgment. That case surfaced in a newspaper, and no regulator has reported it.
In July 2022 a man was taken into emergency custody on a telephone call from a private party who was, at that moment, the adverse party in pending civil litigation against him. Nine days later the same caller reported to the same crisis team that he had committed a kidnapping, and asked that they respond and arrest him. Five weeks after that, the person named as the victim of the kidnapping told the District's own behavioral health agency it had not happened. The retraction is in the government's file, dated, from the named victim, and it changed nothing, because by the time it arrived no process was still running that a correction could enter. The detention had already produced its own justification. The chart existed and the billing had started, and a correction to the predicate has nowhere to go once the predicate has been metabolized.
In the District roughly sixty percent of involuntary commitments go to a single facility, and the facility that decides whether a patient still needs to be held is the facility that bills for each additional day and writes the note that justifies the next one. Utilization review is internal, and at least one national operator has been described as appealing every payer denial without regard to medical necessity. The facility inherits a premise nobody tested and has every reason to leave it alone, because questioning it costs money and accepting it makes money. Immigration detention runs on the same arithmetic, with the bed paid by the day and the claim that filled it never reopened.
A hospital acting in complete good faith on a false predicate generates exactly the same bill as one acting in bad faith.
The remedy is unglamorous and cheap, and it leaves every one of these systems as able to answer a real emergency as it is today.
Put the source of the predicate on the instrument, with a line for any interest that source has in the outcome: the caller's relationship to the subject, the database and the confidence of the match, the name of the officer who scored the checklist. A crisis team that writes down "landlord, eviction pending" has still responded, and it has left the next reader something to weigh. The fact costs nothing at the moment it happens and is impossible to reconstruct later.
Before custody, run the claim against a record the government already holds, the kind of comparison a pharmacy counter runs automatically for a $14 antibiotic. Peter Brown's citizenship was in ICE's file. In the District case, the government's own system recorded a fact contradicting the filing five separate times in the preceding six weeks, in a mandatory field. For a veteran the record is a DD-214, and GAO told ICE in 2019 to start writing down the veterans it meets.
When a caller recants, a named victim denies the event, or a detainee produces a birth certificate, the custody decision should reopen automatically. Today a correction enters a file and sits there, and a correction with no destination works as a receipt.
Every form of civil detention should carry a date by which a neutral decision-maker must look at the predicate, whichever statute the government invokes. The courts have left that question to Congress, and the one detention statute Congress passed in 2025 moved the clock in the other direction.
No agency publishes who initiates involuntary commitments, the government keeps no count of the citizens immigration agents hold, and until GAO forced the issue ICE kept no complete record of which detainees were veterans. Until someone counts, every discussion of this is anecdote against anecdote, which suits everybody except the people it happens to.
None of this requires believing that anyone in the sequence acted in bad faith, and the argument is stronger without it. The crisis team answered a call, the officer acted on a match, the jail honored a detainer, the hospital admitted the person the District delivered, and the court reviewed what was in front of it. Each system permits too much in the same place, at the very beginning, when it lets a claim about who you are stand in for proof of it, and everything after that is arithmetic.