US citizens are carrying passports amid ICE fears

Many Americans are not leaving the house without their passports, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to conduct raids across American cities. Reports of citizens being detained have created a culture of fear, leading them to carry identifying documents wherever they go.

What citizens are being detained?

At least 170 American citizens have been detained by ICE during its raids, according to a ProPublica investigation. This has led some people to carry their passports because of the “threat of mistakenly being taken into ICE detention and potentially disappearing into labyrinthine immigration custody,” said NPR’s KQED-FM. While there is no legal requirement to carry a passport, citizens “may choose to make practical decisions around carrying documentation anyway.”

Reports indicate that the majority of people choosing to do this are people of color, including many Latino U.S. citizens. Walter Cruz Perez, who lives in a New Orleans suburb, has been a U.S. citizen since 2022 and “used to never think twice about only carrying his driver’s license,” said The Guardian. But since the ICE raids in New Orleans ramped up, he’s in the “habit of putting his passport in his cell phone case.” Those in his community “see on the news that people don’t have the chance to identify themselves,” so “you do what you have to do to avoid problems,” he said.

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Other people of color are reportedly choosing to carry documentation too. Amid ICE raids targeting Minnesota’s large Somali American population, many of these people “feel they have little choice but to carry their passports to prove they are citizens,” said CBS News. These Somali Americans are “being stopped by ICE and asked to prove citizenship,” Jamal Osman, a Minneapolis City Council member, said to CBS News, saying it “feels like [the] 1930s and ’40s in Germany.”

What can ICE ask for?

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security “vehemently denies that American citizens have been detained, even inadvertently, during its immigrant sweeps,” said Arizona State University’s Cronkite News, with the department calling ICE raids “highly targeted.” Despite this, experts continue to push clarity on what ICE agents can and cannot do when stopping someone.

There is “no legal requirement that U.S. citizens carry papers or have proof of their citizenship on them,” Bree Bernwanger, a senior attorney at ACLU NorCal, said to KQED-FM. There “shouldn’t be a reason to have to carry your papers because immigration agents aren’t supposed to stop people or detain them” unless they have a reasonable suspicion of a crime. But people also “have to make their own decisions about what they are comfortable with in the face of this lawless enforcement.”

Many legal experts say carrying your passport, even if you are an American citizen, is probably a good idea. It is “better to carry your passport — that’s the best,” attorney Layla Suleiman González said in a translated interview with Telemundo Chicago. But even if you are stopped by ICE, you “don’t have to answer their questions, you don’t have to say where you’re from, you don’t have to say whether you are a citizen or not. You don’t have to talk to them.”