The day in 2016 when I became a U.S. citizen was one of the happiest of my life.

I bought a new dress for the occasion. My best friends and my in-laws snapped pictures as I received my certificate of naturalization. My husband kissed me on the cheek next to a mural of the Statue of Liberty — the moment frozen in a photograph that hangs by the front door of our home.

Dallas Morning News writer Julieta Chiquillo is one of the people whose name showed up on a list of people who the Texas Secretary of State says may not have been eligible to vote. Problem is, Juli has been eligible to vote since she became a naturalized U.S. citizen. She is photographed in the studio, Thursday, January 31, 2019. (Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News)

The next day, I registered to vote. After a decade of paying taxes, being repeatedly scrutinized and playing by the rules, there was no sweeter triumph than to finally call

an American.

But I felt like an outsider again this week when I found out that my name is on a list of nearly 100,000 potential noncitizen voters compiled by the state of Texas.

I am not a lawbreaker. I did not vote before I became a citizen.

We already know, with the help of the reporting of this newspaper and other media outlets, that thousands of names don’t belong on that list. But here I am today, a statistic being used to vilify immigrants. All because of an innocent discrepancy.

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My dread crept in a week ago, after I read that Texas Secretary of State David Whitley told counties that his office had flagged 95,000 people because their names on voter rolls matched records in a driver's license database that identified them as noncitizens at the time they got their cards. He said he had forwarded the list to the Texas attorney general’s office, which has the authority to prosecute election crimes.

Eligible Texas voters “should not have their voices muted by those who abuse the system,” Whitley said in a press release.

I scrolled and I scrolled through the state advisory and news accounts on my phone, wanting to know more. Then I pulled my driver's license out of my wallet to confirm what I already knew: I had last renewed it before my naturalization ceremony. Was I on that list?

The original secretary of state advisory cautioned that its data matches were WEAK — in capital letters. And we’ve been down this road before in Florida, which in 2012 produced a list of 180,000 potentially ineligible voters, according to news accounts. And in the end, only 85 names — in a state of more than 10 million registered voters — were removed from voter rolls for being noncitizens.

Still, after the Texas announcement, politicians hinted at widespread wrongdoing.

“VOTER FRAUD ALERT,” Attorney General Ken Paxton trumpeted on Twitter.

Gov. Greg Abbott retweeted him and added: “Thanks to Attorney General Paxton and the secretary of state for uncovering and investigating this illegal vote registration.”

And President Donald Trump entirely misinterpreted the secretary of state’s statistics: “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote,” he tweeted Sunday, warning without proof about “rampant” voter fraud.

The secretary of state’s office didn’t correct the president publicly.

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I don’t begrudge honest efforts to maintain voter rolls to ensure elections are fair. The integrity of elections is vital to democracy.

But all week, I’ve tried to get answers from state officials about how Texans can find out if they’re on the list of potential illegitimate voters.

A spokesman for Whitley didn’t reply. And a spokeswoman for Paxton said that his office hadn’t issued any guidance to counties on how they should handle those requests for information. She pointed me to the Public Information Act handbook but didn’t respond when I asked her what part of it was relevant to what I wanted to know.

If I can’t get a response as a reporter for a major newspaper, I shudder to think what it must be like to try, as a member of the public without a press badge, to get answers.

I told my county elections administrator that I suspected I was on the list. He looked up my name, and there I was.

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The state’s latest strategy to identify fraudulent voters seems to fail to account for people like me: immigrants who got their driver's licenses before they became citizens and eligible voters.

To get a driver's license in Texas, noncitizens must show proof they’re in the country legally.

I’ve visited driver's license offices many times since I got here 13 years ago. Because I was on a student visa first, and later a work visa, I had to renew my license in person every year. That’s the rule for a “temporary visitor,” like I was.

In 2014, I showed the Department of Public Safety my green card — a document that indicated I was a legal permanent resident.

The expiration date on my license was set for 2020, so I haven’t gone back to renew it — nor am I required to do so until then.

Attorneys say Texas law also doesn’t require state officials or county registrars to verify a person’s U.S. citizenship when he or she claims it on a voter registration form. But I didn’t know that when I went to my county elections office in 2016 to register. I brought my certificate of naturalization, expecting someone to ask for it. I don’t remember if anyone did.

I’ll leave others to debate whether our state should require proof of citizenship at the time of registration. But I am still baffled that the secretary of state would turn to DPS for information on Texans’ citizenship status when DPS has never been an up-to-date repository of that data.

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It’s unclear exactly how many names on the state’s list shouldn’t be there. A few days after the secretary of state’s office made a big splash, state officials began to quietly call county officials to warn them that at least 20,000 names mistakenly made their list. The people being scrubbed off had registered to vote during the driver's license process and had proved to DPS they were citizens.

On Friday, the office sent revised instructions that put the burden on the counties to sort through the mess.

The nuances of immigration have apparently eluded the Republican Attorneys General Association. Earlier this week, it sent out a press release that erroneously said Paxton “recently announced thousands of registered illegal immigrants on voter rolls, many of which voted.”

I am not an illegal immigrant, or a fraudulent voter, or a political prop.

I am a Salvadoran-born U.S. citizen expecting her first child. I am a proud immigrant who makes a living writing in her second language. I am a devout Texan whose press badge hangs from a Whataburger lanyard — an accessory the governor seemed to like in 2017 when I interviewed him on the side of a road after he comforted families affected by tornadoes in East Texas.

Maybe one day we’ll know just how many Texans were unjustifiably swept up by this list. This week, though, Abbott defended it, saying it was a work in progress.

“I think it’s important to let the data speak for itself,” he said.

If only the data would tell the truth about me.