For nearly five hours on Jan. 21, 2013, in a windowless room at the United States Embassy in Sana, Yemen, an American citizen and Brooklyn grocery store owner held his crying infant daughter while insisting he was exactly who he said he was.

Embassy officials said otherwise and threatened him with imprisonment, according to legal documents. Desperate to leave, he signed a statement admitting that he had the name the officials claimed he did, without understanding the consequences, he said.

The passport of the man, who spoke on the condition that only his middle name, Mohammed, be used because of the shame he felt at being targeted by the United States government, was deemed fraudulent and taken away. He was stuck in Yemen for 13 months until he was granted a temporary passport valid only to return to the United States. But without his official passport, he cannot return to where he left his daughter. He is not alone.

At least 20 other Yemeni-Americans from New York to California have similar stories of having their passports revoked in Sana. Last month, Mosed Shaye Omar, 64, a naturalized American citizen since 1978 who lives in San Francisco, sued the State Department and Secretary John Kerry, claiming he was coerced into acknowledging that he had a name different from what was on his passport.