But ICE makes mistakes. American citizens can get caught in its maw — even white Americans. According to the Cato Institute, from 2006 to 2017 ICE wrongfully detained more than 3,500 U.S. citizens in Texas alone. Even in Rhode Island, ICE issued 462 detainers for people listed as U.S. citizens over a 10-year period, according to the A.C.L.U. From 2017 to 2019, A.C.L.U. data showed that law enforcement detained 420 citizens in Ms. Nuetzi’s state of Florida, at ICE’s request. Eighty-three of those requests have been canceled , and the people released. The rest remain in detention, waiting for ICE, according to the A.C.L.U. report. Even though ICE detainers should lapse after 48 hours, local law enforcement often continues to hold people until the agency gets around to checking them.

Ms. Nuetzi is a cheerful white woman who spent her childhood in Ocala, Fla., and has been an elementary school secretary in Gainesville for 20 years. In 2016, she voted for Donald Trump, and was ecstatic when he won. A year later, her driver’s license expired.

Ms. Nuetzi went to the motor vehicles agency to get a new one, and for the first time in her life, officials did not accept her birth certificate. She could have used a passport, but hers had long expired; the last time she traveled abroad, she was 12. With her birth certificate suddenly invalid, she couldn’t get a new passport, meaning she couldn’t get a driver’s license.

Never once was she asked for her Social Security number, which would have proved that she worked as a teenager starting in 1974. To get a passport, you need proof of citizenship and a photo ID: A Social Security number is not an accepted form of identification there. With an invalidated birth certificate and no passport, Ms. Nuetzi had no paperwork to prove she belonged in the United States.

Ms. Nuetzi was born in Montreal to two U.S. citizens who were in Canada for less than a year while working for an American company. Having two U.S. citizen parents automatically makes you a citizen under Section 301(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, but with restrictions tightening under the Trump administration, 60 years later, that automatic citizenship wasn’t enough.