U.S. Citizen Wrongly Detained by ICE for 25 Days Despite Presenting Birth Certificate Receives U.S. Passport

On June 2, 2026, Dulce Consuelo Diaz Morales — a 22-year-old U.S. citizen from Maryland — was issued a U.S. passport, resolving a high-profile wrongful detention case that had gone viral on TikTok and drawn national coverage. ICE arrested Diaz Morales on December 14, 2025, and held her for 25 days despite her presenting a Maryland birth certificate and other documentation establishing U.S. citizenship. DHS had previously asserted she 'is not a U.S. citizen.' The State Department's issuance of a U.S. passport — which requires its own identity and citizenship verification process — effectively confirmed her citizenship and constituted a formal acknowledgment that ICE had wrongfully detained an American. Advocates cited the case as a concrete illustration of the risks inherent in record-pace ICE enforcement operations — exceeding 1,000 arrests per day — with reduced procedural review and the closure of OIDO (the only independent detention oversight body, shuttered May 5, 2026). The Diaz Morales case was among the most high-profile of several documented instances of ICE detaining U.S. citizens during the Trump second-term enforcement surge; the ACLU and DHS OIG have historically tracked multiple such cases annually, with advocates arguing their frequency increases proportionally with enforcement volume.