On April 10, two U.S. citizens — both legal professionals working with immigrant communities in San Diego — received chilling emails from the Department of Homeland Security. The message was blunt and unmistakable: “It’s time for you to leave the United States.” That’s not a typo. These are American citizens, born and raised in this country. And yet they were told to get out.
This isn’t just a bureaucratic error. This is an outrage.
Attorney Adam Peña, born in El Paso, Texas, and immigration court legal representative Aldo Martínez Gómez, born in National City, were among several U.S. citizens nationwide who were mistakenly — or perhaps carelessly — sent parole termination notices meant for non-citizens. The emails threatened swift federal enforcement if the recipients did not leave the country. They were not personalized. They offered no recourse. And they instilled fear.
It’s deeply offensive that the federal government, under the Trump istration, would allow such a reckless breach of due process and personal security to happen, especially during a time of aggressive immigration enforcement and racialized political rhetoric. It’s not just incompetence. It’s a warning shot — intentional or not — that no one is truly safe when the government weaponizes its systems against its own people.
Let’s be absolutely clear: U.S. citizens have the unalienable right to remain in their country. The moment that right is threatened — even “accidentally” — we must all take notice.
Customs and Border Protection has since acknowledged that notices “may have been sent to unintended recipients.” But this kind of “error” is not minor when the stakes are this high. These are people who fight daily for justice in a system already stacked against the vulnerable. They now carry their ports and birth certificates in fear that the next “mistake” might lead to detention — or worse.
This is how civil liberties erode — not with dramatic declarations, but with quiet, unable messages in your inbox telling you that you no longer belong. This is not just about immigration anymore. It’s about citizenship, power, and the dangerous ease with which Americans — particularly Latinos and those tied to immigrant communities — can be profiled, threatened and ignored.
Peña summed it up: “I was just more frustrated by the recklessness, the carelessness, the disregard this government has for people.”
He’s right. And we should all be furious.
These stories are not anomalies. They are symptoms of an istration that has shown, time and again, that it values cruelty over competence, fear over facts and division over dignity. Every American, regardless of political leaning, should see this for what it is: an abuse of power.
It’s time we demand better — from our agencies, from our leaders and from ourselves. Silence is complicity. And this kind of government-sanctioned intimidation cannot be allowed to stand — not in a democracy, and certainly not in our name.
Granquist works as a technology professional and lives in Mission Hills.
