Federal immigration agents deported an Austin man who says he is a U.S. citizen after detaining him during a traffic stop near Fredericksburg earlier this month.
Brian Jose Morales Garcia, 25, said he was born in Denver but grew up in Mexico and lived there until last year, when he legally crossed into the U.S. Despite having documents at home that he said show he is a U.S. citizen, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported him four days after his arrest.
The American-Statesman reviewed copies of Garcia's Colorado birth certificate, hospital records and a baptismal record from a few months after his birth, which he and his attorney provided to the newspaper. The Statesman independently corroborated the birth certificate and baptismal record.
"There just is no dispute about whether he is a U.S. citizen," his lawyer, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, said. "What happened here was not that they reviewed those documents and decided that they didn't care. What happened here was that they immediately assumed that he was lying."
Morales Garcia was being driven to a worksite on April 3 when his boss' truck was stopped by Texas state troopers for what the officer said was a window tint violation. The officer contacted ICE, which asked the Gillespie County Sheriff's Office to hold Morales Garcia in jail. Morales Garcia, whom authorities identified as a Mexican citizen, was eventually picked up by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and deported four days later.
During those four days, friends of Morales Garcia said they tried to provide authorities with a copy of his birth certificate.
In a statement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that it had determined Morales Garcia's lack of authorization to be in the country "through record checks" and pointed to an admission by Morales Garcia that he had entered the country illegally, a statement that Morales Garcia said he made after being intimidated.
"They didn't believe me; they were intimidating me so that I'd sign," Morales Garcia said. "I figured that I'd come back with my birth certificate."
Border Patrol did not provide the Statesman with proof of its claims or evidence to dispute Morales Garcia's account. In its statement, the agency wrote: "CBP did NOT arrest a U.S. citizen."
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Morales Garcia's arrest comes after reporting has shown that U.S. citizens are sometimes detained amid the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. His case also appears to raise questions about federal agents' willingness to detain - and even deport - individuals without allowing for due process, University of Texas immigration law professor Elissa Steglich told the Statesman.
On its website, ICE states that everyone the agency arrests receives due process.
Morales Garcia's deportation was first reported by Univision.
A birth
Morales Garcia's mother, Maria del Socorro Garcia, said she gave birth to him in Denver in 2001. She had met Morales Garcia's father the year prior, shortly after immigrating from Mexico. At the time, she said, she was working as a custodian and he was working as a cook.
Denver Vital Records, the agency that maintains birth certificates for the city and county of Denver, told the Statesman that "there's a record available" for someone with Morales Garcia's name and date of birth - a detail that had not been previously reported. A staff member declined to confirm further details about the document, citing Colorado law.
Staff at the Denver Archdiocese confirmed that they had a record matching the information in the baptismal certificate provided to the Statesman.
Shortly after the birth of a second son, Garcia decided to move with her sons to Mexico due to her father's ill health. Her husband eventually joined them, and the couple decided to raise their sons in the city of Aguascalientes.
Garcia registered Morales Garcia's birth in Mexico in 2004, according to a document the family provided to the Statesman. That birth certificate shows a different date of birth and spelling of Brian's first name than the American document.
Garcia said the registrar changed the spelling of Brian to a version that was more common in Mexico and also changed his date of birth for reasons she could not explain.
Steglich, the UT law professor, said it is not unusual for foreign IDs to have different names or spellings than their American counterparts, in part due to "differences in literacy, differences in spelling," and that she has seen late-filed Mexican birth certificates with discrepancies in birth dates. Steglich said she is uncertain how that would affect Morales Garcia's case.
By January 2025, Morales Garcia was a husband and an expectant father. He said he crossed from Mexico into the U.S. legally by showing his birth certificate, intending to live with his younger brother in Denver and find work there. He eventually settled in Austin, where a family friend, Jesus Parga, offered him work with his HVAC company.
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‘They laughed'
Early in the afternoon of April 3, Parga was driving Morales Garcia and another employee to a worksite when a state trooper pulled over his truck just east of Fredericksburg on Texas 290.
When the officer approached and asked him for identification, Parga said he instinctively reached for his Mexican passport because it was in his center console.
Upon seeing this, "he told me to get down from the truck; he had me sit down on the dirt," said Parga, a U.S. citizen. "Then they started asking if the men with me had status."
The Texas Department of Public Safety told the Statesman its officer stopped the truck because of a window tint violation. But Parga said he believes the stop was the result of racial profiling, based on the men's appearance as well as the type of truck they were driving: a 2003 Chevy Silverado with a bed full of ducts and other equipment. Parga said he first saw the patrol car traveling in the opposite direction, only to notice it following them minutes later. He said he did not receive a ticket or citation.
DPS did not respond to Statesman questions about Parga's claim. State law gives law enforcement wide discretion over traffic stops, authority that some immigration attorneys say allows DPS - which has an agreement to assist ICE - to perform immigration-related stops.
As the stop continued, Gillespie County sheriff's deputies arrived, in part to translate. They eventually took the three men to the county jail, where they booked Parga on an outstanding warrant and held Morales Garcia and the other man at the request of ICE, which identified them as being in the country illegally.
The Gillespie County Sheriff's Office, which did not respond to Statesman requests for comment, has a 287g agreement that allows it to detain individuals at ICE's request.
Parga said he repeatedly told jail staff that he had proof of Morales Garcia's legal status but was ignored. His wife, Bianey de la Rosa, said she rushed from Austin to the Gillespie County jail with a copy of Morales Garcia's passport and a photocopy of his Social Security card - the two forms of ID Morales Garcia had left behind at home. But when she arrived about two hours later, he was no longer there.
Morales Garcia and the other man had been picked up by Border Patrol. In the following days, Parda and de la Rosa said they tried calling Border Patrol several times to offer the birth certificate but were unsuccessful.
In detention, Morales Garcia said immigration agents ridiculed his assertion that he was a U.S. citizen.
"They laughed, they had a mocking tone and they were mad," Morales Garcia said. He said officials pressured him into saying he crossed illegally, and he eventually agreed because it "was what they wanted to hear."
Afraid of prolonged detention, missing his family and believing he could later return to the U.S., Morales Garcia agreed to deportation after four days.
Steglich said she commonly encounters people who agree to deportation because of the pressure of detention.
"All the empirical studies show that the coercive nature of detention results in people giving up valid claims for relief," Steglich said. "That is the power of detention, and that is why this administration is using detention so aggressively."
Detention of citizens
National reporting shows that federal agents have at times detained U.S. citizens during the Trump administration's immigration crackdown.
An October ProPublica report found more than 170 cases in which U.S. citizens were detained during immigration raids and protests during the first nine months of President Donald Trump's second term.
Of more than 50 Americans detained after federal agents questioned their status, almost all of whom were Latino, many reported being held for over a day without being able to contact relatives or lawyers, and in some cases, their families could not locate them, according to ProPublica.
Immigration agents have legal authority to detain U.S. citizens in limited circumstances, including if they suspect a person is in the country illegally or is interfering with or assaulting an officer.
In the early 20th century, during mass deportation campaigns of Mexicans in the United States, U.S. citizens - often American-born children of immigrants - were subjected to unconstitutional detentions and deportations. Such cases have occurred periodically since, including during the Obama and first Trump administrations.
However, the Statesman did not find a previous confirmed case of a U.S. citizen being deported since the start of Trump's current administration.
Lincoln-Goldfinch said that her client's detention represents an obvious violation of constitutional rights and negligence by federal agents. She declined to say whether her client would seek legal action against any law enforcement agency.
Morales Garcia said he plans to return to the United States, where he hopes to continue working.
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