Dulce Consuelo Diaz Morales, 22, spoke about her case to reporters Friday during a news conference conducted on Zoom. (The Washington Post)
A Maryland woman arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents last month and held for 25 days despite providing a birth certificate, immunization records and what her lawyers describe as overwhelming evidence that she is a U.S. citizen said the experience was shocking and she hopes the case against her will soon end.
During a Zoom news conference with her lawyers Friday, Dulce Consuelo Diaz Morales, 22, sat in a black office chair wearing a light gray zip-up jacket and spoke softly in Spanish. Asked what message she would want known about her case, she said that even though she has Hispanic heritage, she was born in the United States and is a U.S. citizen who "has the same rights as everyone else."
Though ICE released Diaz Morales last week, it has not terminated its case against her. On Tuesday, at her first check-in with ICE, she waited for eight hours and was required to wear an ankle monitor before being allowed to leave.
Diaz Morales's lawyers, Victoria Slatton and Zachary Perez, said they have provided the Department of Homeland Security with extensive proof of their client's citizenship but the government has been unresponsive and unhelpful.
Their client's case raises concerns about precedent, Slatton said at the news conference.
"By forcing Dulce and her legal team to produce extraordinary volumes of evidence to secure her release, the government effectively shifted the burden onto a U.S. citizen to prove her citizenship while she was incarcerated," Slatton said. "That inversion is dangerous. Citizenship and liberty should not depend on a person's ability to gather paperwork from behind detention walls or retain legal counsel under duress. If normalized, this approach puts countless citizens at risk of detention first and verification later."
DHS did not respond to questions sent by The Washington Post asking why ICE was proceeding with its case against Diaz Morales and if the agency had any evidence that she was not a U.S. citizen.
Diaz Morales, who has a 5-year-old son, was arrested in Baltimore on Dec. 14 while leaving a Taco Bell with her younger sister. She said Friday that she told the officers who detained her that she was born in the U.S. and gave them the date and place of her birth. She said she gave them her father's phone number and he confirmed details about her birth date and the name of the Maryland hospital where she was born.
But, she said, the officers did not believe the information was true. Instead of being released, Diaz Morales began her almost four-week stay in federal custody and was told she could be deported.
Four days after her arrest, a Maryland District Court judge barred the government from deporting Diaz Morales while the court considered a petition from her lawyers challenging the detention. ICE held Diaz Morales at five facilities in four states before releasing her on Jan. 7 after her lawyers filed additional documents supporting their client's citizenship claim with the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). During her detention, she was only allowed to speak with her lawyers twice, Slatton said.
DHS, using a different last name for Diaz Morales, said after her arrest that she was in the U.S. illegally.
"Dulce Consuelo Madrigal Diaz is NOT a U.S. citizen -- she is an illegal alien from Mexico," DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement emailed to The Post in December. "She did NOT provide a valid U.S. birth certificate or any evidence in support of her claim that she is a U.S. citizen. On Dec. 14, ICE arrested this illegal alien in Baltimore. On Oct. 20, 2023, when CBP encountered her near Lukeville, Arizona, Madrigal-Diaz claimed she was a citizen of Mexico and was born on Oct. 18, 2003."
The department has provided no other statements or explanations related to Diaz Morales's case.
On Friday, her lawyers said they renewed their request for the government to terminate its case.
"We have submitted so much evidence that we are so far beyond the burden of what could be reasonably expected for anyone to obtain and what anyone has been asked to obtain in the past," Slatton said.
According to her lawyers, Diaz Morales moved from the U.S. to Mexico with her family in 2009 or 2010 and returned in 2023 to escape cartel violence. They said she was stopped by immigration officers when she reentered the U.S. and was mistakenly processed as a noncitizen because she didn't have access to documentation or a lawyer at the time. Diaz Morales, then 19, said she was frightened by the encounter. In January 2025, she received a removal order from EOIR.
The removal order is not valid, Slatton said, because Diaz Morales is a U.S. citizen and not under EOIR jurisdiction.
ICE says that it deported 622,000 people in 2025 and that another 2 million people in the country illegally left the country voluntarily. Official information about how many U.S. citizens are detained or deported by ICE is difficult to come by. In October, ProPublica reported that it had identified more than 170 U.S. citizens who had been held by immigration agents during raids or at protests in 2025.
"The protocols that ICE is supposed to follow is that if there's any probative evidence of US citizenship, then the person's supposed to be immediately released," said Jacqueline Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University who founded the school's Deportation Research Clinic. "ICE can continue to try to prove that a person obtained the birth certificate fraudulently or is not really a U.S. citizen and try to deport the person, but they don't have the legal authority to hold them in custody."
Last week, Diaz Morales's lawyers filed additional documents with EOIR to support their client's citizenship claim, including hospital records from her birth that included her footprints and her mother's fingerprints. They also provided clearer versions of her Maryland birth certificate and immunization records, which they had previously provided to the court and DHS.
That filing also included an extensive analysis of all of Diaz Morales’s birth and immunization records by C. Nicholas Cuneo, an assistant professor of pediatrics and medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Cuneo concluded in his assessment that the documents “substantially support her claim of being a U.S. citizen born in Maryland.”