In an apparent mistake, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told a Newton immigration lawyer, a U.S. citizen, she had one week to self-deport last Thursday.
“At first I thought it was for a client, but I looked really closely and the only name on the email was mine,” the lawyer, Nicole Micheroni, told NBC News Monday. “So it said my parole status had been terminated and I should leave the country within seven days.”
Micheroni said she quickly recognized the message was an accident.
“I never took DHS’s scary-sounding notice that I had 7 days to leave the country too seriously, because it was obviously some kind of mistake,” Micheroni wrote on Bluesky Sunday.
Micheroni—an immigration lawyer at Cameron Micheroni & Silvia in Boston—said it’s likely that the message was meant for one of her clients. Even so, she said the nature of this message was concerning.
“I have gotten some serious inquiries from my parents or other family members or friends being like, ‘what do I do if you stop answering me or if you disappear? Like, who do you want me to call?’” Micheroni told WIRED.
These types of messages would be even more worrying to someone less familiar with U.S. immigration law, Micheroni told WIRED.
“A lot of people that are here on parole status don’t know the nuances of immigration law, so they get this email and they don’t know if it applies to them,” Micheroni said. “And most of them assume that it does because everything is really scary for people right now.”
The DHS has confirmed that it is terminating parole for individuals without legal status, including many who entered the country through the CBP One app, a Biden-administration program that streamlined asylum entry to the United States for immigrants from certain countries. The Trump administration shut the app down in January.
The email Micheroni received resembled messages sent to migrants who had used CBP One to enter the United States. A representative for the DHS confirmed to WIRED that these messages were sent to whatever email was associated with the intended immigrant, which could have included the individual’s lawyer.
“CBP used the known email addresses of the alien to send notifications,” an unnamed DHS spokesperson said to WIRED. “If a non-personal email—such as an American citizen contact—was provided by the alien, notices may have been sent to unintended recipients. CBP is monitoring communications and will address any issues on a case-by-case basis.”
The message itself was misleading, Micheroni said, partly because it’s uncommon for notices like this to be sent via email.“The language in the email is very threatening,” Micheroni said to NBC News. “And it looks kind of like a sketchy spam email. It doesn’t look like an official government notice, but it is.”
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