Emilio René Pincheira Dennett was still asleep at about 6 a.m. one morning in September when agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, armed with guns and rifles, knocked on the door of the Santa Fe house he shares with his parents.

Even though the 33-year-old Pincheira is a naturalized American citizen, he was taken into custody and incarcerated for 13 days, nine of them in an immigration facility in Southern New Mexico. There he was held in a large, open room with 54 other prisoners.

Pincheira was one of 36 people arrested in New Mexico on Sept. 17 in a nationwide roundup of criminal aliens and "egregious immigration law violators."

The operation was part of a large-scale effort to identify and remove immigrants who have broken criminal laws, pose national security threats, are recent border crossers, or fugitives and repeat violators of immigration laws. In fiscal year 2011, the agency removed nearly 397,000 individuals, the largest number in its history.

In this case, however, the federal agents nabbed a citizen, not a criminal alien. Pincheira and his parents, immigrants from Chile, have been naturalized U.S. citizens since 1994. But when the officers came to his home, Pincheira could not produce a copy of his citizenship certificate, even though he says, "I wasn't illegal at any point in my life."

Part of the problem, he says, is that the lawyer who represented his family when they applied for citizenship never told them to file an N-600 form to change their immigration status.

"But he's a citizen even without the [certificate], and that's what we showed ICE officers ... [who] should have picked up on it," said his attorney, Amber Weeks, a lawyer with Noble & Vrapi in Santa Fe.

Pincheira was apparently on the list of targets for the nationwide roundup because of a minor criminal record. In 1999 he pleaded no contest to marijuana possession, a felony. (Other charges were dismissed.) And in 2010, he pleaded guilty to a drunken driving charge and to two charges of child abuse, because he had his son and nephew in the vehicle at the time. The DWI was deferred and the child abuse charges have been conditionally discharged.

Tim Counts, spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said that the burden of proof falls on the individual detained to produce documentation.

Asked why Pincheira was included in this enforcement operation, Leticia Zamarripa, ICE spokeswoman, acknowledged that "no system is perfect," but that "ICE is focused on smart, effective immigration enforcement that prioritizes the removal of criminal aliens."

Apparently what happened to Pincheira is not so unusual. Northwestern University political science professor Jacqueline Stevens says that in the rush to deport illegal immigrants, "a low but persistent" number of U.S. citizens is arrested.

In a paper published in July, Stevens reported that in 2010, more than 4,000 U.S. citizens were detained or deported as aliens. Since 2003, that number totals more than 20,000, a figure Stevens admits "may strike some as so high as to lack credibility."

Pincheira was just a year old when his parents and two older sisters arrived in Santa Fe in 1980 as legal permanent residents. They were fleeing the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Pincheira was a sophomore at Capital High School when his parents became citizens. As a minor child, he automatically became a U.S. citizen himself.

Under President Barack Obama, more than a million so-called criminal immigrants have been removed from the U.S. That is more than any other administration since Herbert Hoover, who approved a Mexican repatriation campaign that forced between 1 million and 2 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans back to Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s.

Christine Valenciana, an assistant professor of elementary and bilingual education at California State University, Fullerton, has written that the campaign was a Great Depression-era effort to "free up jobs for those who were considered 'real Americans' and rid the county governments of 'the problem.' "

Of the nearly 400,000 individuals removed last year, a majority — 55 percent — had been convicted of felonies or misdemeanors. While more than a thousand were convicted of homicide, most of the convictions were for drug offenses (44,653) and drunken driving (35,927). More than two-thirds of the others removed were recent border crossers or repeat immigration violators.

After his arrest, Pincheira's boss, Ismael Mena — owner of Mena's Coach Works in Santa Fe — and his friend, Anthony Baca, located him in the Otero County Detention Center in Alamogordo and found a lawyer to represent him.

The friends organized a car wash and Frito pie sale to raise money for legal defense. When the day came, Pincheira was able to be there. One customer of Mena's auto body repair shop donated $1,000.

Mena's family also fled Chile around the same time as the Pincheiras. So for Mena, Pincheira's arrest brought back memories of when Pinochet's officers arrested his own father, a union leader at the University of Chile. "For 33 days he was taken and he was tortured," said Mena, 45.

Pincheira's arrest, he added, made him realize that "this safe country could pretty much pluck you out, plug you away, quicker than you think."

Pincheira's mother, Elena Dennett, 61, said the memory of armed officers taking her son away still causes her and her husband, René Pincheira, to wake up in the middle of the night.

Dennett said she opened the door that September morning to police and ICE officers because "We have nothing to hide."

The family has owned several businesses in Santa Fe and currently operates Espresso de Arte on east San Francisco Street.

For Pincheira, the experience was a nightmare. Government agents kept his hands and ankles chained while transporting him to Texas (where the detention facility was full) and then back to New Mexico.

During the nine days at the Otero County Detention Center, Pincheira was known as C-7. He lived with 54 cellmates originally from places as diverse as European countries, Jamaica, Iraq, the Cayman Islands, Mexico and Palestine, all of whom had been picked up in various cities across the U.S.

They showered in open stalls. Their knees touched when they used the toilets. During the one hour of recreation time allowed in the morning, Pincheira read law books at the library, seeking answers to his dilemma. He wanted to remain in the U.S. He had only visited Chile once since his family emigrated.

"At first I was convinced it was all a mistake ... but on days six, seven, eight, after hearing the stories ... I started thinking, 'You're going to go back to Chile,' " he said. "I thought that I wasn't going to see my son for a long time. That was the hardest part."

Telephone conversations with his friends and family kept him going. Some days he spent hours on the phone with Mena, giving him directions on how to access files and payroll accounts on the company's computers.

His life is still not back to normal. ICE officers kept his driver's license, among other documents, so he's getting around town on a bike or by asking others for rides. He's working to pay off the personal loans he got to pay attorney's fees and is trying to go on with his life.

Being back home and at work sometimes is still a bit "surreal," he said. For 13 days he was in survival mode. That does something to the soul, to the brain, he said.

"You can't be weak. I knew I needed to fight and fight. I needed to be strong."

Contact Sandra Baltazar Martínez at 986-3062 or smartinez@sfnewmexican.com.