Davino Watson was held in a New York detention center awaiting deportation orders for over three years.

What makes his detention extraordinary and outrageous is Watson is an American citizen.

Watson became a naturalized citizen in 2002, and is suing the U.S. government and a handful of immigration officers in Brooklyn federal court, claiming he was unlawfully detained in the Buffalo Detention Center. In his lawsuit, he said officials ignored his repeated claims about his immigration status, and an investigation into his background would have affirmed his claim.

Watson pleaded guilty in 2007 to selling cocaine and served an eight-month sentence, but a detainer request triggered his transfer from a New York correctional facility to the immigration detention center.

"We are all at risk if this can happen," Mark Flessner, one of Watson's attorneys, told Reuters. "If there isn't a procedure that allows citizens to be immediately released without any kind of due process, it just points to the broken system."

This is not the only case where this has happened. Detainers were mistakenly placed on 834 U.S. citizens and 28,489 permanent residents between 2008 and 2012, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse run by Syracuse University. Most of the detentions lasted a few days to several months; Watson served the longest time.

"About half the lawsuits brought by citizens against the government have been settled and the rest are pending," Mark Fleming from the National Immigrant Justice Center, and co-counsel representing Watson, told Reuters.

The detainers are activated under the Secure Communities program, under which the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) can issue a request to a local police department to investigate an arrested person's residential status, holding them up to 48 hours without a warrant. The program has proved increasingly unpopular with cities and local police departments who could be accused of unlawful detention by civil rights groups and face the prospect of lengthy and expensive legal proceedings. In the past two years, police departments around the country have publicly denounced the program and say they will only participate if issued a warrant from the court. ICE maintains the program all along was voluntary.

A spokesman for ICE declined to comment on the Watson case, but told Reuters "detainers are critical for the government to be able to identify, and deport, criminal aliens being held in federal and local custody."