A new National Register of Citizens in 2019 saw the listing of 1.9 million people as illegal migrants in India’s northeast state of Assam before the Citizenship (Amendment) Act was passed in the same year. However, little has been said about the practices prevalent in Assam, where Bengali-speaking population have faced detection, detention and ‘deportability’ for at least the past two decades. While the prevalent discourse revolves around how illegal migrants acquire citizenship rights crossing the border between India and Bangladesh, this work sheds light into intimate citizenship and the process of removal in India.  By using ethnographic insights, the paper aims to explore two interrelated themes. First, it looks at how family itself becomes a quintessential unit of defining citizenship in the policies of the state and how it affects and irregularizes the citizenship status of individuals. Secondly, it shows how citizenship policies and bureaucratic interventions produce mixed families having both Indians and alleged Bangladeshis at their home, leading to an intense crisis in their life. Mixed-status families then live in continuous vulnerability and anxiety with the constant fear of family members being separated, detained and deported.