Courthouse News Service:
HOUSTON (CN) - In a perfect immigration nightmare, a U.S. citizen claims the Department of Homeland Security arrested her in her own home, imprisoned, threatened and intimidated her and denied her food, water and medication unless she admitted she was someone else. Then it deported her to Honduras, where she was immediately imprisoned as an illegal alien, held in prison for 3 weeks and sexually assaulted by "an officer of the Honduran government." Even after she returned home, she says, U.S. immigration agents continue to harass her and threaten to arrest her again.
[…]
Williams says she showed the agents her Louisiana birth certificate, but they arrested her anyway, and accused her of Angelique Bethany Cortez Rodriguez, a citizen of Honduras. She claims the "ICE officers made no attempt whatsoever to verify the plaintiff's claim to U.S. citizenship," but took her to the prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America, on a contract with DHS.
The lawsuit goes on to claim that while in ICE custody Williams was deprived of her medication for "seizures, asthma and emotional disorders," deprived of sleep by middle of the night interrogations, deprived of food and water, and held in a cell with abnormally low temperatures in unsanitary conditions.
Plaintiff was told by Officer Rolando Jimenez and Officer Tak Wong that she would be jailed for four years and still deported if she refused to admit that she was 'Angelique Bethany Cortez Rodriguez, and a citizen of Honduras.
Afraid of spending 4 years in prison, "and in an unstable mental state due to the denial of her medications," Williams says she signed the statement. Three weeks later she was deported to Honduras.
[…]
The complaint continues: "Shortly after arrival in Honduras, plaintiff was arrested by officials of the Honduran government as an alien and held in custody in that country for approximately three weeks.
"While detained by Honduran officials, she was denied bathing facilities, slept on the floor, was fed irregularly and was sexually assaulted by an officer of the Honduran government."
Finally, 72 days after her nightmare began, "On March 31, 2009, the U.S. Embassy in Honduras issued plaintiff a U.S. passport after receiving her birth certificate from her family in the United States and investigating to their satisfaction her claim to U.S. citizenship.
A PDF of the lawsuit can be found here.
It is depressing to note that this is not an aberration. I once authored a diary on the subject of legal residents and US citizens being detained and deported due to aggressive "enforcement" by immigration authorities. I'll repost the list here:
Kebin Reyes: Detained for ten hours along with his father by ICE agents who raided his home in San Rafael, California. He and his father were held "in a locked room and [...] were only provided with bread and water."
Thomas Warziniack: Small-town drifter who was proclaimed by the ICE to be an illegal immigrant from Russia and held for weeks in a detention center in Arizona. When asked for comment on the case, an ICE spokeswoman said that "[t]he burden of proof is on the individual to show they're legally entitled to be in the United States."
Pedro Guzman: 30 year-old mentally challenged Californian who was jailed for a misdemeanor trespassing charge. He signed a document stating that he was a citizen of Mexico and had no residency rights in the U.S. despite that fact that he cannot read or write. He was subsequently transferred to ICE custody and then deported to Tijuana. He spent the next three months wandering the U.S. Mexican border and eating garbage until the border patrol finally allowed him back in.
Sharon McKnight: Deported from the U.S. to Jamaica after returning from a visit to her grandfather in Jamaica. Impaired with a developmental disorder that allows her only the "the mental capacity of a young child," she was
left overnight in a room at the airport, handcuffed and shackled to a chair. She was neither fed nor permitted to use the bathroom. In the morning she was deported to Jamaica. Upon her arrival there, baggage porters at the airport donated money to her for bus fare. She was permitted to return to the United States only after the intervention of a Member of Congress. Later describing her ordeal, Ms. McKnight said she had been treated like an animal and suffered from continuing nightmares as a result of the experience.
Deolinda Smith-Willmore: A partially blind schizophrenic who, while serving time for assaulting a neighbor, declared herself to be a Dominican. The U.S. subsequently deported her to the Dominican Republic, where she was put in a nursing home and obtained her birth certificate with the help of an attorney.
Even after the government admitted its mistake in deporting her, it refused to issue her documents that would permit her to return to the United States under her real name until the media took interest in the case.
"Mr. D.": Upon returning to the U.S. from Mexico, was accused of fabricating documents proving his citizenship due to the fact that someone else had stolen his identity. He was threatened with 20 years in jail in order to pressure him into claiming that he wasn't a U.S. citizen.
Mr. D was detained at the airport for two days in a room with other INS detainees. The room did not have a bed, so he slept on the floor. He asked to use a telephone but was refused. Mr. D was then transferred to the Mira Loma Detention Facility in the middle of the night.
Mr. D would spend 45 days in detention before finally being released.
Unnamed Ethiopian refugee: Detained for a year and a half before his citizenship was recognized. The reason for this was was the "ICE’s transposition of two numbers in its translation of his birth certificate."
René Saldivar: 38-year-old who was sent to immigration detention after serving two-month jail sentence. Was only able to contact his family after spending five months in the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona. Eventually released after several more weeks of bureacratic bumbling with documentation.
Anna: Paranoid schizophrenic who was arrested for prostitution. Taken to the Eloy Detention Center after declaring her place of birth to be "Paris."
On February 20 immigration judge Thomas Michael O'Leary, who had Anna's records, including the diagnoses of the court psychiatrists, issued an order to remove Anna from the country. The French consulate refused to issue travel documents for her, telling ICE that Anna is not a French citizen. Having been possibly stripped of her citizenship rights in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Americans With Disabilities Act, Anna will be held in detention for at least three months. If released, she is not functional enough to attend the meetings ICE requires of aliens remaining in the country with deportation orders. A warrant for her arrest will be issued, and in her next encounter with law enforcement the warrant will trigger an arrest.
Now look at this chart:
Despite all the right-wing ranting and moaning about Obama being soft on immigration enforcement, the number of deported immigrants has actually continued increasing just as it was under the Bush administration. The fact of the matter is that a lot more of these "mistakes" are probably being made right now as we speak. In a way it is the inevitable result of a system in which we grant a government agency so much authority over human beings without much care given to due process and other legal niceties. One can't help but think of Operation Wetback from the early 1950s, when many US-born citizens were deported to Mexico for having undocumented parents.
It seems very odd to me that we give the ICE such an incredible amount of authority to detain and deport people with such little oversight of both the processes involved and the conditions of confinement. Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin recently wrote an article alleging that Obama plans to make conditions in detention too humane for those being held. Go figure.
EDIT: Here are some recent articles on the subject:
http://www.sfgate.com/...
http://www.laprogressive.com/...
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) conservatively estimates that approximately 100 U.S. citizens are accidentally ensnared by the country’s broken immigration system each year. Joanne Lin, legislative counsel with the ACLU in Washington, told a Tennessee newspaper that these mistakes are indicative of “a whole host of immigration enforcement and due process problems that exist in the system.” As immigration restrictionists incessantly call on immigration officials to ramp up their deportation efforts, ICE can barely handle the deportation work they’re already doing.