ICE is the epitome of an agency drunk with power and targeting everyone in sight for deportation regardless of what the actual facts of their case are. And in many cases, the actual facts include being a U.S. citizen, being a U.S. citizen who was targeted routinely despite proving one's citizenship, and being a U.S. citizen who was held for more than three years in detention. The LA Times writes on ICE’s "colossal government failure."
Since 2012, ICE has released from its custody more than 1,480 people after investigating their citizenship claims, according to agency figures. And a Times review of Department of Justice records and interviews with immigration attorneys uncovered hundreds of additional cases in the country’s immigration courts in which people were forced to prove they are Americans and sometimes spent months or even years in detention.
Victims include a landscaper snatched in a Home Depot parking lot in Rialto and held for days despite his son’s attempts to show agents the man’s U.S. passport; a New York resident locked up for more than three years fighting deportation efforts after a federal agent mistook his father for someone who wasn’t a U.S. citizen; and a Rhode Island housekeeper mistakenly targeted twice, resulting in her spending a night in prison the second time even though her husband had brought her U.S. passport to a court hearing. [...]
The Times found that the two groups most vulnerable to becoming mistaken ICE targets are the children of immigrants and citizens born outside the country.
Most of the problems result from ICE agents relying on electronic databases that are outdated and contain errant information, such as incorrect identification numbers and misspelled names, to decide whether someone is a citizen.
Los Angeles immigration lawyer Danielle Rosché said she has seen so many U.S. citizens arrested that she tells clients to arm themselves and their children with U.S. passports and certificates of citizenship as a “defense against government mistakes” and skimpy ICE investigations.
ICE homed in on Davino Watson while he was serving time for a drug charge in New York state prison. They originally misidentified his father, leading them to ignore his citizenship claim and hold him for 1,273 days after he completed his prison sentence. In fact, even AFTER they discovered the error, ICE continued to hold him in custody.
Under questioning about his immigration status, Watson said he was a U.S. citizen through his father, who had naturalized. An agent looked for Watson’s father in immigration databases, but he pulled up the wrong person, court records show. Instead of Hopeton Ulando Watson, who lived in New York, the agent landed on Hopeton Livingston Watson, a man living a state away in Connecticut who wasn’t a U.S. citizen.
Once he had served his sentence for selling cocaine, Watson was transferred to ICE custody, where he remained for 3½ years. Even after ICE realized the error in identifying his parents, federal lawyers refused to free Watson. They seized on a new U.S. reading of Jamaican law to argue Watson should be deported because his father was not his legal guardian when they left the island nation.
Watson discovered that rights inherent in the U.S. justice system don’t apply in immigration court, where there is no guarantee to a legal defense.
“You feel like your rights are stripped from you. You feel hopeless,” Watson said. “It was very hard to understand. I spent many nights crying.”
Watson, who never completed high school, went to the prison's law library to try to defend himself. He lost twice and was ordered to be deported.
It was only when Watson’s appeal reached U.S. District Court and a court-appointed attorney pressed ICE that immigration authorities conducted the internal legal review they should have done when Watson first claimed to be a citizen. The review found the government had misinterpreted an arcane aspect of immigration law. ICE abruptly freed Watson.
Man, seriously—what a bunch of pathetic bastards.
How about some consequences for getting it wrong? Just guessing that would clean up some of this indefensibly sloppy and unethical work.
How about this: for every day ICE improperly detains someone who legally should have been free, the arresting agents have a portion of their pay docked and turned over to the person they improperly held.
Frankly, even that’s not good enough for these outrageously unjust lapses. But if there were an actual downside to getting it wrong, ICE wouldn’t have made thousands of these mistakes.