Sen. Elizabeth Warren is calling on the Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog to open an investigation into Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s recent wrongful detention of two U.S. citizens: a young girl on her way to school and an 18-year-old man on his way to a soccer event.
“In March, CBP officers detained 9-year-old United States citizen Julia Isabel Amparo Medina for over 30 hours,” Warren wrote to DHS inspector general Joseph Cuffari. “Medina presented her United States passport card at a border stop on the way to school, yet CBP officers simply claimed she did not closely enough resemble the photograph on her card, and proceeded to accuse her of lying about her identity and detained her for over a day.”
Did border officials step back to review their procedures to ensure another U.S. citizen wouldn’t be wrongfully held? Nope, because they then held Francisco Erwin Galicia for weeks beginning in June, refusing to believe his documentation was real. He said federal immigration officials tried to torment him into agreeing to be deported, which he briefly considered just to get out of the miserable detention conditions. Francisco was finally released after nearly a month not because officials finally believed his documents were real, but because of the public outrage.
Francisco plans to sue, but as Warren notes, more accountability is needed because these agencies already have a long history of wrongfully detaining U.S. citizens. “According to an April 2018 investigation by the Los Angeles Times, ICE released nearly 1,500 people in its custody between 2012 and 2018 after investigating citizenship claims,” she continued in the letter. “The investigation revealed, among other examples, that ICE had detained United States citizen Davino Watson for 1,273 days.” 1,273 days.
Warren described “a nightmare scenario” in which U.S. citizens comply with border officials and show their documents but are detained anyway, terrorized by their own government in the process. Julia, detained for more than 30 hours, said, “I was scared. I was sad because I didn't have my mom or my brother. I was completely by myself.” Warren tweeted that she wants the inspector general “to examine what procedures are in place to stop these wrongful arrests and mistaken detentions, and whether agents are using racial profiling.”