About a week after President Donald Trump took over, Jonathan Gurero Philadelphia was sitting in a car wash, where he works when the immigration agents burst.
The agents did not say why they were there and did not show their badges, Gurero remembered. So the 21-year-old did not get a chance to convince that although his parents were from Mexico, he was born there in Philadelphia.
Gurero said, “He looked at me and explained to me his hands, without telling me that I am from here.”
An agent pointed the Gurro to his gun and handcuff it. They then brought them among other car washing workers, including the father of Gurroo, who are unspecified. When the agents started investigating the ID, they finally saw Gurroo was a citizen and would quickly let him go.
“I said,” Look, man, I don’t know who these people are and what they are doing, “Gurero said. “Anything related to law, I just keep quiet.”
In less than two months in the new Trump administration, a small but stable green in reported cases such as Gurroo is.
In Utah, the agents pulled and took a 20 -year -old American into custody, as he was honored at him. In New Mexico, a member of the Meskelaro Apache Nation was questioned by agents for more than two hours from the border, who demanded their passport to be seen. Earlier this month, a voter of Trump in Virginia was handcuffed by a gun -run immigration agents.
In Texas, a 10-year-old citizen recovering from brain cancer was detained at a border patrol outpost and was eventually sent to Mexico in February with his unspecified parents and other citizens siblings. The family said it was running into an emergency checkup in Houston when the border petrol agents had ignored a hospital letter that the family had passed through the posts earlier. An agency spokesman said that the family’s account was wrong but refused to provide the nuances.
It is not clear how many citizens have faced the dragnet of the Trump administration so far. And while the previous administration has accidentally kept Americans by mistake, there is no firm count of those incidents.
The government does not release data on citizens that have been conducted by immigration officials. Neither the border petrol nor the immigration and customs enforcement, which handles internal immigration enforcement, will provide the number to how many Americans are accidentally detained.
Experts and advocates say that what is clear for them is that Trump’s aggressive immigration policies – such as arrest quota for enforcement agents – This is likely that more citizens will get caught in the immigration sweep.
Kodi Vofci, Deputy Director of the Rights Project of immigrants at the American Civil Liberty Union, said, “This is really everyone – not only nonsuctions or unspecified people – who are in danger of violating their freedom in such a collective exile machinery.”
Regarding the report of the reports of Americans being caught in enforcement policies of administration, an ICE spokesman told Propublica in a written statement that agents are allowed to ask for the identity of citizens: “Any American immigration officer has the right to question, without warrant, any foreign or individual is considered a foreign, which is the right to live with his rights,” agency, ” Did not answer questions about.
The US has gone through cramps to take a large number of citizens into custody and even deported. In the 1930s and 1940s, federal and local authorities forcibly deported an estimated 1 million Mexican Americans, including children of hundreds of thousands of American origin.
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Spreading the two Obama administration, an NPR investigation found, immigration officials asked local authorities to detain around 700 Americans. Meanwhile, an US government’s accountability office report found that immigration officials asked about 600 potential citizens during Trump’s first term. Gao also found that Trump had actually deported about 70 potential citizens.
The report of GAO did not come in any personal matters. But in dozens of cases brought against federal immigration agencies, where the plaintiff got an agreement.
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When local duties in Pierce County, Washington arrested Carlos Rios on suspicion of drunken driving in 2019, it is not that he could explain his American passport duties – or snow agents took him into federal custody – that he was a citizen.
Rios, from Mexico in the 1980s, became a citizen in 2000, often taken with him, when he took a welding job on a coast guard or a commercial fishing job, which took him to international water. But no one listened to him when Rios repeatedly stressed that he was a citizen and the Pears was begging for the county jail officials and the snow officials to examine his bag. Rios was being held for a week. The snow did not comment on the case.
Rios got a disposal of $ 125,000, but still haunted in custody from his time.
“I also don’t have to close my eyes,” Rios said. “I remember every second.”
Other, there are also more recent examples. In January this January, in the last days of the time at the office of President Joseph Biden, the border patrol raided Cairn County, California, for more than four hours from the border.
Among those detained were Ernesto Campos, an American citizen and owner of the bakersfield landscaping company. The agents stopped the Campos truck and killed their tires when they refused to hand over their keys.
At that time, Campos began recording over his phone and opposed that he was an American citizen.
In the video, agents said they were arresting Campos for “foreign smuggling”. (His unspecified employee was in a truck with campos.) Border Petrol told a local TV station that the agents were also concerned about human trafficking.
The campos is still not charged. His lawyer said he was kept for four hours.
Campos case is mentioned in a recent trial by ACLU of Southern California and United Farm Workers said that the same operation was detained agents and a 56 -year -old grandmother was handcuffed, a legal permanent resident. The suit argues that the border patrol agent “went on a fishing campaign” who profiled Latino and farmworkers.
When asked about the campos’ case and trial, the border patrol said it does not comment on the ongoing litigation.
However, there are several fixes that the government can do to limit the wrong detention of citizens, immigration officials often failed to follow.
Following a series of cases against the Obama administration, the ICE began to consult the supervisors before the authorities to detain a person who claims to be a citizen, and not to arrest someone if the evidence of citizenship is “vice versa.” But the GAO report on wrong custody of the citizens said that ICE was not really training the authorities to follow the policy. (In response to the GAO report, the ICE said that it amended its training material. It told Poplis that the agents are still following those policies to determine citizenship)
The Gao found that there is no need to track the border patrol and ice on how many times they keep citizens at immigration fee. While the ICE agent can note in his database whether someone has investigated that he is a citizen, GAO found that he does not need to do so. As a result, records are often incorrect and agents are left uncontrolled even after being told about a mistake. Someone has wrongly flagged off an ice database, forcing them to deal with questions about their citizenship for years.
Peter Scene Brown, another American citizen born in Philadelphia, was considered wrong more than 20 years ago for Jamaica living in the US illegally. When he was later arrested for a probation violation in 2018, the immigration officials requested that he be held, despite his own records, in the case of wrong identity, his lawyer said.
Brown repeatedly stressed that he was a citizen, a claim agents to review immediately.
Brown wrote to the guards on April 19, 2018, “I am trying to get information related to an unnatural ice grip, while on April 19, 2018, the guards were written, while still detained in Monroe County Jail in Florida.” An American citizen IM … how is this even more possible? “
The ice eventually left her – in custody after three weeks.
Pratheek Rebala contributed to research.
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