The Trump administration is cramming to fulfill its mass deportation promises of ousting around 1 million immigrants this year alone. But as they race to meet those numbers, mistakes have been made, resulting in over a dozen U.S. citizens being swept up in the system.
The true scope of U.S. citizens wrongfully deported is not known as the federal government does not release data on how often members of this group are mistakenly detained or even removed from the country. However, The Washington Post estimated that there are at least 12 well-known cases, drawing conclusions from court records, interviews and news reports.
In one of the most notorious instances, three children who are U.S. citizens— aged 2, 4 and 7— were removed to Honduras along with their undocumented mothers, according to attorneys and court records. One child, a 4-year-old boy with Stage 4 cancer, was sent without medication or access to his doctors.
Both families were detained at routine immigration check-ins in New Orleans, denied communication with attorneys or family members and placed on a flight to Honduras the following morning.
Another minor, a 10-year-old girl from Texas was detained on Feb. 3 with her family at a Border Patrol checkpoint after they were rushing to the hospital to treat the girl, who is being treated for a rare brain tumor. Her parents are undocumented immigrants, yet they are applying for special victims of human trafficking. They carried birth certificates for their five U.S.-born children, medical records and letters from doctors and lawyers, yet they were still detained and later expelled to Reysona, Mexico. The patient’s medication was also confiscated.
But not all citizens who have been caught up in the immigration system have been detained, but not deported.
In Florida, for instance, Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a 20-year-old citizen, was detained by Florida Highway Patrol during a traffic stop near the Georgia-Florida line. Despite presenting his birth certificate and Social Security card, he was arrested under Florida Senate Bill 4-C— a law targeting unauthorized migrants in the state, which had been temporarily blocked by a federal court. Lopez-Gomez was held in Leon County Jail for 24 hours, even after a judge verified his citizenship and dismissed the charges against him.
Other victims include Jose Hermosillo, an Arizona citizen detained and released by Border Patrol for nine days; Julio Noriega, a Chicago-born man who was held in ICE detention for over 10 hours; Jensy Machado, a Virginia man detained while driving to work; Jonathan Guerrero, a Pennsylvania man arrested during an ICE raid at a Philadelphia car wash; and a military veteran from Puerto Rico who was arrested in New Jersey during a raid at a seafood business.
The cases have alarmed attorneys, civil rights advocates and immigration scholars, who warn that citizens are becoming increasingly vulnerable in a system moving faster and operating with fewer safeguards, according to another Washington Post report.
“As immigration officials become more indiscriminate about who they’re targeting— all while they’re pressured to deport people faster and to avoid immigration court proceedings— it creates a situation in which the possibility of illegally detaining and deporting a U.S. citizen rises immensely, because citizenship is not something that we can spot on people’s foreheads,” said Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez, a law professor at Ohio State University.
However, DHS is seemingly denying any wrongdoing, telling The Post in a statement: “we don’t have data to provide you on the deportation of U.S. citizens because we don’t deport U.S. citizens.”
Originally published on Latin Times
