Wednesday, July 29, 2009
U.S.-born Leonard Parrish, a former prison supervisor, was detained in Houston because sheriff's office officials thought he had a "strange accent."
It’s bad enough when immigration officials mistakenly jail American citizens because of assumptions stemming from racial profiling, but it’s worse if they insist on keeping them detained even after they have presented a slew of evidence proving their citizenship. Such was the nightmare of Hector Veloz, a citizen by birth whose father, an American-born citizen, served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. Veloz spent 14 months in an Arizona prison because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials refused to believe their own eyes.
Veloz served eight months in prison for having bought a stolen car. He was about to be released, but was turned over to ICE instead.
While waiting for a hearing, Veloz managed to gather, with help from a relative, his birth certificate, his parents’ marriage certificate, his father’s birth certificate, and his own school, military and Social Security records. After sitting in jail for nine months, a judge determined Veloz was a citizen—and yet ICE officials appealed the decision, delaying Veloz’s release another five months.
Veloz is just one of hundreds of U.S. citizens who have found themselves arrested by ICE because they appear to be non-citizens, and have had to prove their way out of custody, or even worse, find their way back home after being wrongly deported. Many legal experts say these detentions are unconstitutional.
“The constitution is the same that applies to U.S.-born citizens as to naturalized citizens,” Sin Yen Ling, an attorney at San Francisco’s Asian Law Caucus, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Detaining these folks is creating a third category of people with a different set of rights.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
U.S. Citizens Wrongly Detained, Deported by ICE (by Tyche Hendricks, San Francisco Chronicle)
U.S.-Born Citizen Mistakenly Deported (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
Profiles of Citizens Detained or Deported (Associated Press)
U.S. Citizens Detained as Illegals (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
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