Saturday, April 11, 2009
Comedy fans may remember the movie Born in East L.A., in which Cheech Marin plays a Mexican-American who is caught up in an immigration raid and mistakenly deported to Mexico. Unfortunately, sometimes real U.S. citizens do get detained, and the results are not so funny.
Tough anti-illegal immigration policies during the Bush administration resulted not only in large numbers of undocumented workers being arrested by immigration agents in recent years, but U.S. citizens as well, reported the Los Angeles Times on Thursday. The story relayed several personal accounts by Americans who were held by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, including Mike Graves, a longtime employee of the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Marshalltown, Iowa, who was handcuffed and held for eight hours in December 2006 when ICE agents raided Swift plants throughout the Midwest. “My government treated me like a criminal, and I didn’t do anything wrong,” Graves told the newspaper.
An ICE raid in 2008 at Micro Solutions Enterprises, a Van Nuys, CA printer cartridge manufacturer, resulted in wrongful-arrest claims by more than 100 citizens who were held for two to three hours before being released. And then there is the case of Rennison Vern Castillo, originally from Belize, who grew up in South Los Angeles, spoke fluent English, served in the U.S. Army and had been an American citizen for seven years when ICE delayed his release from prison and forced him to stay for months in an immigration detention center, before a judge finally let him go.
An ICE raid in 2008 at Micro Solutions Enterprises, a Van Nuys, CA printer cartridge manufacturer, resulted in wrongful-arrest claims by more than 100 citizens who were held for two to three hours before being released. And then there is the case of Rennison Vern Castillo, originally from Belize, who grew up in South Los Angeles, spoke fluent English, served in the U.S. Army and had been an American citizen for seven years when ICE delayed his release from prison and forced him to stay for months in an immigration detention center, before a judge finally let him go.
The worst case was that of Pedro Guzman, a mentally disabled U.S. citizen in California who really was deported to Mexico in May 2007. It took three months for his family to find him.
“ICE does not detain United States citizens,” spokesman Richard Rocha told the Times. When asked about the Castillo case, he refused to comment.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
U.S. Citizens Caught Up in Immigration Sweeps (Andrew Becker and Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times)
Born in East LA (IMDb)
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