Last winter, a remote Texas prison convulsed in a cry of outrage, voicing the desperation of the immigration system’s silenced captives.
Soon, undocumented immigrants may be eligible to enjoy an expense-paid hotel stay just before being jetted off to their country of origin, never to see their families again, courtesy of the federal government. Not quite the overhaul human rights activists have been seeking, but at this point, they can take heart in any glimmer of light that Washington might shed on the shadowy realm of immigrant detention.
The Obama administration has refused to make legally enforceable rules for immigration detention, rejecting a federal court petition by former detainees and their advocates and embracing a Bush-era inspection system that relies in part on private contractors.
The son of a decorated Vietnam veteran,
Hector Veloz is a U.S. citizen, but in 2007 immigration officials
mistook him for an illegal immigrant and locked him in an Arizona
prison for 13 months.
Veloz had to prove his citizenship from behind bars. An aunt helped
him track down his father's birth certificate and his own, his parents'
marriage certificate, his father's school, military and Social Security
records.
NEW YORK - Duarnis Perez, a native of the Dominican Republic, became a U.S. citizen at 15 when his mother was naturalised. But he didn't know that meant he was also a citizen. He thought he was an illegal immigrant, and so did the authorities.
He was deported and subsequently arrested trying to sneak back into the U.S. from Canada. Perez spent almost five years in prison for unlawful reentry. But when he was released in 2004, an official of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) reviewed his file and told him he had been a citizen all along.
NEW YORK - Immigration agents raiding homes for suspected illegal immigrants violated the U.S. Constitution by entering without proper consent and may have used racial profiling, a report analyzing arrest records found.
Latinos made up a disproportionate number of the people arrested who were not the stated targets of the raids, and many of their arrest reports gave no basis for why they were initially seized, said the report, which was based on data from raids in New York and New Jersey.
NEW HAVEN - Immigration Judge Michael W. Straus has terminated deportation proceedings against four city residents arrested in a 2007 raid because of the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
Straus found that the four men's constitutional rights were "egregiously violated."
Straus said in a recent ruling that ICE agents illegally entered the apartments of the four men "without a warrant, without probable cause and without consent," a violation of their 4th and 5th amendments protections.
Mark Lyttle expected to return home after serving a few months in prison for inappropriately touching a woman's backside.
Instead, he says, the U.S. government deported him to Mexico, Mexican officials deported him to Honduras, and Honduras deported him to Guatemala - even though he is a North Carolina-born U.S. citizen who speaks no Spanish.
