http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2011/10/deportation-us-citizens.html
Thousands of U.S. citizens across the country are being held in prison until they can prove their U.S. citizenship, even though the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lacks authority to hold U.S. citizens, according to a report in the latest issue of the Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law, available at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1931703/.
Jacqueline Stevens, professor of political science at Northwestern University and an expert on the practices of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), reports on several previously unpublished cases in the journal. Mario Guerrero, a California truck driver, was deported and then, on his return, charged with False Personation of a U.S. Citizen. He was incarcerated for seven years for immigration violations, even though he acquired U.S. citizenship at birth from his father, also a U.S. citizen, a fact the government finally recognized in 2007.
In another case, a man born in Lawrence, Mass., was deported to the Dominican Republic when he was 19. It took “William” more than a decade before his U.S. citizenship was recognized in 2009.
“Some of these U.S. citizens found the Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody so physically and emotionally debilitating that they capitulated to ICE officers who pressured them to sign statements falsely conceding their lack of U.S. citizenship,” Stevens said. “They preferred deportation to ICE confinement.”
