Hundreds of American citizens end up in deportation proceedings each year, immigration data shows

Emilio Blas Olivo, a 69-year-old Texan born in Weslaco, ended up in a deportation cell for three months after he returned home from a visit with relatives in Reynosa in the summer of 2014.

He presented both his birth certificate and a social security card to U.S. border officers but was detained anyway and then deported to Mexico.

In a lawsuit filed this year in the Southern District of Texas, Olivo claims immigration authorities lacked the right to arrest him and violated his rights by failing to give him due process after he repeatedly told them he was an American.

Olivo is not alone.

In the past six years, at least 1,714 other people were targeted for deportation by U.S. immigration agents despite the fact they presented paperwork, testimony or some other claim of U.S. citizenship to an immigration judge, according to new data on immigration cases that the U.S. government was forced to release through Freedom of Information Act requests.

More than a third eventually won their freedom. But few had attorneys to help - since detained immigrants have no rights to appointed counsel unlike criminal defendants. Hundreds of those who were eventually freed spent months locked inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, according to immigration court data on cases closed from January 2011 to June 2017.

The records were provided to the Houston Chronicle by the Deportation Research Clinic at Northwestern University, which obtained the data from the U.S. Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review.

Jackie Stevens, a Northwestern University professor who runs the deportation clinic, has assisted in researching the cases of more than 150 people with citizenship or citizenship claims who were forced to fight deportation in Texas and other states - including Lorenzo Palma, who was released from detention last year by a Houston-based immigration judge based on evidence Stevens helped gather Palma's attorney gather about Palma's U.S.-born grandfather.

Stevens said she believes that even more American citizens will be wrongfully arrested as the pace of detentions and deportations continues to increase under policies approved by President Donald Trump.

In an interview, Stevens said she believes the new immigration court data undercounts citizenship claims and represents a small sample of a much bigger problem.

Nationwide, Stevens has published estimates that as many as 3,000 to 4,000 of people with citizenship claims have been wrongfully targeted in U.S. deportation dragnets each year or about one percent of all deportations.

An EOIR spokesman did not immediately respond to questions about citizenship claims or about the accuracy of codes used in the immigration court database.

Complex process

Houston immigration judges alone reported evaluating more than 60 cases involving citizenship since 2011. In most cases the legal burden fell on the person locked away and facing deportation to prove citizenship - a task that can require tracking down decades-old birth certificates or naturalization certificates relating to the detainee or his or her parents or grandparents.

The process of proving citizenship can be complex since a foreign-born baby can inherit U.S. citizenship though a citizen mother or father - as is the case with U.S. Sens. John McCain, R-Arizona, and Ted Cruz, R-Texas. A minor child whose parents naturalize also earns citizenship status. But specific requirements can vary depending on a person's birth year, parents' marital status and other factors.

In a 2011 law review, Stevens first attracted national attention by publishing an estimate that 20,000 people with citizenship claims had been wrongfully detained or deported between 2003 and 2010 under what she described as flawed U.S. immigration enforcement policies and procedures.

"But the deportation laws and regulations in place since the late 1980s have been mandating detention and deportation for hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people each year without attorneys or, in many cases, administrative hearings," she wrote in the 2011 law review article. "It would be truly shocking if this did not result in the deportation of U.S. citizens."

Pending civil lawsuit

The newly released data, gleaned from U.S. immigration court records nationwide, confirms that hundreds of people with valid U.S. citizenship or citizenship claims are regularly arrested and detained each year before being hauled before an immigration judge. But that court database excludes people whose citizenship claims went unrecorded by court officials or who were held under ICE detainers in local jails or who were swiftly deported without ever seeing an immigration judge at all.

Ricardo Garza, a naturalized U.S. citizen, is part of a group of about three dozen immigrants who have sued Dallas County in civil rights lawsuits in the Northern District of Texas claiming that Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detainer policies and procedures also violated constitutional due process rights. In Garza's case, attorneys allege Dallas County officials refused to allow him to post bond on a driving-while-intoxicated charge because he told a jailer that he was a naturalized U.S. citizen but had been born in Mexico.

Garza was then held a full month longer on an ICE hold despite having proof of citizenship, said Garza's attorney, Eric Puente.

Garza's pending civil lawsuit claims he was denied due process both by Dallas County and by ICE - though in his case his citizenship issue could have been easily settled through a check of ICE's own databases. Garza, it turned out, had already gone to immigration court back in 1999 and had obtained confirmation of his citizenship from a judge around the time his mother became a naturalized citizen, Puente said.

It took time for Garza himself to obtain proof because ICE databases are readily available to immigration agents but not to the public or even to attorneys assisting people with deportation cases.

Puente said he subsequently assisted two other wrongfully detained Texans who were denied bond under ICE holds after being arrested in Kaufman and Tarrant counties. In both cases, Puente said he was able to resolve the immigration cases by using his knowledge of the law to track down proof of citizenship - in each case derived by his clients through parents. But the process took weeks.

Puente said he filed the civil lawsuit because no mechanism exists to assist U.S. citizens like Garza who are wrongfully targeted for deportation - and he suspects citizens often are mistakenly detained by immigration agents in Texas, a state where so many people traditionally have travelled back and forth across the border to work, to give birth and to visit family and where many citizens were born abroad and later become naturalized.

"There's no due process and no hearing to address whether they had a real claim to citizenship or not," Puente said. "I can only imagine how many people get lost in the system and can never prove it, and that's what I worry about."

U.S. citizens are guaranteed the right to a court-appointed attorney under the constitution in any criminal proceeding. But immigrants with citizenship claims detained by immigration authorities in the United States do not have the right to legal assistance, not even to fight the threat of imminent deportation.

Some people with valid citizenship rights have been deported anyway.

That's what happened to Olivo Segura, the 69-year-old Texan. After U.S. border patrol agents wrongfully arrested him at the border in 2014, he was taken to an ICE detention center in Port Isabel where he was held for three months while government agents accused him of having another identity and of presenting someone else's social security card and Texas birth certificate.

He was then deported to Mexico, where he spent five more months before finally being able to sort out the mess and make his way home, his pending civil lawsuit says. He lost eight months' wages and his job as well as contact with family and is seeking compensation from the government. 

No quick resolution

The newly released information on 1,714 citizenship claim cases shows that only about two dozen people with citizenship cases nationwide were resolved quickly.

One out of every six people with citizenship cases spent more than six months behind bars either trying to obtain documentation of their own births or naturalization, or waiting out a clunky, time-consuming court review of a more complex claim that revolved around a U.S. citizen parent or grandparent.

That process can require tracking down decades-old paperwork or affidavits from parents, grandparents and others with intimate knowledge of family members' naturalization ceremonies, family trees, births, weddings, divorces in the United States and abroad. Less than half of those with citizenship claims received legal help, the same data show.

In the past, immigration officials have taken steps to try to reduce the number of citizens who are detained by immigration agents, in part by setting up a special 800 number to address cases.

But Stevens said immigration court officials have failed to accurately track citizenship cases that she brought to the attention of immigration judges.

"I know from cross-checking known cases of people who have successfully been proven to be citizens that the dataset is woefully incomplete," she said.