Immigration officers detained US citizens in Arizona for nearly 10 days, according to court records and reports.
NPR affiliate Arizona Public Media, First reported19-year-old Jose Hermosilo, a New Mexico resident who visited Arizona, was taken into custody by agents of the Border Patrol in Nogales, a city along the Mexican border about an hour south of Tucson.
According to the Border Patrol Criminal complainton April 8, Border Patrol officials claimed that Elmosilo had discovered “without proper immigration documents” and that young Americans allowed them to enter the United States illegally from Mexico. Two days later, federal court documents say Hermosillo continued to assert that he was a US citizen. April 17th, federal judge Rejected His case.
Hermosilo’s illegal arrest and long-term detention comes amid escalating the Trump administration’s attacks on US immigration. Since Donald Trump took office, the administration has encouraged immigrants to arrest, arrest and enforce undocumented people, including foreign students whose visas have been revoked, leading to a string of errors.
“Under the Trump administration’s theory of law, the government may have refused to do anything to bring him back after expelling this US citizen to a Salvador prison,” Slate law analyst Mark Joseph Stern said. I wrote it On blue skis. “This is why the Constitution guarantees a legitimate process for everyone. Will that become more obvious?”
During the presidential election, the US president promised to carry out a “large deportation.” Three months after he took office, several foreign tourists were mistakenly detained, federal agents from other agencies were represented to engage in immigration enforcement, and Trump evoked the alien enemy law of 1798, declaring Venezuelan gang members as a major foreign invasion in the United States to grant the authority to expel immigrants to prominent rescue prisons.
According to an AZPM report, Hermosillo was visiting the Tucson area of Albuquerque, lost without identification and was arrested by Border Patrol officials near Nogales’ headquarters. Hermosillo’s girlfriend’s family called multiple times to search for him before discovering that he was being held at the Florence Correctional Centre, a privately run Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility. After his arrest, the court docket said he was temporarily detained in the custody of a former US man.
After the family followed him, they provided his birth certificate and Social Security card to staff.
“He said he was a US citizen, but they didn’t believe him,” the aunt of Elmosillo’s girlfriend told AZPM. “I think they had him. If they hadn’t had that information in court yesterday, they would have given it to ice and border patrols, he would probably have been deported to Mexico already.”
Attorneys for Ice, Customs, Border Protection, Homeland Security, and Elmosilo did not respond to requests for comment.
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Federal Magistrate Judge Maria S. Aguilera dismissed the case on April 17th. Hermosilo was released later that night.
Since Trump took office, the number of US citizens detained by immigration officers across the country has increased. However, the detention of immigration officers for citizens is not new and is taking place throughout the presidential administration. Government Accountability Bureau 2021 Found From 2015 to 2020, ICE arrested 674 US citizens, deporting 70 of them. From 2007 to 2015, 818 US citizens were detained in immigration detention. According to the 2016 analysis From NPR.
In recent months, the Trump administration has revoked visas for hundreds of foreign students. Among those swept through the crackdown is Aditya Wahiu Halsono, an Indonesian student in Minnesota who is married to a US citizen, who was arrested at the hospital’s workplace this month after his visa was secretly revoked.
