U.S. Citizens Detained in Immigration Raids

The son of a WWII veteran, La Puente resident Frank Ponce de Leon was held in a San Diego immigration detention center for three months last year. He insisted he was a United States citizen all the while facing the possibility of being deported.

“I kept telling them I was a citizen, but they wouldn’t believe me,” he said. “Little did I know that this would happen to me and that I would be sent to an INS detention center.”

Ponce de Leon, 47, was born in Mexico in 1961 and moved to California in 1977. Despite being born abroad to an American parent, he automatically acquired U.S. citizenship by law.

However, he never obtained a Certificate of Citizenship, which would have officially proven he was a citizen at birth.

In 2007, more than 300,000 illegal immigrants were detained by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with 30,000 held in detention centers daily.

Neither agencies have data on how many U.S. citizens have been deported or detained on suspicion of being non-citizens.

However, Ponce de Leon is just one of thousands of citizens who have been rounded up and sent to immigration centers with their status in question, according to Jacqueline Stevens, associate professor of Law and Society at UC Santa Barbara.

Stevens claims ICE has been unlawfully detaining U.S. citizens after researching and compiling information since 2008 from government officials, immigration attorneys, criminal public defense attorneys and intake interviews with detainees.

Working with an Arizona nonprofit legal service organization called the Florence Immigrant and Refugees Rights Project, she says one percent of their more than 2,000 cases are for detainees who have potential claims to U.S. citizenship.

“It happens one percent of the time but that’s still thousands of cases,” Stevens said. “In absolute numbers, it’s intolerably too frequent.”

In reviewing the organization’s cases, Stevens claims to have seen enough files of citizens in Arizona detention centers to estimate that since 2004, between 3,500 and 10,000 citizens nationwide have been detained.

But ICE spokeswoman Lori Haley said, “ICE only processes individuals for removal when all the available facts indicate that the individual is an alien. We have no interest in deporting U.S. citizens.”

Committed to enforcing the law fairly, ICE thoroughly investigates all claims, she said.

“After careful questioning, if somebody is erroneously detained they’re immediately released,” Haley said.

However, Ponce de Leon’s release wasn’t as immediate.

Two months before being released from jail for an aggravated felony, he was sent to the Otay Detention Facility where he would spend the next three months trying to prove his citizenship.

“I was representing myself and getting slammed down in court,” he said. “The judge didn’t give me the light of day.”

Since detainees are not provided legal representation, the American Bar Association Immigration Justice Project in San Diego offered him pro bono legal services.

“A significant number of people go through the immigration process without a lawyer,” Attorney Allegra McLeod said. “Without a lawyer it can be very hard to establish your rights under the law even if you are a U.S. citizen.”

Trying to Prove Citizenship

But there was sound evidence of his citizenship, including his father’s birth certificate, military service showing the family’s allegiance to the U.S. and a marriage certificate showing he was in the U.S. 10 years prior to Ponce de Leon’s birth, she said.

There was also the fact that his older brother, Fernando, had the same problem the year before, McLeod said. His case was terminated when the court found out he was a U.S. citizen, she said.

Despite the claim and evidence being identical to Fernando’s, Ponce de Leon was held longer, costing U.S. tax payers $90 a day, McLeod said.

Others who have gone through similar circumstances haven’t come forward because they don’t know who to trust, Stevens said.

“The government has unlawfully imprisoned them and … treated them in a way that’s fundamentally unfair,” she said

Attorney Veronica Villegas represented a West Covina resident named Robert, who was deported twice by ICE to Tijuana.

Robert was born in Mexico in 1970 and was orphaned with his five siblings after his parents were killed, she said.

After being adopted in 1983 by his legal resident aunt and his U.S. citizen uncle from Baldwin Park, Robert became a legal permanent resident.

“The minute he became a resident he automatically became a citizen,” Villegas said.

After serving a 16-month jail sentence, Robert was sent to El Centro Detention Facility in San Diego where he spent a year in detention. He was deported to Tijuana as a criminal alien.

He went back to California the next day, but was caught and deported to Tijuana again, Villegas said. In attempting to get back to the United States, Robert was caught by border agents who accused him of falsely claiming citizenship. He served three years in federal prison.

“Robert had a legitimate claim to citizenship,” Villegas said. “The law automatically made him a citizen but ICE is not going to verify that.”

It’s up to the detainees to prove their status, she said.

“They set it up in a way that’s nobody’s responsibility but yours and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re screwed,” she said.

He was released from a San Pedro detention facility, where he was told “Congratulations, you’ve been a citizen since 1983,” Villegas said.

Although the claim to U.S. citizenship is there, it’s difficult to prove, especially when detainees can’t obtain the documents proving their citizenship, Sheila Neville, Senior Attorney for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles said.

Immigration officials “should work with that person and the family to figure out what is going on,” she said.

David Hernandez, an assistant professor of Chicano and Chicana Studies at UCLA, has studied the detention of immigrants and attributes the detention of citizens and potential aliens to racial profiling.

”If people are using racial profiling to capture immigrants, citizens are sure to get detained,” he said. “When you rely on racial profiling and picking up whoever is next to the person that you’re trying to arrest  that’s going to cause terrible mistakes.”

Ponce de Leon was released from the detention center Dec. 31, 2008 and has applied for his Certificate of Citizenship.

However, he isn’t in the clear yet.

“Until he has his Certificate of Citizenship in hand, which can take a long time, the problem hasn’t yet been solved,” Mcleod said. “He could find himself back in the same situation.”

Still, Ponce de Leon is hopeful.

“Little by little, I look up at God and know that everything will be all right,” he said. “Eventually I’ll get my break.”

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Credit: Juliette Funes will be graduating from Cal State Fullerton in May with a B.A. in Communication - Print journalism. This summer she has an internship at the L.A. Times writing for the Calendar Section. She likes writing about minority, social and women’s issues and eventually would like to focus her writing on immigration.