On New Year’s Eve, President Obama promised that his “Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens.”
But his Administration continues to deport them.
Consider the example of Jakadrian Turner, the 15 year old African American girl who spoke no Spanish but was deported to Colombia in April.
[After running away from home in Dallas] Jakadrien somehow ended up in Houston, where she was arrested by Houston police for theft. She gave Houston police a fake name. When police in Houston ran that name, it belonged to a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from Columbia, who had warrants for her arrest.
So ICE officials stepped in.
News 8 has learned ICE took the girl’s fingerprints, but somehow didn’t confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.
“She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was,” Turner said.
Now some might blame this girl for giving the cops a false name–though pictures suggest she still looks like a teenager, so that itself is problematic.
But what this demonstrates is how low the due process requirements are on ICE deportations. Not her fingerprints, not her lack of identification, not her youth, not even basic common sense prevented her from getting deported to a country to which she had no tie.
And for all the solace that Defense Authorization supporters took (naively, I maintain) in habeas corpus, in a country where citizens can be deported based on gross error, in a country where this is not an isolated incident, that doesn’t amount to much.