Pedro Guzman has been an American citizen all his life. Yet last year, the 31-year-old Los Angeles native — in jail for a misdemeanor, mentally ill and never able to read or write — signed a waiver agreeing to leave the country without a hearing and was deported to Mexico as an illegal immigrant.
For almost three months, Guzman slept in the streets, bathed in filthy rivers and ate out of trash cans while his mother scoured the city of Tijuana, its hospitals and morgues. He was found trying to cross the border at Calexico, 100 miles away.
These days, back home in California, “He just changes from one second to another. His brain jumps back to when he was missing,” said his brother, Michael Guzman. “We just talk to him and reassure him that everything is fine and nobody is going to hurt him.”
In a drive to crack down on illegal immigrants, the United States has locked up or thrown out dozens, probably many more, of its own citizens over the past eight years.
A months-long AP investigation has documented 55 such cases, on the basis of interviews, lawsuits and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Immigration lawyers say there are hundreds of such cases.
It is illegal to deport U.S. citizens or detain them for immigration violations. Yet citizens end up in detention because the system is overwhelmed, said Victor Cerda, who left Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2005 after overseeing the system. The number of detentions overall is expected to rise by about 17 percent this year to more than 400,000.
The result is the detention of citizens with the fewest resources. Most at risk are Hispanics, who made up the majority of the cases the AP found.
Jim Hayes, ICE director of detention and removal, said he is aware of only 10 cases of U.S. citizens detained over the past five years. Even if combined with the cases found by the AP, “that’s not an epidemic,” Hayes said. He refused to identify any cases.
