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In a case that garnered national attention and questioning last week during a House Judiciary Committee hearing that was supposed to be about the separation of families U.S. citizen Francisco Erwin Galicia was released from immigration detention on July 23 after more than 20 days in custody at the South Texas Detention Facility. In March of this year, a 9-year-old U.S. citizen was detained at a Southern California checkpoint for more than 30 hours after crossing the border from Tijuana while authorities verified her identity. And in April 2018, Peter Sean Brown, also a U.S. citizen, faced deportation to Jamaica after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confused him for someone with the same name. Brown spent just over three weeks in a Florida county jail before being released, according to a lawsuit.
A total of 834 U.S. citizens were issued ICE detainers which allow local law enforcement to detain people on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement between fiscal years 2008 and 2012, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research organization at Syracuse University. A detainer is how Brown was held in county jail despite evidence that he was born in the U.S.
In all three of these recent headline-making cases, those with their citizenship status questioned were able to return home. But this isnt the first time U.S. citizens have faced the threat of deportation and its reality. It is estimated that about 2 million people, 60% of whom were American citizens of Mexican descent, were removed to Mexico as part of a Depression-era effort known as repatriation, according to the state of California, though the exact number is unknown and estimates range.
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