Immigration Crackdown Also Snares Americans – NYTimes.com

Posted by deslava27 |

A growing number of United States citizens have been detained under Obama administration programs intended to detect illegal immigrants who are arrested by local police officers.  As Officers are growing more reliant on racial profiling and inadequate information to detain illegal immigrants, Citizens are also being arrested even as officers determine there is a mistake. American College student Romy Campos was arrested for over 5 days even though her file said she was a Citizen.  She could not be released by local authorities until a federal judge issued the order.

via Immigration Crackdown Also Snares Americans – NYTimes.com.

An American college student, Romy Campos, was also trapped in a California jail last month for four days on an immigration detainer. After her Nov. 12 arrest in Torrance on a minor misdemeanor charge, Ms. Campos, 19, was denied bail and transferred to a Los Angeles County jail. A public defender assigned to her in state court said there was nothing he could do to lift a federal detainer.

“Can’t they see in my file or something that I’m a citizen?” Ms. Campos said she asked him. “He said: ‘I’m sorry, but this is state court. I can’t do anything about it.’ ”

After four days, Ms. Campos was released, soon after Jennie Pasquarella, an A.C.L.U. lawyer, provided her Florida birth certificate to the immigration agency.

Ms. Campos said the experience was shocking. “I felt misused completely, I felt nonimportant, I just felt violated by my own country,” she said.

Ms. Campos, a citizen of both the United States and Spain, later learned that she had a Department of Homeland Security record because she had once entered the United States on her Spanish passport.