Proof-positive
U.S. must provide attorneys to immigration detainees who attest American citizenship.
U.S. immigration agents during the past six years targeted for deportation more than 1,700 people who told immigration judges they were U.S. citizens. But few of these imprisoned people had help from lawyers.
His birth certificate showed he was a native Texan, born 69 years earlier in Weslaco. If that wasn’t enough proof of his citizenship, Emilio Olivo also offered his Social Security card to the border guards who questioned him as he returned from a visit with his family in Reynosa, just across the border from McAllen.
Nonetheless, Olivo, a proof-positive citizen of the United States, was taken into custody, locked in a cell for three months and deported to Mexico.
What happened to Olivo is startlingly common. As the Chronicle’s Lise Olsen recently reported, (“U.S. citizens forced to fight deportation,” Page A1, July 31), U.S. immigration agents during the past six years targeted for deportation more than 1,700 people who told immigration judges they were U.S. citizens. Hundreds of those who were eventually freed spent months locked up in detention centers. Some of them, like Olivo, presented paperwork. Others offered testimony supporting their claims of citizenship.
But few of these imprisoned people facing deportation had help from lawyers. That’s because people accused of entering the country illegally for the first time face civil proceedings rather than criminal charges, so they’re not entitled to court-appointed attorneys. As a result most of these people detained at our borders, even if they’re American citizens, stand alone as they confront a system that’s trying to throw them out of the country. That’s wrong, and it needs to change.
The circumstances vary, but it’s noteworthy that many of these cases happen not at the border, but well within the boundaries of the U.S. Ricardo Garza, a naturalized citizen, was arrested on a routine DWI charge in Grand Prairie, but he was jailed without bond for more than a month while ICE agents investigated whether he was a citizen. Gerardo Gonzalez Jr., who was born in Los Angeles, languished for months in pre-trial detention on a California drug charge because somebody mistakenly wrote on a form that he was born in Mexico. Lorenzo Palma was about to be released from a Texas prison after serving five years on an assault charge, but he spent months trying to prove he was a citizen so he could avoid deportation.
The biggest problem many of these detained citizens face is that it’s hard to dig up birth certificates and other documents from behind bars. In some cases, proving citizenship requires deeper investigation, like tracking down evidence about parents and grandparents. That’s the sort of routine work lawyers can perform, but only if a detainee can afford an attorney.
More than a halfcentury has passed since the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous 1963 ruling that governments are constitutionally required to provide lawyers to indigent criminal defendants. The principle is that presumably innocent people, whether or not they can afford to pay a lawyer, need legal representation in court proceedings that could cost them their freedom or their lives. That same doctrine should apply to U.S. citizens the government is wrongly trying to deport.
Just as poor people accused of crimes are granted free legal representation, people facing deportation who attest they’re U.S. citizens should have the right to a courtappointed lawyer. Opponents of this idea will correctly point out that it will cost taxpayers a lot of money. But that same argument didn’t stop the nation’s highest court from decreeing that indigent defendants accused of crimes are entitled to an attorney.
What happened to Emilio Olivio shouldn’t happen to any American. If immigration authorities want to throw a man who claims U.S. citizenship out of the country, the government needs to provide him a lawyer.