Pedro Guzman, a 30 year-old California native, was missing several months in Mexico after being wrongly deported last May.
      The mentally disabled man had been arrested and jailed on a misdemeanor trespassing charge. For about three months, his family searched for him in shelters, jails and morgues in Mexico.
      According to a lawsuit filed a couple weeks ago on Guzman's behalf against the Department of Homeland Security and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in a federal court in Los Angeles by the American Civil Liberties Union, in order to survive he rummaged for food in garbage cans and washed himself in rivers. Although he tried to enter the United States on several occasions, he was turned away. He was found last August near the Calexico border and reunited with his family.
      "I will never forget what Peter looked like when he finally returned to the U.S. - exhausted and in terrible shape," Guzman's brother, Michael, told the Associated Press. "Peter's life is forever changed by what his government did to him."
      Attorney Jim Brosnahan, who is representing Guzman, said not only does Guzman's family want some vindication but they also want to make sure immigration officials "understand they can't do this."
      "They should have apologized and said they would take steps to make sure this doesn't happen again," Atty. Brosnahan, told the Associated Press.
      A statement released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a branch of Homeland Security, called the incident a "one-of-a-kind case" and added more than 1 million illegal immigrants have been deported since the agency's inception.
      However, Rachel Rosenbloom, a supervising attorney at Boston's College's Center for Human Rights and International Justice, said Guzman's case is not an isolated incident.
      "This is just the tip of the iceberg," she told O Jornal.
      She said her center is aware of at least eight cases in which U.S. citizens have been removed from the country.
      "These cases draw people's attention because they are U.S. citizens, but what they show is the underlying problem in the system that anyone who is in this vast system of immigration detention is very familiar with," she said.
      One such person is Deolinda Smith-Willmore, a partially blind, 71-year-old with schizophrenia, born in New York to an African-American father and an immigrant from the Dominican Republic.
      For reasons that appear to have been related to her mental illness, she identified herself as a Dominican, while in prison for assaulting a neighbor.
      According to Smith-Willmore, she informed immigration officers of her U.S. citizenship while detained, but no attempt was made to verify her claim and she was not referred to an immigration judge. She was processed through administrative removal.
      Upon her arrival, the government of the Dominican Republic housed her in a nursing home and obtained a U.S. attorney for her who easily obtained a copy of her birth certificate, said Rosenbloom.
      In another case, Sharon McKinght, a U.S. citizen of Jamaican descent was subjected to expedited removal upon her return to the United States from Jamaica in 2000.
      McKnight, who is developmentally disabled, was taken into custody by immigration officials under the suspicion of carrying a fraudulent U.S. passport. Family members who were waiting for her at the airport discovered she was being detained and secured a copy of her birth certificate.
      Nevertheless, Rosenbloom said, McKnight was left overnight in a room at the airport, handcuffed and shackled to her chair and was not fed or allowed to use a bathroom, Rosenbloom said. In the morning she was deported and was only allowed to return to the United States after a member of Congress intervened on her behalf.
      Rosenbloom - who testified before the U.S. of Representatives Judiciary Committee's Subcomittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law at a hearing on Problems with ICE Interrogation, Detention and Removal Procedures on Feb. 13 - maintains that such mistakes are "virtually inevitable under current deportation laws."
      "We don't think they [immigration laws] provide enough safeguards to catch cases like this," she told O Jornal.
      Gary E. Mead, deputy director of ICE's Office of Detention and Removal Operations, regarding safeguards implemented by ICE, said that "Even though ICE has never knowingly or intentionally detained or removed a U.S. citizen, ICE is currently reviewing its policies and procedures to determine if even greater safeguards can be put in place to prevent the rare instance where this event occurs."
      He said ICE anticipates completing the review in the next 30 days.
      "The integrity of our immigration system requires fair and effective enforcement of our nation's immigration laws," he said. "By aggressively enforcing these laws to the best of our abilities, ICE seeks to make our nation secure by preventing terrorism, improving community safety by ensuring that criminal aliens are not released back into the population, and strengthening the legal immigration process."
      Rosenblood, however, maintains the current system is designed "to ensure that deportation laws are applied as broadly as possible to those who are removable, even at the cost of ensnaring U.S. citizens and others with the right to remain in this country."
      "The problem is not so much that this one person was deported, the problem is that millions of people are being subjected to these systemic problems that lead to a few cases being public and obvious," she added. "But everybody who is in immigration detention is dealing with the same problems."
      She said in the last decade many of the procedural protections have been eroded by the introduction of new fast-track removal systems that increase the potential for U.S. citizens to be deported. Factors such as mandatory detention, lack of access to counsel, lack of accommodations for individuals with disabilities and transfers of individuals to detention centers far away from their homes also contribute to errors within the deportation system.
      Attorney Kara Hartzler of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project of Arizona, who also testified at the congressional hearing, said "The intense pressure on ICE to enforce the nation's immigration laws often leads to the arrest of persons on the basis of race, language, surname or other factors that are unreliable in determining immigration status."
      The Guzman's lawsuit claims a sheriff's custodial assistant interviewed Guzman "solely on the basis of his perceived race, ethnicity and national origin."
Since 2005, the Sheriff's Department has identified inmates who were eligible for deportation and passed along the information to ICE.
      After Guzman was transferred into federal custody, the lawsuit alleges, he was coerced to sign a form written in Spanish that waived his legal rights to a deportation hearing and stated that he was a Mexican citizen.
      Guzman "received no assistance from ICE agents - or anyone else - in attempting to read or understand" the form, the lawsuit said.
      Rosenbloom believes the agency should adopt a formal way of handling detainees who appear to have valid claims of U.S. citizenship.
      "For a person under threat of deportation, there is no right to government-appointed counsel," she said, adding that access to competent legal counsel can be critical in citizenship cases.
      "Ninety percent of people on immigration detention are underrepresented by lawyers and kept in places where it's virtually impossible for them to get any legal assistance," she stated. "They can't get documents, birth certificates, they don't have access to things or information they would need to prove their cases, to establish an asylum case or their right to stay in this country."
      She said a recent study reported that seven percent of U.S. citizens and 12 percent of citizens earning less than 25,000 per year do not have ready access to proof of their citizenship, such as a U.S. passport, naturalization papers or a U.S. birth certificate. And as the cases of Guzman, McKnight and Smith-Willmore show, even those with U.S. birth certificates on file can end up being removed.
      For those who obtained citizenship upon the naturalization of a parent, the change of error in a removal proceeding is infinitely higher, she said.
      Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project encounters on average between 40 and 50 cases a month of people in immigration detention who have potentially valid claims to U.S. citizenship, said Atty. Hartzler.
      Rosenbloom also cautions that some problems that lead to the removal of United States citizens can also lead to the wrongful deportation of lawful permanent citizens. She said the center is also aware of a large number of cases in which longtime legal residents have been removed on the basis of criminal convictions that do not actually trigger removal, or convictions that do not bar discretionary relief.
      "Faced with the prospect of lengthy detention and lacking the financial ability to hire an attorney, many simply concede removability or let stand a Board of Immigration Appeals decision that could, for a significant legal fee, have been presented to a federal appeals court for judicial review," she said.
      Last year, in just one detention center, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project assisted 73 permanent residents who were ultimately found not to be removable despite being charged with removability by ICE.
      "The majority lack English skills, have limited formal education and have no training in immigration law," said Atty. Hartzler. "Nevertheless they are responsible to enter pleadings, contest charges, gather evidence, cross-examine witnesses, write motions and briefs, and make legal arguments before an immigration judge. Many of them are at a disadvantage when trying to present their cases to judges and opposing counsel who possess years of experience in immigration law."
      She said often immigrants are served with Notices to Appear, application forms and other documents in English without an accompanying translation. Also, if the immigration court is not able to obtain an interpreter for the court, it will not prevent the removal hearing from going forward.
      In January, Julie Myers, head of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, told The New York Times that the United States expects to deport more than 200,000 immigrants in 2008 who are serving time in prisons across the country. Last year, ICE sent 276,912 immigrants to their home countries, including many who had never been arrested for crimes, according to the same report.
      "Once outside of the country, it can be nearly impossible to reopen a proceeding in which legal error occurred," said Rosenbloom. "There is great cost to all of us, and our legal system, when the rule of law is undermined by a system that permits such egregious errors regularly to occur."
      


Some AP material used in this report