How a U.S. citizen was mistakenly targeted for deportation. He’s not alone
beta.latimes.com
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I like to joke that I have more documenting showing my legal right to be in the US than my wife's grandmother. My wife's grandmother has a birth certificate but it is water damaged, illegible, and falling apart. Besides that she has no state ID (driver's license expired twenty years ago), and few other forms of identity.
Americans seem quite dead set against a national ID scheme (and associated database). The problem with that is that we wind up with a de-facto one, SSNs and social security cards being your main proof of who you are and your legal status. Birth certificates are problematic because they've never been standardised, and have no real fraud mitigation mechanisms (e.g. watermarks). Certainly my daughter's US birth certificate would be trivial to duplicate.
This is in no small part why I ordered my daughter a US passport even before it was needed. It is one of the best forms of ID and citizenship proof you can have, even if it expires you remain in the database indefinitely. It is also why I ordered myself a US passport-card, so I have proof of citizenship in my wallet at all times.
ICE, interior immigration checkpoints, and other initiatives seem to be on the rise. Even legal immigrants and US citizens need to protect yourselves, particularly if you're more likely to be profiled due to race.
Birth certificate was impossible to replace because the courthouse or whatever burned down before the records were computerized.
You can't get a social security card without a driver's license, and vice versa. He literally had tried almost everything.
In the end another family member photoshopped a social security card so he could get a driver's license, which he used to get an actual social security card.
The whole system is stupid as hell. It's easier to navigate if you lie than if you act truthfully.
A passport or drivers license is much better because the issuer put a picture on it and already did the checking to make sure the birth certificate and social security card were valid.
http://www.ocregister.com/2015/11/25/paper-shortage-puts-bir...
My perfectly valid, accepted by the State Department for a passport and by a federal agency for a rather intensive background check, birth certificate was issued by what was then a tiny town in north Texas, just after that city had gotten large enough to have its own birth registry. It is hand-typed and has a raised seal that is now mostly flat due to age. It doesn't even have a unique identifier. It says it is recorded in "book 2, page 19" and there are three other birth entries on that same page. I got to see the original book when I went asking about it out of curiosity.
The only not-on-paper copy of it is on a microfiche roll at the new city hall. I've checked; they've not yet gotten around to digitizing records from my year of birth. Consequently, I can't order a copy of my birth certificate electronically from out-of-state. I have to mail in a paper form. The copy I get back is fantastically secure: microprinting, holographic seals, and a QR code unique ID. But the original, which is still good for everything, has none of those.
Maybe new birth certificates are standard but there are literally dozens of us who are still in our prime working years of life that have "proof of birth" paperwork that can be fabricated by anyone who knows how to type.
You are mistaken. Your wife's grandmother ( assuming she is native born ), even though she may not have "papers", is undeportable. Whereas you have legal documents showing that you are not a a native born citizen. You are someone that we can deport. Naturalized citizens can be deported from the US. A native born american cannot.
> Americans seem quite dead set against a national ID scheme (and associated database).
There really is no need. Most americans have state IDs and if they want to travel abroad, US passports.
> ICE, interior immigration checkpoints, and other initiatives seem to be on the rise.
But for american born citizens, that isn't a worry. It's a worry for immigrants - legal or illegal. Not for native born citizens.
That's the key point. How do you prove this if your documents are shoddy?
Naturalized citizens cannot be deported unless the government first proves in an Article III Federal Court that they obtained citizenship fraudulently and the court revokes their citizenship.
Source: https://www.uscis.gov/policymanual/Print/PolicyManual-Volume...
> "Most americans have state IDs"
State IDs don't prove citizenship. IDs from States that don't comply with the REAL ID Act don't even necessarily prove legal presence.
> "But for american born citizens, that isn't a worry. It's a worry for immigrants - legal or illegal. Not for native born citizens."
Why would it be reasonable to have a system that "worries" legal immigrants? Should legal immigrants, especially naturalized American citizens, be harassed by the government?
Nope. Back in the 1970s when I had medium-long hair (cut every four or five months) a bored INS guy in Detroit passed a couple of minutes asking me to establish my right to enter the US. The driver's license didn't prove anything, nor in his opinion did the draft card. At that point I just shrugged and he waved me through.
So naturalized citizens can be deported whereas a natural born american citizen cannot.
> Should legal immigrants, especially naturalized American citizens, be harassed by the government?
Don't remember saying they should.
That's misleading.
A "naturalized citizen" who is proven to have fraudulently obtained citizenship, and therefore deportable, is considered to never have legally become a citizen in the first place. So this person would only have been a pretend "naturalized citizen" on the surface, and by the time they are deported they are not considered to be a naturalized citizen.
A real naturalized citizen, who legitimately obtained citizenship, cannot be deported against their will, no matter what they do after becoming a citizen.
So a naturalized citizen cannot be deported. A person who pretends to be a legally naturalized citizen but really isn't, can.
This is all in contrast to non-citizen immigrants, such as green card holding permanent residents, who can be deported for "aggravated felonies" as well as other specified reasons.
> "Don't remember saying they should."
I read it that way, but if that was not your intent then OK.
> Carrillo said his son brought a passport and a certificate of citizenship the government issued Carrillo but that ICE officers refused to review the documents.
Well that's just baffling. What exactly would they consider proof of citizenship if a passport and the certificate doesn't do it. What would it take? What if he didn't have a passport. Many people I know don't have one or have an expired one. Certainly not a requirement to have one.
> The refusal by ICE officials to listen to Carrillo’s claims of citizenship appeared to violate an agency policy that requires officers to thoroughly and quickly investigate such claims
It also violates decency and common sense as well, and veers into plain old brutality.
Rant: One thing I don't understand is why don't people have national ID cards in US. Most countries I know of have them, here it is a complicated mess of drivers license, SSN, birth certificates, each states makes their own ID card thing for those that don't drive. Every single time elections come around there is talk of ID cards and supposed voter fraud for months afterwards, with everyone pointing fingers and insinuating things. Then there are cases like these. People's identities are stolen based on the stupid SSN number and a name, most of those are already on the black market somewhere already.
https://www.thefamilyinternational.org/en/viewpoints/future/...
It's a bit weird to some of us Christians, too. :-) Some of us realize that the Bible is a book of metaphors and guidelines, not a literal future-history account. What John saw in his visions and how to interpret that has been a major source of discussion among religious scholars for a very long time now.
I am opposed to a national ID on a very specific point: It can be used as a tool for voter suppression if not done correctly.
The first time someone told me that the story of Adam and Eve was allegorical and not literal, it blew my mind.
I had grown up and been taught "literalism", in that everything that Bible said was literally the truth and not simply a story.
The Bible didn't make any sense to me until I took a religious studies course and learned that the old testament is basically the verbal tradition of the ancient Jewish people in written form. I had tried reading the bible when I was much younger, and the contradictions were so absurd I started highlighting them, and I ran out of highlighter before I ran out of Bible. I'm still not religious, but at least religion kind of makes sense to me now.
Having a free, low barrier, nationally accepted ID would help to disarm the weapon of voter suppression by ID demands.
I agree, but the current administration would never allow either metric, because they don't want voter suppression to go away, they want to broaden and empower it. I am wholeheartedly disgusted with the state of our national government but I feel powerless to do anything about it. I vote (usually Independent/Libertarian/Democrat in that order as available on the ballot) and I contribute to organizations, but I'm just one person in a deep red state.
We can solve it by making it the duty of the government to provide everyone with ID cards, not the other way. This is an even easier problem than universal healthcare.
But of course, "the government is always inefficient!" crowd will fight tooth and nail to keep it from happening.
I can see that somewhat but voter ID requirements and legislation in specific states can already be used for it. A free national ID would make it easier and would even fix or prevent abuses from individual states.
Besides if countries like India, which have more corruption, more poverty and fight with such issues like open defecation can manage to provide IDs to more than 95% of its population (and some states have close to 100%) surely we can do it as well.
http://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/AMERIC...
From the article:
> On Wednesday, attorneys for Carrillo announced a settlement deal in which the government will pay him $20,000 to resolve a civil lawsuit he filed over the arrest.
The last poll worker who asked me for an ID, I told them ID was not required in order to vote. They handed me my ballot, without even a single word of argument. It's not illegal for them to ask either; it's just a form of voter suppression instituted by either the Country Registrar, the District Supervisor or the Precinct Head.
The myth of voter fraud in the US has been debunked time and time again, just Google it for yourself. Voter fraud is a big distraction from the real Election Fraud that’s going on. Like the Democrat-appointed Country Registrar in Los Angeles who neglected to inform Precinct Leaders by law they were supposed to display the write-in candidates (like Bernie Sanders) on the table where people sign in. I toured 3 different precincts in my neighborhood and got into it with each Precinct Leader and showed them the CA Election Code to convince them to properly display the write-in lists. And then I tracked down the District Election Supervisor who told me no instructions were given about write-ins and he was upset about it too.
Or like the 5 Berner’s I know personally who had their registration changed to mail-in, through no action on their part. The dirty trick there is the voter is handed a provisional ballot when they show up at their polling place.
It is kind of like saying a door can be locked.
Yup.
This should result in a large settlement, and punishment ranging from minor discipline to jail time for the officers involved.
The passport serves that.
"After several hours, Carrillo and another detainee were driven to a privately run immigration detention center in Adelanto, 85 miles outside Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert."
Privately run centers don't get paid based on citizenship or not but on services rendered.
Do you mean disenfranchisement?
I mean, plenty are (of the Wall Street kind), but we're far from demonetizing them.
[^] were these people detained? Does it count in the data set?
[1] http://www.endisolation.org/resources/immigration-detention/ (these numbers may be wrong, I haven't fact checked this site)
> estimate that if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely at least 4.1% would be exonerated. [1]
@_@
We should be automating our border patrol, I cringe at how inefficient our government is. Why are we still using paper records and certificates? These government bureaucrats are literal parasites on our society.
We currently have no national registry of who, or who isn't a citizen, and no verifiable way to tie identity to work status, or anything else.
Stuff like this is part of the price we pay for freedom I suppose.
What an odd conclusion to draw from this. Do countries with national ID's not have freedom?
See the 3rd thru 10th amendments, specifically the 3rd and 4th.
The war was as much about the question of what the powers of government ought to be as anything else.
In politics, you should never give yourself more power then you wish your opponent to have at some point in the future.
Another is, a right by executive order isn't a right.
1) Freedom of speech in the US is the most unrestricted in the world. "Hate speech" (or more accurately: whatever the current cultural consensus deems to be beyond the pale) is not an exception.
2) Protections for criminal defendants in the US are the greatest in the world:
* No other country has a hard rule that excludes all illegally-collected evidence, and legally-collected evidence flowing from illegally-collected evidence, from trial.
* More generally, we have very extensive rules of evidence that limit what can be admitted into court, to protect the rights of the criminally accused, and both sides of a civil case. The UK has similarly extensive rules, but the rest of Europe does not.
* An absolute right to trial by jury for anything greater than a petty criminal charge.
3) The right to homeschool your children. This is essentially illegal in Sweden, Germany, and some other European countries.
Other countries (such as Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) have weaker protections for criminal defendants during the trial, yes. But, assuming you are convicted, prison sentences tend to be shorter on average and there is no death penalty. On another point, to compare Australia to the US, the High Court of Australia has basically full appellate jurisdiction (even on state law questions) when it chooses to exercise it, whereas the US Supreme Court's jurisdiction is limited to appeals on points of federal law only, and AEDPA has limited access to federal habeas corpus. So I think the convicted have greater rights of appeal under Australian law than US law. So it isn't clear to me that criminal defendants actually have more rights under the US system overall – they have more rights prior to conviction, but less rights afterward.
How does this to relate to rights? Well, arguably one of our rights is the right to appeal adverse judicial decisions. And the Australian legal system grants more extensive rights in that area than the US one does.
For those not well-versed in law, this discussion is very misleading. Appellate courts do not retry facts, they only decide if there was an error of law in the lower court. American states retain a lot more power than Australian states do, including the right to their own common law and to apply their own judicial philosophy. To substitute the judgment of the federal courts on issues of purely state law is to abolish federalism to a large degree.
Appellate courts (at least in some systems) are allowed to reopen the facts, for example to consider new evidence not available at the time of trial - see e.g. http://www.courtofappealbc.ca/appellant-guidebook/3.5-introd...
> American states retain a lot more power than Australian states do, including the right to their own common law and to apply their own judicial philosophy. To substitute the judgment of the federal courts on issues of purely state law is to abolish federalism to a large degree.
Australian state court systems have always been subject to review by higher courts. Originally by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, and now the High Court of Australia has taken over that jurisdiction. I don't think it is reasonable to say that because we do federalism differently than the US, we don't do federalism at all.
It is also worth keeping in mind that there is a potential tension between states rights and individual rights. If a state is trying to limit my rights as an individual, and the federal government or courts wants to stop that, and "states rights" limit the ability of the federal government or courts to step in and protect my individual rights, then that is a case in which my individual rights are being sacrificed to protect "states rights". So, I'd say that in the matter of appeals, the US chooses to prioritise states rights over individual rights in a way in which Australia doesn't.
I'm not saying there's no federalism in Australia. I'm saying that the federalism is substantially limited by having one general common law to rule them all. And also by imposing a single approach to judicial decision making.
Also, I think you continue to misrepresent the situation. You have every right to appeal a violation of your federally-granted rights to the federal Supreme Court. It is only rights granted to you only by your state that cannot, generally, be appealed. As I said above, it also means that prosecutors cannot try to get a decision made for you, by a state court on the basis of state law, overturned by the federal courts. So it cuts both ways.
No denying that in the general case greater rights of appeal could work against the defendant as well as in favour of them. But in practice it all depends on how defendant-friendly the federal and individual state court systems actually are. I'm sure that for at least some US states, if the federal court system was granted Australian-style supremacy over them, the end result would be more defendant-friendly than it is now. Maybe for some other states it would be the opposite, but you have to ask which of those two situations would be the more common.
We have one of the highest crime rates in the world. If our penal system didn't work the way it did, America would descend into chaos.
That is assuming you stay alive, no? As far as I know, USA is the only developed country where a police officer killing an unarmed person doesn't even make national news.
> 3) The right to homeschool your children. This is essentially illegal in Sweden, Germany, and some other European countries.
Another way to see this is that kids in Sweden or Germany have basic right to education whose quality is certified by the government. In America, anything goes. (Whether it's good or bad is a matter of opinion, I guess...)
> They seem to have less freedom overall, theoretically
I think you accidentally forgot to type a very long and well-cited essay in between those two lines?
Kind of, though it was really more about the potential that central government would eventually act me way on one particular issue, but the side of big central government won that war. (We earlier fought a war against government without representation, but that's a different issue.)
See the 3rd thru 10th amendments, specifically the 3rd and 4th.
The question is not whether the government is federal, or more of a confederation, it was what the rights of that government, and the rights of the people ought to be.
I'm not sure how Amendments to the Constitution which replaced the Articles of Confederation provide any evidence whatsoever about the purposes of the Revolutionary War (they provide evidence of the concerns that needed to be addressed as part of the massive centralization, relative to the AoC, that the Constitution represented, but that's a whole different issue.)
Also the highest incarceration rate in the free world and an election system subject to massive corruption. But hey, no national ID is more indicative of freedom.
Curious, why?
There is already pervasive tracking I am afraid. Having a smartphone, social accounts, banking online, NSA running wild, face recognition tech tested in airports, traffic cameras. At this point, it seems an ID card wouldn't make much of a difference in that area. I have an ID card by being a citizen of another country, I just don't feel like I am somehow tracked more or less free because of it.
> another large federal bureaucracy that is difficult to deal with
I've seen state government being just as dysfunctional and I've seen other countries have even more bureaucratic governments. If they can do it, so can the federal government.
In a way the social security card is already a broken and terrible ID, which is misused and causes billions of dollars in waste every year. So the ID is effectively there, it's just very bad and an in need of an update.
That's really easy to say when you (and, honestly, I) are not the ones paying that price.
If ICE wouldn't accept a passport, I doubt a national ID would have helped.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/special_packages/Puerto_Ri...
>In the second case, Carrillo was sentenced to 240 days in jail and three years’ probation, the records show.
In theory ICE could check this out, but sanctuary city policy is to not cooperate with ICE, so my guess is they did not have immediate access to this information.
Given that this was an outlier case, I'm guessing the city would withhold the verification because most times it would show illegal status. Of course, it would make sense if all the enforcement agencies had synchronized data, but that seems like a pipe dream for an organization like the US gov.
Also I think Hilary's emails and Benghazi obviously played a factor here. And Obamacare. And gay marriage. And liberals.
I don't think that's true, unless you have an example. Usually sanctuary cities have policies like "don't hold illegal immigrants while you wait for ICE agents unless they've broken another law", "don't automatically notify ICE when an illegal immigrant is released from jail", etc.
It doesn't mean "don't return their phone calls and never share information".
I don't think this has anything to do with sanctuary cities. I am convinced they had easy access to his info:
"As a young teenager, Carrillo automatically became a U.S. citizen when his mother went through the naturalization process."
That means USCIS had everything -- his SSN, fingerprints, photos, (even though from his teenage years). Could have been trivial for ICE to check, if they wanted to.
https://theintercept.com/2017/02/27/los-angeles-mayor-flirts...
>LAPD officers have historically shared intelligence with ICE through the CalGang database system, and ICE agents are in the county jails on a near-daily basis.
Seems the problem lies with ICE officers and not the city.
Curious why did they refused to review the documents. Just malice, racism ect?
inb4 'just following orders' response: We're not talking about murdering people here, so here's a ladder so you can get off your high horse and we can engage on the same level.
>The refusal by ICE officials to listen to Carrillo's claims of citizenship appeared to violate an agency policy that requires officers to thoroughly and quickly investigate such claims. If there is any doubt whether someone is a citizen, the policy instructs officers not to arrest the person until the confusion is resolved.
How is the confusion resolved? ICE officers are equipped to verify the documents?
They can also contact the U.S. Department of State, which issues passports, to verify the passport.
If Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not equipped (internally or by communication with USCIS) to confirm the validity of purported immigration documents, why bother having the agency at all? I mean is there anything more essential to their purported mission?
Ok that makes sense. However given that they are ICE not just a regular police force wouldn't stuff like showing proof of citizens also be enough to amend the order.
> family member gave them a video tape showing the person being arrested is innocent
A video tape is not the same as a passport. A passport is good enough for the DHS to let people into the country or not, nobody has to go in front of a judge there. I don't see why ICE employees couldn't also perform the same check.
"The refusal by ICE officials to listen to Carrillo’s claims of citizenship appeared to violate an agency policy that requires officers to thoroughly and quickly investigate such claims"
Of course they are not going to release a suspect immediately, but their responsability was to investigate those claims and bring their supperior's attention to them. They were not "following orders", they were going against them.
That's so far from the truth, though. Despite their having orders to get Carrillo, it was their job to read the paperwork that was provided. The alternative is police who are "just following orders". History shows the consequences of that to be armies of evil.
Cities aren't the source of authority for naturalization information, USCIS is. Sanctuary cities have no effect on ICEs ability to verify information whose authoritative source is another office that, like ICE, is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.