U.S. citizens, many of them Latino men, have been stopped and in some cases taken into custody by law enforcement officers who are carrying out President Trump’s immigration crackdown and who suspect the men are living in the country illegally.
While many of those detained have immediately declared their U.S. citizenship to officers, they have routinely been ignored, according to interviews with the men, their lawyers and court documents. In some cases they have been handcuffed, kept in holding cells and immigration facilities overnight, and in at least two cases held without access to a lawyer or even a phone call.
How many U.S. citizens have been swept up in the Trump administration’s immigration sweeps is difficult to say. No comprehensive log of such encounters is available from the federal government, and immigration agents are not required to document stops of citizens.
A review by The New York Times of publicly reported cases and court records found that since January, at least 15 U.S. citizens have been arrested or detained and questioned about their citizenship by immigration agents or local law enforcement officers enlisted to work with the federal authorities.
In late January, Julio Noriega, 54, of Chicago, had been handing out copies of his résumé to local businesses in Berwyn, Ill., when ICE officers approached him as he walked out of a Jiffy Lube auto service shop.
They handcuffed him and loaded him into a van, without allowing him to explain he was a citizen, according to a motion filed in the Federal District Court for Northern Illinois. He was released about 10 hours later, the court filing states.
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The post ‘I’m From Here!’: U.S. Citizens Are Ending Up in Trump’s Dragnet appeared first on New York Times.
