A 22-year-old woman was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers this month and is facing deportation despite her lawyer’s insistence that she is a U.S. citizen born in Maryland. ICE says the woman is in the country illegally and is not a citizen.
The case landed in federal court last week where a Maryland District Court judge barred the government from deporting Dulce Consuelo Diaz Morales while the court considers a petition her lawyers submitted to determine whether her detention is lawful.
According to her lawyer, Victoria Slatton, Diaz Morales lived in Mexico for about 13 years but has a birth certificate from a Prince George’s County hospital and immunization records from Anne Arundel County, all of which have been provided to ICE as evidence of her citizenship. The Washington Post has viewed emailed photos of those documents, including a Maryland birth certificate with the name Diaz Morales on it, but cannot verify their authenticity.
Affidavits of multiple people who were at the hospital following Diaz Morales’s birth were also sent to ICE, said Slatton, whose pleas for the woman’s release have gone viral on social media.
“I also called the hospital myself,” Slatton said. “Because of HIPAA, we couldn’t get a full release of her records. We’re working on that right now. But they were able to confirm that they had a patient with that name in that general time period.”
According to her lawyers at Sanabria and Associates, a firm specializing in immigration law, Diaz Morales was arrested Dec. 14 while leaving a Taco Bell in Baltimore with her younger sister. After being held in a detention center in Baltimore, Diaz Morales was transferred last week to Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana.
The Department of Homeland Security, using a different last name for Diaz Morales, said she was in the United States illegally.
“Dulce Consuelo Madrigal Diaz is NOT a U.S. citizen — she is an illegal alien from Mexico,” DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement emailed to The Post. “She did NOT provide a valid U.S. birth certificate or any evidence in support of her claim that she is a U.S. citizen. On Dec. 14, ICE arrested this illegal alien in Baltimore. On Oct. 20, 2023, when CBP encountered her near Lukeville, Arizona, Madrigal-Diaz claimed she was a citizen of Mexico and was born on Oct. 18, 2003.”
McLaughlin did not answer questions about where Diaz Morales, who has a 5-year-old son, was being held or whether she had already been deported. DHS did not respond to specific questions sent Tuesday about why it had determined the birth certificate and other documents sent by Diaz Morales’s lawyers were not valid. The department also did not answer a question asking whether there was a mistake or misunderstanding about the documents that resulted in Diaz Morales’s arrest.
Slatton rebutted McLaughlin’s statement about the validity of the birth certificate. She added the discrepancy over her client’s last name in official records “is fully explained by her parents having two different last names. … Discrepancies of this nature are incredibly common with non-English speakers and do not negate citizenship.”
“We encourage investigations on this, including by ICE, because we believe the facts and law are in our favor,” she said.
According to her lawyers, Diaz Morales moved from the U.S. to Mexico with her family in 2009 or 2010 and returned in 2023 to escape cartel violence. They said she was stopped by immigration officers when she reentered the U.S. In January, she received a removal order from the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR).
The order, Slatton said, holds no standing, because the agency does not have jurisdiction over U.S. citizens.
“I want to reiterate that these circumstances do not strip a U.S. citizen of her citizenship. Citizenship by birth is not lost through travel, lack of documentation, emergency reentry or any ruling by the EOIR,” Slatton said.
In a news briefing Monday afternoon, Diaz Morales’s lawyers said that they could not confirm her whereabouts and that all of their efforts to reach her or determine why she was being held have been unsuccessful. On Tuesday morning, her lawyers said they were told she had been moved to a DHS detention facility in Texas, but they still have not been able to speak with her.
Slatton said she posted on TikTok about the case because she hoped to bring more attention to her client’s plight, which she described as egregious. She was not surprised the posts blew up because, she said, people are worried that the government will start deporting people even if they are citizens.
Lawyers for Diaz Morales say they are continuing to collect evidence including her elementary school records and additional medical records to gain freedom for their client.
“ICE has discretion to release her any time she wants. She is not being held for any criminal reason,” Slatton said. “We will continue to demand her release.”
The post Md. woman facing deportation is a citizen, lawyer says. ICE disagrees. appeared first on Washington Post.
