Immigration officials arrested an American citizen for almost 10 days in Arizona, according to judicial archives and press reports.
While the affiliate of NPR, Arizona Public Media, reported it for the first time, Jose Hermosillo, 19, a resident of the New Mexico visiting Arizona, was detained by agents of the border patrol in Nogales, a city along the border of Mexico about an hour south of Tucson.
According to a criminal complaint of the border patrol, on April 8, a head of the border patrol found Hermosillo “without the appropriate immigration documents” and said that the young American had admitted illegally entering the United States of Mexico. Two days later, the Federal Court document noted that Hermosillo continued to claim that he was an American citizen. On April 17, a federal judge rejected his case.
The unjustified arrest of hermosillo and prolonged detention comes in the midst of attacks on the administration of Trump against immigrants in the United States. Since Donald Trump took office, the administration has embarked on immigration agents to arrest and expel undocumented people, including foreign students whose visas were dismissed, which led to a series of errors.
“Under the theory of the law of the Trump administration, the government could have banished this American citizen to a Salvadoran prison, then refused to do anything to bring him back,” wrote Mark Joseph Stern, legal analyst of Slate, on Bluesky. “This is why the Constitution guarantees regular procedure to everyone. Could this be more obvious? “
During his campaign for the presidency, the American president promised to lead “mass deportations”. In the three months that followed their entry into office, several foreign tourists were wrongly detained, federal agents from other agencies were deputies to engage in the application of immigration and that Trump invoked the law on extraterrestrial enemies of 1798, declaring that members of the Venezuelan gang are a foreign foreign invasion of the United States to give themselves the power in a notoriety of the Salvadorian prison.
According to the AZPM report, Hermosillo visited the Albuquerque Tucson region, was lost without identification and was arrested by heads of the border patrol near its seat in Nogales. Hermosillo’s girlfriend’s family has spent many calls to find it before discovering that he was detained at Florence Correction Center, a private immigration and customs application (ICE). After his arrest, shows the court file, he was temporarily held in the care of the American marshals.
After the family followed it, they provided managers with their birth certificate and social security card.
“He said he was an American citizen, but they didn’t believe him,” Hermosillo’s girlfriend told AZPM. “I think they would have kept it. I think they would have, if they would not have obtained this information yesterday in court, and gave this to the ice and the border patrol. He would probably have already been expelled in Mexico. ”
Ice, customs and border protection, the Ministry of Internal Security and the lawyer for Hermosillo did not respond to requests for comments.
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The federal magistrate judges Maria Sur Aguile rejected the case on April 17. Hermosillo was released later in the evening.
Since Trump came into office, there have been an increasing number of American citizens held by immigration officials across the country. But the detention of citizens by immigration officials is not new, and it took place in the presidential administrations. In 2021, the Government Accountability Office noted that from 2015 to 2020, Ice arrested 674 American citizens and expelled 70 of them. And from 2007 to 2015, 818 American citizens were detained in immigration detention, according to a 2016 NPR analysis.
In recent months, the Trump administration has revoked the visas of hundreds of foreign students, much for participating in Gaza Solidarity protests on the administration’s call. Among the people carried away in this repression, Aditya Wahyu Harsono, an Indonesian student in Minnesota, married to an American citizen, arrested at his workplace at the hospital this month after his visa was secretly revoked.
