The deportation of Andres Robles Gonzalez was a bureaucratic nightmare at every turn.
The 25-year-old Louisianan spent nearly three years trapped in Mexico because the U.S. government wouldn’t recognize him for what he is: a U.S. citizen. Not only was Robles wrongly sent packing across the border; he was blocked in his attempts to rectify his situation because the government kept reverting to the initial mistake.
Robles was born in Mexico. His family legally immigrated as permanent legal residents — green card holders — when he was 6 years old. When he was nearly 13, his father was naturalized, which gave the son his citizenship, too.
Fast-forward a few years. Robles is a troubled teenager in the New Orleans area. He winds up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement sights due to theft and drug charges. ICE agents assume he is a foreigner.
According to a lawsuit filed on his behalf, Robles told officials repeatedly that he was a U.S. citizen, and they refused to believe him. ICE agents even consulted their own records, which showed a photo of his father and indicated his father’s citizenship.
Incompetent attorneys were no help to him. He was deported in late December 2008.
His family tried to appeal on both sides of the border to no avail. In one letter to an attorney, an immigration official agreed that Robles was a citizen but said that because the government had deported him, they couldn’t complete his request for proof of that citizenship. He advised that Robles should schedule an appointment when he returned from Mexico.
He couldn’t return, though, as consul offices refused to issue him a passport because he’d been deported.
In early May, the government settled the case, admitting no errors, and awarded Robles $350,000.
It would be easy to chalk this story up to the arrogant, lax actions of a few immigration agents.
But what happened to Robles is an indictment of a bureaucracy that is both overwhelmed and underfunded.
No one knows how many U.S. citizens are detained temporarily, much less the number of people who actually get deported. By one researcher’s estimate, based on interviews within detention centers, attorney records and other data, the number might be as many as 20,000 U.S. citizens detained since 2003, with thousands deported.
But no one really knows. That fact alone is troubling.
What is undeniable is that in recent years, pressure has grown to deport huge numbers of people to satisfy conservatives. Overhauling our system receives far less attention. Backlogs in immigration courts, like the one through which Robles passed, are at an all-time high; with more than 445,000 cases pending.
Officials are training and hiring more judges, but Congress has stalled on approving the funding. That’s hardly a shock. And now, President Barack Obama’s executive actions, intended to maneuver around congressional obstruction, are stuck in court appeals.
No wonder then, that a chain of complications sent a U.S. citizen across the border and then kept him there. Robles got lucky when his family finally found competent help.
Many others, sad to say, haven’t and won’t fare so well.
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