Tuesday, September 5, 2017

ICE Wrongly Imprisoned an American Citizen for 1,273 Days. Judges Say He’s Owed $0.


By Harry Siegel

An ICE agent sent through—and his supervisors approved—mistaken paperwork ‘proving’ Davino Watson wasn’t a citizen. And no one’s been held to account for the catastrophic screw-up.

The thing that happened to Davino Watson, American citizen, when he was locked up in prison for 1,273 days awaiting deportation amounts to an “entirely common state of affairs,” according to two United States Court of Appeals judges riding the Second Circuit.

Watson’s nightmarish odyssey through the overloaded parallel legal system more concerned with pushing paper than with just outcomes began on May 8, 2008, the day the then-23-year-old high school dropout completed a bootcamp-style Shock program for non-violent offenders after pleading guilty to selling a small amount of cocaine in Times Square the previous year.

His story is, on the face of it, perfectly simple: He came from Jamaica as a 14-year-old in 1998 to live with his father and stepmother, and when his father became a citizen in 2002, he automatically became one too under the Child Citizenship Act of 2000. That’s what he told the first ICE agent who came to interview him while he was in the Shock program. Watson provided his parents’ contact information and the agent left without issuing a detainer.

He went through the story again with a second agent, Erik Andren, who also had a packet of information from the New York State Department of Corrections that listed his parents’ names and their phone number and explicitly stated that Davino was a citizen. 

Yet “about three seconds” after his sentence was completed, Watson was arrested by ICE. 

Click here for the full article. 

Source: The Daily Beast

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