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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