Innocent until proven guilty unless ICE has you

in their sights. This is proven by an investigative article in the L.A. Times dated 04/27/18. There is no reason to think things have gotten better. The article speaks about ICE wrongly arresting, detaining and deporting people who are actually US Citizens or are otherwise legally here. Sometimes after they realized their mistake and let people go they came back and nailed them again.

In the immigration system in the US you are at the mercy of people who take the automatic position that you are lying when you claim to be a US citizen. In one case a man was grabbed from a Home Depot parking lot despite being a US citizen and having a passport. He kept telling them they made a mistake but nobody would listen. The article notes: "Federal policies require ICE agents to “carefully and expeditiously” investigate any claim of U.S. citizenship. But throughout his detention, Carrillo said, ICE officers either ignored or scoffed at his repeated claims. When his son rushed to the downtown booking facility with his father’s passport and citizenship certificate, ICE officers refused to consider the documents, he said."

It was not until 4 days later after he had been moved even further from his home area that an attorney for Carrillo was finally able to convince ICE to look at the documents. Then they updated their records.

But as the article also points out the records often do not get updated despite someone having proven their citizenship and so they may get targeted again and again. In fact the article points out that there are glaring gaps in the agent training materials versus what ICE claims are stated "policies" for investigating claims of citizenship. For example the policy says an agent is to have a supervisor with them when conducting interviews about claims of citizenship. But the training manual says the agent can do the interview on their own.

The over-reliance on databases of questionable accuracy is also a main problem. The interviews may in fact just be "feel good" words on paper to try to reassure members of Congress etc. The article notes this about interviews "“We could, but we don’t interview because we have all of the information, all of the facts,” an ICE agent said in a federal court deposition, explaining how he used database searches to mark a Chicago man for deportation."

The article also talks about names misspelled etc. and things like trying to deport people based on incorrect interpretations of law. The machine grinds on and will latch on to anything it can to "get rid of you" once they have you. Not only will they and do they but they don't even keep decent records of how often they f**ked up.

So is it any wonder that a system of quasi-military nature that obtains "targets" knowingly using faulty data, and then being mainly concerned in doing maximum CYA operations, would also be the people who didn't give a damn enough to have a system to keep track of the kids they were ripping from their parents arms and "disappearing" them?

The bottom line here is that as ICE and CBP have become more powerful the danger to perfectly legal US citizens has grown also. Remember that Crumb the 1st has ended any and all spending on any legal aid for those caught up in this nightmare. Imagine the nightmare of being a US citizen, having your papers and proof but nobody will even look at them. Imagine the desperation and panic that the son of Carrillo felt. The law is only going to help you if someone enforces it. If they want to "not" enforce it or "not" look at your clear proof then what?

What indeed when all someone wants to do is gaze at a computer screen and declare what they see to be absolute truth. The article notes that since 2007: "In the years since, the government has expanded its reach with computer programs bearing names such as CLAIMS, EAGLE, ENFORCE and FALCON that contain troves of state and federal information on hundreds of millions of people.

The architecture of those programs is so sensitive that federal attorneys have sought to keep details under seal and to prevent former federal employees from testifying in open court." Hundreds of millions of people in their hacked up web of inaccuracy and nobody gets to examine how this all functions. Nobody.

If people think it's only a small percentage sort of problem think about this. Being arrested, detained, threatened and held for days, months and years due to errors by the system is not like a wrongful traffic ticket. The article notes this case: "Ada Morales, a Guatemalan native who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1995, was first held overnight in a county jail in 2004 when authorities mistakenly identified her as living in the country illegally. Five years later, she came under ICE scrutiny again when police in Rhode Island arrested her on a welfare fraud warrant.

An immigration agent checking federal databases failed to run her Social Security number or her maiden name, which would have confirmed her citizenship, according to court records. When the state court judge handling Morales’ case issued an order that would have allowed her to go home, ICE detained her.

The mother of five, who cleaned houses and offices for a living, was strip-searched and her anxiety medications were confiscated. The next day, an ICE agent drove Morales to the federal agency’s offices for questioning. Met there by her husband with her passport, the agent realized the error and freed Morales.

Nearly nine years later, Morales, 54, still sobs recalling her night in prison, where she said she suffered panic attacks and guards accused her of lying about her citizenship.

“Nobody wanted to listen to anything,” she said."

Horrifying but what about the agent who did this to her? The article also states: "That year, the ICE agent who conducted the flawed investigation into Morales issued 77 official requests to detain people he identified as eligible for deportation. Of those, 31 had to be canceled when it turned out the subjects were Americans or lawful residents, according to records in a lawsuit Morales filed against the agency." He was wrong over 40% of the time. Thankfully Morales won her suit but that was then and we now have judges who may very well give greater deference to the error ridden system.

Crumb The 1st has stated he wants a quota for agents of thousands per day rounded up instead of just hundreds. Is there any reason to think they won't "satisfy" that request by ratcheting up their reliance on their flawed targeting system? Most assuredly not and the media we have now is much worse than when the L.A. Times did this article in 2018. So we'll see and hear the pictures from the border and maybe buses of deportees heading to the planes. But we won't be likely to hear about the US citizens who have their lives torn by being profiled for deportation because of a name or their skin color by an error ridden system hidden behind a wall of utmost secrecy. In the Land of the Free.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/story/2018-04-27/ice-held-an-american-man-in-custody-for-1273-days