NARROW ESCAPE

A United States (US) citizen narrowly escaped deportation to Jamaica after he was wrongly picked up, jailed and prepped for ejection from the country by law enforcement in that country.

American Peter Brown was saved from deportation after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a human rights organisation, among other groups in Florida, filed a federal lawsuit on his behalf.

The lawsuit was filed against Florida’s Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay for his improper collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Brown was detained by the county at ICE’s request, even as he pleaded that he was a US citizen. Those pleas were ignored.

The ACLU said Brown has suffered severe emotional trauma from the incident, especially after languishing in detention in preparation for deportation to Jamaica.

He said he has no ties to the island, only visiting the island once on a cruise. The last-minute intervention reportedly came when Brown’s friend sent a copy of his birth certificate to an ICE representative.

According to a report from the ACLU, a federal court on May 30 granted a motion for partial summary judgment in Brown’s federal lawsuit challenging his detention.

The court ruled that Brown’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated when Ramsay illegally detained him in April 2018.

He had been held on an ICE immigration detainer, which had incorrectly identified him as a deportable Jamaican immigrant.

The ACLU said the court’s ruling explained that ICE lacked probable cause to issue the detainer in the first place, and the sheriff’s office could not rely on the detainer to ignore the obvious evidence that Brown was a citizen.

“We have seen the ICE detainer system fail time and again, but the county still chose to put Mr Brown through this nightmare,” said Cody Wofsy, deputy project director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “At a moment in which we are seeing a raft of unlawful immigration arrests of citizens by federal and local authorities, this decision is a key reminder that the Fourth Amendment safeguards us all.”

The decision came just a day after Jamaica accepted a flight of 107 deported nationals and a week before riots broke out across Los Angeles, California, in protest against ICE raids to detain persons involved in illegal immigration. The riots, which have been ongoing for days, led US President Donald Trump to federalise the California National Guard in an effort to bring the protests under control.

While there have been widespread concerns and debate across the US over Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration – a hallmark of the start of his second term in office – Brown’s case dates back to the president’s first term.

“This case highlights the significant threat posed to US citizens by frequent ICE errors, which are exacerbated when local law enforcement agencies participate in immigration enforcement,” said Amien Kacou, staff attorney at the ACLU of Florida. “This case makes one thing clear: state and local police who act as ICE’s enforcers do so at their own peril. The sheriff’s office cannot deflect responsibility onto ICE and ignore its independent duty to ensure there is probable cause before arresting someone like Mr Brown. His perseverance in this lawsuit reaffirms that the US Constitution protects every Floridian, regardless of citizenship.”

As the most recent flight of deportees arrived on May 29, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Senator Kamina Johnson Smith confirmed that US authorities had approximately 4,000 Jamaicans with final deportation orders, with about 2,500 confirmed for removal over time, based on legal and logistical considerations.

editorial@gleanerjm.com