The son of a decorated Vietnam veteran, Hector Veloz is a U.S. citizen, but in 2007 immigration officials mistook him for an illegal immigrant and locked him in an Arizona prison for 13 months.
Veloz had to prove his citizenship from behind bars. An aunt helped him track down his father's birth certificate and his own, his parents' marriage certificate, his father's school, military and Social Security records.
After nine months, a judge determined that he was a citizen, but immigration authorities appealed the decision. He was detained for five more months before he found legal help and a judge ordered his case dropped.
"It was a nightmare," said Veloz, 37, a Los Angeles air conditioning installer.
Veloz is one of hundreds of U.S. citizens who have landed in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and struggled to prove they don't belong there, according to advocacy groups and legal scholars, who have tracked such cases around the country. Some citizens have been deported.
By law, immigration authorities have jurisdiction only over non-citizens. Citizens, whether native-born or naturalized, cannot be deported.
As the immigration agency increased its collaboration with state and local police and prisons under changes to immigration laws and policies in recent years, some detainees who have had a run-in with the law drop through a trapdoor from the criminal justice system into deportation proceedings.
In immigration detention it falls to the detainees to prove their citizenship. But detainees don't have the constitutional protections, such as the right to legal counsel that would help them prove their case.
And many who wind up in immigration custody have the most difficulty proving citizenship. They may have been born abroad and acquired citizenship through a U.S.-born parent, like Veloz, or a parent who became a naturalized citizen. Some have mental health problems. And frequently they are poor.
"These are people who are the most vulnerable," said Judy Rabinovitz, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants Rights Project. "People are being locked up without bond hearings, often for long periods."
A growing chorus of legal experts says these detentions are unconstitutional.
"The constitution is the same that applies to U.S.-born citizens as to naturalized citizens," said Sin Yen Ling, an attorney at San Francisco's Asian Law Caucus. "Detaining these folks is creating a third category of people with a different set of rights."
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials insist they would never knowingly detain or deport a U.S. citizen.
Asked about citizens winding up in immigration detention, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who oversees ICE, said, "We're always concerned about that. If there's an error made, we want to rectify it as soon as possible."
Immigration detainees are routinely shipped to remote jails where free legal aid is unavailable, their families are not notified of their whereabouts, and they are often denied access to telephones, mail and even medical care, according to a March report by Amnesty International and several federal audits.
"Throwing people into a system where they're sitting 3,000 miles away without a lawyer and trying to prove they're a citizen -- they're making people make their arguments with two hands tied behind their back," said Nancy Morawetz, a professor at New York University School of Law and an expert on deportation law.
In addition to U.S. citizens, there are other inmates in immigration detention who may not be deportable, legal analysts say. They include lawful permanent residents who have committed crimes that are not grave enough for deportation, and asylum seekers locked up until their cases are decided.
The fact that citizens are imprisoned in a system designed to deport them points to potential problems for these other detainees, said Chuck Roth, litigation director for the National Immigration Justice Center in Chicago.
"If it can happen to U.S. citizens, you can imagine how few procedural protections are available to everybody else."
E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks(at)sfchronicle.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com
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