Official claimed Jose Hermosillo, who was visiting Arizona, was \u2018without the proper immigration documents\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Immigration<\/a> officials detained a US citizen for nearly 10 days in Arizona<\/a>, according to court records and press reports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the NPR affiliate Arizona Public Media, first reported<\/a>, 19-year-old Jose Hermosillo, a New Mexico resident visiting Arizona, was detained by border patrol agents in Nogales, a city along the Mexico border about an hour south of Tucson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to a border patrol criminal complaint<\/a>, on 8 April, a border patrol official found Hermosillo \u201cwithout the proper immigration documents\u201d and claimed that the young American had admitted entering the US illegally from Mexico. Two days later, the federal court document notes that Hermosillo continued to claim he was a US citizen. On 17 April, a federal judge dismissed<\/a> his case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hermosillo\u2019s wrongful arrest and prolonged detention comes amid escalating attacks by the Trump administration on immigrants in the US. Since Donald Trump<\/a> took office, the administration<\/a> has emboldened immigration officers to arrest and deport undocumented people, including foreign students whose visas have been revoked, leading to a series of errors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cUnder the Trump administration\u2019s theory of the law, the government could have banished this U.S. citizen to a Salvadoran prison then refused to do anything to bring him back,\u201d Mark Joseph Stern, a legal analyst for Slate, wrote<\/a> on Bluesky. \u201cThis is why the Constitution guarantees due process to all. Could it be more obvious?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n During his campaign for the presidency, the US president promised to carry out \u201cmass deportations\u201d. In the three months since he took office, several foreign tourists have been wrongfully detained, federal agents from other agencies have been deputized to engage in immigration enforcement and Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, declaring that Venezuelan gang members are a leading foreign invasion of the United States to give himself the power to expel immigrants to a notorious Salvadorian prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to AZPM\u2019s report, Hermosillo was visiting the Tucson area from Albuquerque, got lost without identification and was arrested by border patrol officials near its headquarters in Nogales. Hermosillo\u2019s girlfriend\u2019s family made numerous calls looking for him before they discovered he was being held at the Florence Correctional Center<\/a>, a privately run Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility. After his arrest, the court docket shows, he was temporarily detained in the custody of the US marshals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the family tracked him done, they provided officials with his birth certificate and social security card.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe did say he was a US citizen, but they didn\u2019t believe him,\u201d Hermosillo\u2019s girlfriend\u2019s aunt told AZPM. \u201cI think they would have kept him. I think they would have, if they would have not got that information yesterday in the court, and gave that to Ice and the border patrol. He probably would have been deported already to Mexico<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ice, Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Homeland Security and Hermosillo\u2019s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Federal magistrate judge Maria S Aguilera dismissed the case on 17 April. Hermosillo was released later that evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since Trump stepped into office, there have been a rising number of US citizens detained by immigration officials around the country. But immigration officials\u2019 detention of citizens is not new, and it has taken place across presidential administrations. In 2021, the Government Accountability Office found<\/a> that from 2015 through 2020, Ice arrested 674 US citizens and deported 70 of them. And from 2007 through 2015, 818 US citizens were held in immigration detention, according to a 2016 analysis<\/a> from NPR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In recent months, the Trump administration has revoked the visas of hundreds of foreign students, many for taking part in Gaza solidarity protests the administration call antisemitic . Among those swept up in that crackdown is Aditya Wahyu Harsono, an Indonesian student in Minnesota<\/a>, who is married to a US citizen, arrested at his hospital workplace this month after his visa was secretly revoked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n