Feds Wrongly Deport Citizen Living in N.C.

[babylonsister]

Feds Wrongly Deport Citizen Living in N.C.
Believing Mark Lyttle was Mexican, they launched him from a Wayne County prison on an odyssey across Latin America.

by Kristin Collins


Mark Lyttle expected to return home after serving a few months in prison for inappropriately touching a woman's backside.

Instead, he says, the U.S. government deported him to Mexico, Mexican officials deported him to Honduras, and Honduras deported him to Guatemala - even though he is a North Carolina-born U.S. citizen who speaks no Spanish.

U.S. immigration officials confirmed this week that they wrongly deported Lyttle, 31, who his family says is mentally ill and suffers from mild retardation, in December after finding him in a North Carolina prison. He and his lawyer say he spent four months bouncing among Latin American prisons and homeless shelters before ending up this month at a U.S. embassy in Guatemala, where officials confirmed his citizenship.

Lyttle returned to his family on Friday, but only after immigration officials at the Atlanta airport tried to deport him again. He said that, throughout the process, federal agents repeatedly ignored his assurances that he was a U.S. citizen and native of Rowan County, about 125 miles southwest of the Triangle.

"I said, 'All I know is the United States.' I said, 'I was born here in Rowan County,'" said Lyttle, who is now staying with his brother in Kentucky. "They just totally ignored it."

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said that before they deported Lyttle, he gave them two sworn statements in which he said he was a Mexican named Jose Thomas. But ICE officials also said Lyttle made other, conflicting sworn statements in which he used his true name and claimed U.S. citizenship.

Agency spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez declined to release copies of the statements.

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/04/30-2

[MADem]

1. Well, he's rich now! nt

[ThomCat]

2. I doubt it. You can't easily sue the government.

Lawsuits against the government have a habit of getting thrown out on technicalities.

Even if they were morally wrong they may have been "technically correct" because they operated without some rules that they wrote, that they won't fully reveal, that don't require them to do the right thing.

ICE has been doing this to a bunch of people, and abusing far, far more. They're getting away with it because our country is still becoming increasingly militarized and authoritarian.

[MADem]

3. They denied a citizen his rights of citizenship. I think he's rich.

I'll bet the lawyers are lined up. He could probably paper his bathroom with all the business cards he's got!