Americans are now getting caught up in President Donald Trump’s brutal crackdown on immigrants caught in the U.S. illegally. A Texas man, the son of a longtime U.S. Army veteran, was deported to Jamaica, despite his father’s U.S. citizenship and his birth on an American military base in Europe, according to The Austin Chronicle.
In late May, Jermaine Thomas, who told the Chronicle he was born in 1986 on a U.S. Army base in Germany, suddenly found himself in Jamaica, despite having never been to the Caribbean nation before, after he was arrested in Killeen, Texas, about an hour north of Austin. The Chronicle reported he was taken into custody on trespassing charges after he was evicted from his apartment.
He served 30 days in jail on those charges, but instead of being released after serving his time, he was transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Texas, where he said no one could tell him anything about his detainment except that “he had a very unique case.”
“You keep explaining to me that I’m being detained in suspended custody, in detention, but if I don’t have a release day and I don’t get to see a judge, that’s pretty much a life sentence,” Thomas told the Austin newspaper.
Thomas moved around a lot as a child as his father’s military career took the family to different places. After his parents, who were living back in the U.S., divorced, he struggled with his mother’s new husband and a new family. He told the Chronicle that when he was 11 years old, he went to live with his father in Florida, who by then was a U.S. citizen and retired from an 18-year military career.
His father died in 2010 from kidney disease and apparently never obtained the proper citizenship documentation for his son. Thomas moved to Texas, where he’s lived ever since.
“If you’re in the U.S. Army, and the Army deploys you somewhere, and you’ve gotta have your child over there, and your child makes a mistake after you pass away, and you put your life on the line for this country, are you going to be OK with them just kicking your child out of the country?” Thomas asked in an interview with the Chronicle.
Court documents show Thomas has no citizenship and was apparently under a previous deportation order. Immigration authorities and DHS did not respond to requests for information on his case.
It’s also unclear exactly when he was first ordered to leave the country. Court records from 2015 show a case brought against Thomas by the Department of Justice made it to the Supreme Court, which upheld a deportation order by the U.S. Court of Appeals, according to KTLA.
The high court denied a petition from Thomas asking for a review of the deportation order, noting his prior criminal history and saying in part, “his father did not meet the physical presence requirement of the statute in force at the time of Thomas’s birth.”
Fast forward 10 years, after the arrest in Texas, Thomas was part of a group of migrants flown in late May to the Jamaican capital of Kingston, where he’s now living in a hotel.
“I’m looking out the window on the plane,” Thomas told the Chronicle of his journey to Jamaica, where he says he doesn’t know how he will find a job, and finds it hard to understand the dialect, “and I’m hoping the plane crashes and I die.”
At least one parent needs to be a U.S. citizen for a baby born at an overseas U.S. military to acquire U.S. citizenship at birth and that “parent must have been physically present in the United States for a period or periods totaling not less than 5 years, at least 2 of which were after attaining the age of 14 years,” according to U.S. immigration policy.
However, it’s unclear if Thomas’ father was a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth in Germany. His mother was reportedly a Kenyan citizen at the time of his birth. Still, his birth wasn’t registered in Germany at a U.S. Consulate.
In a statement to the Chronicle, the Department of Homeland Security said Thomas is “a violent, criminal illegal alien from Jamaica who had final orders of removal and was deported back to his home country. Thomas spent nearly two decades posing a significant threat to public safety.”
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