Nearly three months after U.S. immigration officials dumped Luis Alberto Delgado in Mexico despite his insistence that he is a U.S. citizen, the 19-year-old was permitted to re-enter the country last weekend with the U.S. government's blessing.
Delgado said U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents cleared him to return to the United States on Friday, roughly 85 days after he was detained by immigration officials and pressured to sign papers that cleared the way for his removal to Mexico.
Steven Cribby, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, declined to comment on Delgado's case.
On Monday in Houston, Delgado said he was pondering a lawsuit against the U.S. government, calling his case "an injustice."
U.S. Border Patrol agents detained Delgado after a traffic stop in South Texas on June 17 and held him for eight hours, questioning him about his citizenship.
Delgado said he gave immigration agents a copy of his birth certificate showing he was born at Houston's Ben Taub Hospital, a state of Texas identification card and a Social Security card.
Lack of fluency
But Delgado, who was raised in Mexico after his parents divorced, said immigration agents were suspicious of him because he did not speak English well, and insisted the paperwork he carried belonged to someone else.
Delgado said he eventually signed paperwork that resulted in his removal to Mexico because he wanted to be released from immigration custody, and thought he could fight his case from Houston.
"I believe (the agents) discriminated against me because I didn't speak English," he said. "If you don't speak very well, I think they just assume you're Mexican."
Isaias Torres, a Houston immigration attorney who took Delgado's case pro bono, said he believes the U.S. government was "at best, very negligent" in its handling of the case.
U.S. immigration officials have faced scrutiny in recent years over allegations that they have deported U.S. citizens, including a high-profile case of a mentally disabled Los Angeles man who was lost for months in Mexico in 2007.
Estimates of the number of U.S. citizens deported from the U.S. vary widely, and such statistics are not officially tracked by U.S. immigration officials, who recently adopted guidelines designed to prevent such deportations.
Torres said the government should not tolerate discrimination against U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who do not speak English fluently.
"I don't believe this is an isolated incident," Torres said.
He said such cases will become increasingly common because the U.S. government is deporting parents with U.S.-born children. Between 1998 and 2007, the United States removed 108,434 illegal immigrants with U.S. citizen children, according to a 2009 Department of Homeland Security report.
Delgado said he does not speak English well because he and his brother moved to Mexico with their mother after she divorced their father, who lived in Dallas. Delgado moved back to Houston about three years ago.
"This is not an anchor baby," Torres said. "He was born here and his mother moved back to Mexico."
Mother interviewed
Torres said he decided not to file a formal lawsuit after Delgado was removed in June because he was concerned that it would slow down the case. Instead, Torres and attorney Lionel Perez worked with U.S. officials to resolve the case administratively.
Delgado's mother, who lives in Michoacan, Mexico, came up to the border on Thursday for an interview with U.S. immigration officials and provided them with extra paperwork, including a copy of her own Mexican birth certificate.
Job is lost
Delgado said immigration officials told him Friday that he was cleared to return to the United States.
The next day, he packed up his clothes at his cousin's home in Reynosa and crossed the border through the Hidalgo port of entry.
He arrived at the Houston apartment he shares with his brother to learn that his construction job is gone, he said.
Now Delgado is searching for work, he said, and hoping to take classes to improve his English.