A U.S. citizen was awarded a settlement of $55,000 last week after Immigration and Customs Enforcement falsely arrested and detained her and threatened her with deportation, the New York Times has reported.
Guadalupe Plascencia, 60, was born in Mexico and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1998. She had lived in California for over three decades, raising her five children and working at a beauty salon, when she was arrested in March of last year after a car accident in Ontario, a city east of Los Angeles.
Afterwards, she and her daughter went to the Ontario Police Department to get her registered gun from the car. She was told that she had an outstanding ten-year-old warrant for not appearing in court in another case.
Plascencia was shackled and held overnight in an immigration-detention center. She was told she would not be released unless she signed a detainer document police said was a notification to ICE that she was being released, despite her questions about why a citizen would have to sign such a document. She was arrested by ICE immediately after she left the detention center, handcuffed, and taken to an ICE center in San Bernardino.
“Here, you are nobody,” an ICE officer allegedly said to her when she asked if her daughter could show authorities her passport. “You are nothing.”
Plascencia was finally released after her daughter produced her mother’s documentation.
She sued the federal government and the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department in December for false arrest and imprisonment.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented Plascencia, said the county will pay her $35,000, and the federal government will kick in the other $20,000.
“ICE’s records of who is a naturalized citizen are incomplete,” said Plascencia’s attorney, ACLU lawyer Adrienna Wong. “This case really highlights how local law enforcement needs to get out of the game of enforcing federal immigration law.”
ICE has requested to detain 2,965 U.S. citizens between 2004 and 2018, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.