Yesterday the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, and a number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E) officers over the wrongful deportation of 33 year old Mark Lytlle, a U.S. citizen of Puerto Rican background who has mental disabilities.

According to the complaint( PDF File), in the fall of 2008, Lyttle was detained by I.C.E. in North Carolina, identified as a Mexican national and subsequently deported to Mexico. Lyttle had no ties to Mexico and spoke no Spanish. For four months he lived on the streets and in the shelters and prisons of Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

From the ACLU :

Lyttle’s entanglement with immigration authorities began when he was about to be released from a North Carolina jail where he was serving a short sentence for inappropriately touching a worker’s backside in a halfway house that serves individuals with mental disorders. Despite having ample evidence that Lyttle was a U.S. citizen – including his social security number, the names of his parents, his sworn statements that he was born in the United States and criminal record checks – officials from the North Carolina Department of Correction referred him to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as an undocumented immigrant whose country of birth was Mexico. Lyttle had never been to Mexico, shared no Mexican heritage, spoke no Spanish and did not claim to be from Mexico.

This lawsuit actually touches upon the multiple injustices built into current immigration policy in the United States, polices that are being reinforced by the current administration. Besides the obvious absence of due process and the inability of the immigration authorities to work with communities with special needs, the lawsuit points out how ineffective collaborations between local law enforcement entities and the federal immigration system are.

The state of North Carolina has an agreement with ICE requiring state officials to report all incarcerated individuals who they believe were born in other countries. This is what got Mark Lyttle improperly flagged.

“Mr. Lyttle’s disabilities were obvious and well documented but the government offered him no legal assistance and worse still, failed to even perform the normal verification procedures on his legal status,” said Azadeh Shahshahani, Director of the National Security/Immigrants’ Rights Project at the ACLU of Georgia. “No reasonable basis existed to suspect that Mr. Lyttle was not a United States citizen.”

As programs like Secure Communities rapidly expand through the U.S. like a virus with no opportunity to opt -out, is this what communities of color can expect more of?

Additionally, the case points to the global problem of the treatment of migrants or those perceived to be migrants.

Lyttle was left alone and penniless in Mexico and unable to communicate in Spanish. Mexican authorities sent him to Honduras, where he was imprisoned and faced with guards who threatened to shoot him. Honduran officials sent him to Guatemala and, eventually, he made his way to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City. Within a day, embassy officials contacted one of Lyttle’s three brothers at the military base where he was serving, leading to Lyttle being issued a U.S. passport. His brother wired him money and Lyttle was soon on a flight to Atlanta. Upon Lyttle’s arrival, border officials, seeing his history of ICE investigations, held and questioned him for several hours before letting him go.

Via / The ACLU