L.In June, federal agents seized the paperwork of a self-proclaimed U.S. citizen and sent him to Mexico under a controversial CDC order ostensibly designed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, The Daily Beast has learned. And despite a series of executive measures reversing some Trump-era immigration policies, newly inaugurated President Joe Biden has abandoned this warrant, without his administration clearly indicating that it plans to end it soon.
Any available evidence indicates that Óscar Luis Cortes García was born in Los Angeles, California in May 1991. While he was a baby, his mother decided to return to her hometown in the Mexican state of Colima, Cortes recently explained. He spent most of the next two decades in Mexico, but stuck to the idea of one day living in the United States.
“They didn’t even try, they threw it away so quickly.“
– Angelica Garcia
When the coronavirus pandemic hit and all the work in his city dried up, he finally decided to take the plunge and make the journey, he said. But he had no idea of US immigration and border laws, nor a passport, when he first tried to enter the country.
“I had so little information, what could I do,” Cortes told The Daily Beast. ‘I don’t have the means to go to a consulate. They later told me consulates were free, but I didn’t know that at the time. “
Assuming a citizen would be allowed anywhere along the border, Cortes claimed, he crossed between the official inland ports.
Shortly afterwards, Cortes was arrested with a group of undocumented migrants. He thought he would be able to show his identity documents when taken to a processing center. Instead, he was fingerprinted and immediately expelled under the CDC Title 42 warrant, which authorizes US immigration enforcement personnel to immediately expel people without valid entry documents, even if they intended to seek asylum.
The statute on which it is based is not strictly an immigration statute, but a public health measure designed to stop the introduction of communicable diseases in the United States. Still, it provided the Trump administration with an easy way to advance its anti-asylum agenda: More than 380,000 deportations have taken place under this authority, according to the CBP’s own data.
After Cortes’ first failed attempt, his aunt Angélica García – an American citizen living in California – convinced him to go through an official port of entry and went to Mexico to accompany him. “He’s not very good at speaking, he’s very timid, he doesn’t present well,” she told The Daily Beast. Nonetheless, the two recalled, they thought that possession of a birth certificate, social security card, and baptismal certificate would be more than enough.
Instead, Cortes explained, once Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents realized that he had been previously deported, he was taken to a separate area and aggressively questioned about his documents. “Right away they said the papers were not mine, that they would charge me with identity theft,” Cortes said. “I said, ‘Go ahead, do it, the documents are mine.’ ”
Although Cortes asked for arrest so that his claims could be further evaluated, he was deported again – but not until agents seized all of his documents, he said.
This report was supported by García, who claimed she had been allowed through, but was subsequently threatened with criminal charges herself when she intervened on his behalf and attempted to show the officers pictures of Cortes’ baptism. “[An agent] came out and said, “You know, I could accuse you of illegally smuggling people into the country.” I wasn’t scared because I knew I was not doing anything wrong, ”she said.
CBP spokesman Matthew Dyman told The Daily Beast that the agency’s report of the meeting “goes against the story you’re going for.” According to Dyman, Cortes was “unable to provide specific details of the birth certificate presented to the CBP officer, nor to answer any of the questions about his alleged birth in the US” Dyman also claimed that both Cortes and García were deported, wondering why Cortes would think he could have crossed the border between the ports of entry as a US citizen.
While a claim of US citizenship does not automatically allow people to enter the country, federal policy requires that immigration officers investigate potentially credible citizenship claims of those in custody. A 2015 ICE policy on this topic, published via an archival request, notes that an assessment of a credible claim of citizenship should include a “ factual investigation and legal analysis and a review of all available DHS [Department of Homeland Security] data systems and any other reasonable resources available to the officer. While CBP policies are not publicly available in the same way, they are likely to be essentially similar; CBP press releases noted that field personnel are “trained in document analysis.”
Both Cortes and García dispute that any serious effort has been made to establish the validity of his claim.
‘They didn’t even try, they threw it away so quickly. It was a matter of – I don’t even know if it was an hour, ‘said García.
Cortes added that he started to protest when he was handcuffed. ‘In English they told me,’ What’s wrong? ‘and I said,’ At least give me back my papers, ‘and it was,’ No, no, we’ll get you out of here. ‘ They brought me out fascinated, I didn’t even talk to my aunt. “
“It made me sick, I felt very depressed. It’s a very violent city, and I actually lived on the street.“
Regarding the recovery of documentation, CBP spokesman Dyman said he “would propose investigating how to replace US birth certificates if an original is lost.” The State Department referred questions about Cortes’s situation back to DHS, while a Biden White House spokesman told The Daily Beast that the Title 42 order was being reviewed by the new government.
“We want to restart and resume processing at the border, and we have,” added the White House spokesman. “However, we are in a pandemic. And so therefore, coupled with the chaos and the things that have been done to our immigration policy over the past four years, we are not in a place where we can just flip a switch and things can be more or less the way they were before. . “
Since his second deportation, Cortes has been assisted by the cross-border legal and social services group Al Otro Lado, which is trying to provide him with new proof of citizenship. He stayed in Tijuana for about five months hoping the lawsuit would be resolved soon, but eventually returned to his mother’s hometown.
“It made me sick, I felt very depressed. It’s a very violent city and I actually lived on the street, ”he said.
According to Nicole Ramos, Cortes’s attorney at Al Otro Lado, he did not go to the consulate as they currently have little official evidence that he is a Native American citizen. But Cortes and his aunt have copies of some immunization records, baptism and hospital papers, which have been reviewed by The Daily Beast (the main originals were taken by CBP, they claim). An employee of the San Antonio de Padua Catholic Church in Los Angeles this week confirmed that the priest who baptized Cortes worked there in 1991. A spokesperson for the LAC-USC Medical Center told The Daily Beast that the medical records team confirmed the authenticity of the signature on a letter dated a few days after Cortes was born, stating that he was born there. Neither the church nor the hospital would specifically testify that Cortes had passed their facilities.
The original Title 42 order was ostensibly intended to protect U.S. immigration authorities and border communities from the coronavirus pandemic, but was issued based on the objections of CDC personnel, some of whom refused to sign it off. Leading public health experts have disputed that there is any public health rationale for the policy, and its use has been deemed illegal by the United Nations. A federal judge had prevented the government from deporting unaccompanied minors under the warrant, but the decision was overturned by a Trump-appointed DC Circuit Court panel last week. (The Biden government has said it has no plans to deport minors.)
The Washington Post reported this week that the Mexican government has begun refusing banned children and families, but is still taking single adults. Meanwhile, an executive order, signed by President Biden on Feb. 2, ordered the CDC and the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, in consultation with DHS, to “promptly review and determine whether termination, dissolution, or amendment” warranted, but left the policy unchanged, with no specific timeline for that review.
Cortes now feels like he just wasn’t prepared – but also determined to try again if he can.
“I didn’t know about the laws, you know,” he said. “About how they should protect you.”