U.S. Citizen Racially Profiled and Summarily Deported: A Built-in Feature of Mass Deportation Crusade
Washington, DC — According to a detailed post from Univision national correspondent Lidia Terrazas, a U.S. citizen named Brian Morales was racially profiled, threatened with a fraud charge, and summarily deported to Mexico this week despite his repeated protestations that he was a U.S. citizen.
As Terrazas reports, Morales was born in Denver, CO but grew up in Mexico and remains a Spanish-dominant speaker. Having recently returned to the U.S., Morales was detained during a traffic stop near Fredericksburg, TX along with other members of a construction crew in what likely amounts to a classic Kavanaugh stop and example of racial profiling.
Morales alleges that three different CBP agents didn’t believe him when asserting he had a birth certificate, Social Security card, and other documentation proving he was a U.S. citizen. Instead, they intimidated him and threatened him with a fraud charge and five years’ imprisonment if he didn’t sign a voluntary departure order. He complied and then was summarily deported to Mexico.
According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:
“This administration’s disdain for our fundamental rights has no bounds. The continued examples of U.S. citizens being detained and deported are a built-in feature of the Trump and Miller mass deportation crusade and the culture that prioritizes speed and quotas instead of accuracy, accountability or dignity. Brian Morales needs to be returned to the U.S. immediately and all of us need to demand an end to the out-of-control mass deportation machinery. Our constitutional rights are under siege.”
The arrests and deportations of U.S. citizens like Mr. Morales – as well as earlier examples such as Dulce Consuelo Díaz Morales, a Maryland-born mother detained after federal immigration officials accused her of faking her Maryland birth certificate, and others, also underscore the role that racial profiling and “Kavanaugh stops” are playing out across the country.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently highlighted and Bloomberg Law detailed in “Sotomayor Faults Kavanaugh Over Immigration Stops Concurrence,” “Those hours that they took you away, nobody’s paying that person. And that makes a difference between a meal for him and his kids that night and maybe just cold supper,” and warning that assumptions these encounters are brief or harmless ‘blink reality.’”