Matt Ortega

Just prior to the Labor Day holiday weekend, the Star-Telegram reported that Alicia Rodriguez, a Texas woman born in Dallas, was mistakenly jailed and held as an “illegal immigrant” by local authorities.

Alicia Rodriguez, an accountant and mother of three, has the same name and date of birth as a woman deported to Mexico three times.

“I was told I was waiting for an [immigration] officer or Border Patrol officer to interview me and then move me to another location. It was very scary,” the Mansfield woman said. [...]

“This is very unusual,” Arlington police spokeswoman Christy Gilfour said “We’re not aware of this having happened before. We do realize that this is unfortunate, and we do regret that we made an error.”

Gilfour said police overlooked fingerprints that would have shown Rodriguez was not the illegal immigrant.

It is stories like Rodriguez’s and Pedro Guzman, the developmentally challenged man that was mistakenly deported to Mexico where it took his family three months to find him, that make massive deportations incredibly risky and bad immigration policy. There is no room for error and these kinds civil rights violations of Americans would only increase exponentially.

Also, it is important to note that older and/or poorer Americans lack proper documentation like birth certificates. The government questioned the legal status of an elder in my family despite having been born and lived in New Mexico even before it achieved statehood in 1912.