The DHS Has Been Using A Fake Mexican Constitution Article To Deport US Citizens For 35 Years

from the every-deportation-justifies-the-lie dept

We're used to our government's security and intelligence agencies telling lies in order to justify their actions. The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has achieved a sort of infamy for his "least untruthful answer" in response to questioning. (Not that this infamy has cost him his job…) Others have performed linguistic aerobics ("not under this program," "relevant to…") to stretch the truth just enough to give their activities a thin veneer of legitimacy.

The DHS does it, too. However, when it lies, it goes big, and it plays a long, long con.

For more than two decades, Sigifredo Saldana Iracheta insisted he was a U.S. citizen, repeatedly explaining to immigration officials that he was born to an American father and a Mexican mother in a city just south of the Texas border.

Year after year, the federal government rejected his claims, deporting him at least four times and at one point detaining him for nearly two years as he sought permission to join his wife and three children in South Texas.

In rejecting Saldana's bid for citizenship, the government sought to apply an old law that cited Article 314 of the Mexican Constitution, which supposedly dealt with legitimizing out-of-wedlock births. But there was a problem: The Mexican Constitution has no such article.

NPR calls it an "error." Jeff Gamso, public defender and former criminal defense lawyer, calls it something else.
Our government's been lying to the courts about this since at least 1978 when the Immigration and Naturalization Service first invented Article 314 of the Mexican Constitution as a convenient way to deny citizenship to and thus deport American citizens.

Read more:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/2013100...-35-years.shtml

The more one reads, the longer it seems that the IRS is not the only member of the fourth branch of government that has functioned by its own whims, not by the rule of law.

It's very disheartening.