meIn June, federal agents confiscated the paperwork of a self-proclaimed American citizen and expelled him to Mexico under a controversial CDC order apparently aimed at fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, the Daily Beast found. And despite a series of executive actions reversing some Trump-era immigration policies, newly inaugurated President Joe Biden left that order in place, with his government offering no clear indication that it plans to end it soon.
All available evidence points to the fact that Óscar Luis Cortes García was born in May 1991 in Los Angeles, California. When he was still a child, his mother decided to return to his hometown in the state of Colima, Mexico, Cortes explained recently. He spent most of the next two decades in Mexico, but clung to the idea of one day living in the United States.
“They didn’t even try, they kicked him out so fast.“
– Angelica García
When the coronavirus pandemic hit and dried up all the work in his city, he finally decided to take the leap and make the trip, he said. But he was unaware 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 resources to go to a consulate. Later, they told me that consulates were free, but I didn’t know that at the time ”.
Imagining that a citizen would be allowed to enter anywhere along the border, Cortes said, he crossed the official ports of entry.
Shortly thereafter, Cortes was arrested with a group of undocumented migrants. He figured he could present his identity documents when he was taken to a processing center. Instead, he had his fingerprints and was immediately expelled under the order of Title 42 of the CDC, which authorizes US immigration personnel to immediately refuse people without valid entry documents, even if they intend to apply for asylum.
The status on which it is based is not strictly immigration, but a public health measure designed to prevent the introduction of communicable diseases into the United States. Still, it provided a convenient way for the Trump administration to advance its anti-asylum agenda: more than 380,000 evictions occurred under this authority, according to data from the CBP itself.
After Cortes’s first unsuccessful attempt, his aunt Angélica García – an American citizen living in California – convinced him to go through an official entrance door and went down to Mexico to accompany him during the passage. “He doesn’t say much, he’s very shy, he doesn’t perform well,” she told The Daily Beast. However, the two remembered, they realized that having a birth certificate, a social security card and a baptism certificate would be more than enough.
Instead, Cortes explained, when Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents realized that he had been expelled, he was taken to a separate area and aggressively questioned about his documents. “Immediately, they said the papers were not mine, that they would accuse me of identity theft,” said Cortes. “I said, ‘Go ahead, do this, the documents are mine'”.
Even though Cortes was asking to be arrested so that his claims could be assessed, he was expelled again – but not before agents confiscated all of his documents, he said.
This report was supported by García, who claimed to have been overlooked, but later threatened her with criminal prosecution when she intervened on his behalf and tried to show agents photos of Cortes’ baptism. “[An agent] went out and said, ‘You know, I could accuse you of smuggling people into the country illegally.’ I was not afraid because I knew I was not doing anything wrong, ”she said.
CBP spokesman Matthew Dyman told The Daily Beast that the agency’s record of the meeting “neutralizes the narrative you are looking for”. According to Dyman, Cortes “was unable to provide specific details of the birth certificate that was presented to the CBP Officer, nor to answer any of the questions about his alleged birth in the United States.” Dyman also stated that both Cortes and García were expelled and questioned why Cortes believed he could have crossed the border between the entrance doors as an American citizen.
While a U.S. citizenship claim does not automatically allow people to enter the country, federal policies require immigration agents to investigate potentially credible citizenship claims from those in custody. A 2015 ICE policy on the matter released through a request for records notes that an assessment of a credible citizenship claim must involve a “factual examination and legal analysis and must include a verification of all available DHS [Department of Homeland Security] data systems and any other reasonable means available to the officer. ”Although CBP’s policy direction is not equally public, it is likely to be substantially similar; CBP’s press releases noted that field personnel are “trained in document analysis”.
Cortes and García dispute that any serious effort was made to determine the validity of their complaint.
“They didn’t even try, they kicked him out so fast. It was a matter of … I don’t even know if it was an hour, ”said García.
Cortés added that when he was handcuffed, he started to protest. “In English, they said to me, ‘What’s the matter?’ and I said, ‘Well, at least give me back my papers,’ and it was, ‘No, no, we’re getting you out of here.’ They brought me in handcuffs, I couldn’t even talk to my aunt. “
“I was sick of it, I was feeling very depressed. It is a very violent city, and I basically lived on the street.“
Regarding the retrieval of documentation, CBP spokesman Dyman said he “would suggest researching how to replace US birth certificates if an original is lost”. The State Department referred questions about Cortes’ situation 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 be able to restart and resume processing at the border, and we did,” added the White House spokesman. “However, we are in a pandemic. And so, combined with the chaos and the things that have been done to our immigration policies over the past four years, we are not in a place where we can just push a button and have things as they were before. “
Since his second expulsion, Cortes has been assisted by the cross-border group of legal and social services Al Otro Lado, which tries to obtain him a new proof of citizenship. He stayed in Tijuana for about five months in the hope that the lawsuit would be resolved quickly, but ended up returning to his mother’s hometown.
“I was sick of it, I was feeling very depressed. It is a very violent city and I basically lived on the street, ”he said.
According to Nicole Ramos, Cortes’ lawyer at Al Otro Lado, he did not go to the consulate because they currently have little official evidence that he is a natural American citizen. But Cortes and his aunt have copies of some hospital immunization, baptism and paperwork records, which were reviewed by the Daily Beast (the most important originals were taken by CBP, they say). An official at the Catholic Church of San Antonio de Padua in Los Angeles confirmed this week that the priest listed as baptizing Cortes was working there in 1991. A spokesman for the LAC-USC Medical Center told The Daily Beast that the medical records team corroborated the authenticity of the signature in a letter dated a few days after Cortes’ birth, stating that he was born there. Neither the church nor the hospital would specifically certify that Cortés passed through its facilities.
The initial Title 42 order was ostensibly designed to protect US immigration authorities and border communities from the coronavirus pandemic, but was issued against the objections of the CDC career team, some of whom refused to sign it. Leading public health experts dispute the existence of any public health rationale in politics, and its use has been considered illegal by the United Nations. A federal judge prevented the government from expelling unaccompanied minors under the order, but this decision was reversed last week by a panel appointed by Trump from the DC Circuit Court. (The Biden government said it does not plan to expel minors.)
The Washington Post reported this week that the Mexican government has begun to refuse to accept children and expelled families, but still accepts single adults. In the meantime, an executive order signed by President Biden on February 2 directed the CDC and the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, in consultation with DHS, to “promptly review and determine whether termination, termination or modification” of the order was guaranteed, but left the policy unchanged, without a specific timetable for this assessment to take place.
Cortes now feels he was not prepared – but also determined to try again when he can.
“I didn’t know anything about the laws, you know,” he said. “About how they should protect you.”