U.S. Citizen Sues ICE for False Imprisonment in Minnesota

An article in the Star-Tribune by Paul McEnroe reveals yet another U.S. citizen who was falsely imprisoned.

A Minneapolis man was arrested and illegally detained for 43 days by federal immigration agents who sought to have him deported even though he is a U.S. citizen, according to a lawsuit filed recently in federal court in Minneapolis.

Mr. McEnroe didn't tell me the details of the case he was following during our interview, but now that the story is published it appears that the fact-pattern that led to Anthony Clarke's unlawful incarceration is typical of the ones I tracked among the 2006-08 files of the Florence Project, the country's largest federally-funded legal orientation program for people in immigration jails: the person targeted for deportation has a marijuana conviction and is foreign-born.

Millions of U.S. citizens are foreign-born and acquire or derive U.S. citizenship by operation of law, e.g., Sen. John McCain. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targets those who are foreign-born and have some run-in with the criminal database, yielding the arrest of criminal aliens and criminal U.S. citizens alike.

ICE agents are indifferent to civil rights, leading to the arrest of a U.S. citizen occurring in about one percent of all ICE arrests, meaning about 4,000 cases last year alone.

You may download "U.S. Citizens Unlawfully Detained and Deported as Aliens" published in the Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law here.

Photo of Anthony Clarke from the Star-Tribune.