America can complain and condemn the call for the complete abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but once they start arguing that people are calling for it for no reason, they’re just showing off their dedication to ignoring reality. The violence, the human rights abuses, the lies and cover-ups, the detaining and harassing of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike — under this administration, and its aggressive mass deportation agenda, these transgressions have become far too common and constant.
And, again, it’s a form of oppression that being a U.S. citizen won’t necessarily shield you from.
In Iowa City, Iowa, immigration authorities detained for a year and sought to deport a mentally ill man who was born in the U.S., according to his mother and attorneys. The Trump administration, on the other hand, is claiming the man — identified as 39-year-old Phillip James — is from Jamaica, and that his birth certificate is fake.
From the Associated Press:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has no authority to detain U.S. citizens, but has long done so, usually for hours or days, when officers mistake identities or can’t immediately verify citizenship. Immigration lawyers say a nearly 10-month improper detention would be rare but not unprecedented.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, disputes that the man is a U.S. citizen and alleges, without providing evidence, that the birth certificate he submitted to obtain a U.S. passport that he held for 15 years was fraudulent. But AP’s review found documents that support claims by his mother and legal team that he was born in Florida and therefore not subject to ICE’s authority.
The findings suggest that a cursory investigation, lax oversight, and possibly a refusal to admit a mistake may have ensnared a U.S. citizen for nearly all of 2026 as the Trump administration rushes to deport large numbers of people suspected of being in the country illegally.
James, who also goes by the name Felibi Siagha-Coke, according to court records, is still being held at an ICE facility in Indiana, which the Department of Homeland Security has affectionately referred to as the “Speedway Slammer,” because the people who gave us Alligator Alcatraz just can’t stop being insensitive assholes about their Gestapo-like immigration enforcement methods.
To make matters worse, an immigration judge has already ordered that James be deported to Jamaica, but his lawyers say they’re in the process of appealing that ruling, and “a federal judge has indicated he could soon rule on a petition to free him from custody,” AP reported.
AP also noted that Jamaican officials have denied any record that James was born or has citizenship there, and immigration authorities relied on his word — the word of a man who suffers from mental illness, according to his family and medical experts — that he was born in Jamaica and entered the U.S. in 2009 while undocumented.
More from AP:
James’ insistence that he was born in Jamaica is a grand delusion, a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia with which he has been diagnosed, according to reports filed in court by medical experts who have recently assessed him. In particular, he claims that he is the illegitimate son of a former Jamaican prime minister and the descendant of a royal family in Lebanon, where he also claims citizenship despite a lack of evidence.
One psychologist concluded James was not “a reliable historian due to the serious nature of his mental illness, including a deeply entrenched delusional belief system.”
So, then why TF is he in lock-up? How could immigration agents detain and prepare him for deportation without really checking, outside of taking him at his word, despite his mental illness? How can they just decide his paperwork is fraudulent? How can an immigration judge rule that he should be deported based on what any officer of the court should recognize as a man being railroaded? What’s really going on?
“What’s going on in these cases is that evidence that’s consistent with deportation is treated as accurate and evidence that is inconsistent is treated as fraudulent,” said Jacqueline Stevens, a Northwestern University professor, who has reportedly studied ICE’s wrongful detention of citizens for two decades. “This case is not a one-off. This is a feature, not a bug, of how ICE handles claims of U.S. citizenship.”
And that’s why ICE needs to be reformed or abolished outright, and replaced with a system that is more humane and less vulnerable to the abuses of bigots in power.
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