A 15-year-old Dallas girl who had told US immigration officials she was a 21-year-old immigrant is on her way back to the United States after being deported to Colombia.
Jakadrien Turner's family has threatened to sue the US immigration system for failing to spot her ruse, especially since, according to the family, she didn't speak Spanish. Meanwhile, Texas police are considering whether to charge her with identity theft upon her return.
Jakadrien, known to family and friends as Kay-Kay, ran away from her Dallas home in the fall of 2010. After moving to Houston, she worked in a nightclub under a fake name. In the first part of 2011, she was arrested for shoplifting in Houston, and she told law enforcement that she was Tika Lanay Cortez – a Colombian woman born in 1990.
RECOMMENDED: Could you pass a US citizenship test? Take the quiz.
On May 23, 2011, Jakadrien was deported by a federal immigration judge.
Spurred by pleas and Facebook leads from the family, the Dallas Police Department, working in conjunction with Colombian and US officials, tracked the girl down about a month ago to where she was living in Bogotá.
The fact that a Dallas teen could convincingly turn herself into a Colombian expatriate does raise questions about gaps in a fast-moving US immigration system, which last year deported a record 400,000 people.
"Somewhere the ball was dropped," Ray Jackson, the family's attorney, told CNN. "You know, kids are scared when they get around authorities.... To think that you could bamboozle them to create a new identity, it just doesn't make sense."
According to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, immigration officials believed Jakadrien 's story because she never wavered from her false identity. "At no time during these criminal proceedings was her identity determined to be false," the agency said in a statement.
Some legal experts say that Jakadrien could well have invited deportation to avoid facing her family and the prospect of a juvenile delinquency prosecution. Also, those who have taken a close look at the case say it's not crazy to think that the possibility of an international adventure in Colombia could appeal to a runaway who had shown enough maturity and wherewithal to survive on her own for a year on the streets of Houston.
The situation points up some of the difficulties of verifying identification in immigration cases.
“If Turner did not contest her identity or her deportation, it's hard to see what immigration officials should have done differently,” writes legal expert Ted Frank on the PointofLaw.com blog, which examines contemporary legal issues. “There isn't a national biometric database of teenagers' ... fingerprints ... and, normally, we think that to be a good thing.”
He concludes, “Unless we're going to stop deporting people entirely, there's no cost-effective means, short of infringing on the privacy rights of hundreds of millions of Americans, of preventing a Jakadrien Turner from deceiving immigration officials.”
Upon her deportation, Jakadrien was accepted into the Colombia government's expatriate “Welcome Home” program. At least as evidenced by Facebook posts, she lived an adventuresome life, partying and smoking pot with adults during her off-hours from cleaning a mansion. She became pregnant while in Colombia.
Her family believes she attempted to reach out to family members through Facebook, primarily by listing the names of people she met at parties. Her family has not spoken to her since she ran away and did not attempt to contact her through Facebook. They worried she had become a victim of a human trafficking ring.
"I didn't want to scare her or get her in trouble with those who had her," Lorene Turner, her grandmother, told the Associated Press. "She didn't have any reason to leave. She lived in a nice home [with her mother and stepfather]. We were very close. I don't know why she left."
While US authorities continue to investigate Jakadrien's deportation, the Colombia Ministry of Foreign Affairs said attorneys at the country's consulate in Texas had been fired for making a sworn declaration on a provisional passport application on the basis of "inexact information."
RECOMMENDED: Could you pass a US citizenship test? Take the quiz.
Get daily or weekly updates from CSMonitor.com delivered to your inbox. Sign up today.
There are no comments yet