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Whoops! The Department of Justice Admits That It Misunderstood U.S. Citizenship Law

Posted: Feb 27, 2015

We all know that immigration law is complicated. We all know that human beings make mistakes. What we don't expect is that our government can't figure out who its own citizens are. But time and time again, the government disappoints. The latest culprit is the Department of Justice (DOJ), which employs the most powerful attorneys in the country.

The DOJ has the authority to issue deportation orders. In a recent decision, the DOJ admitted that it has been misinterpreting certain citizenship statutes since 2008. As a consequence, DOJ officers have been incorrectly ordering U.S. citizens deported.

The DOJ's error involved what is known as "derivative citizenship." If a parent naturalizes while a child is under 18, the child automatically becomes a citizen, if some other conditions are met. For example, if a father naturalizes, his out-of-wedlock children must be "legitimated" to derive citizenship.

Unsurprisingly, some families do not know about derivative citizenship. They are unaware that their children became citizens by automatic operation of law. But government lawyers should understand how derivative citizenship works and apply the relevant statutes consistently.

The term "legitimated" is what tripped up the DOJ. In its decision, the DOJ explained that it misread the legal requirements for legitimation to occur -- which means that it issued flawed opinions from 2008 to 2015. This creates troubling policy problems: Will the DOJ communicate its error to affected individuals? How? When? What will the government do about U.S. citizens who already were mistakenly deported? Will the government make any effort to identify them and bring them home?

Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-murraytjan/whoops-the-department-of_b_6763514.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

First of all, America's immigration laws should not be complicated. Second, this has been occurring since 2008, and we all know who was elected as president that year. Can this current administration be even more incompetent than has previously been thought?

;

Thanks, Obama! - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
Conservatives never cease to amaze me that in their zeal to place blame on President Obama and his administration for everything, they often seem to miss the big picture. The facts regarding this issue happen to be that the DOJ issued a ruling in 2008 during the Bush administration that set incorrect precedent that has subsequently caused the erroneous deportation of many people who were actually American citizens under United States law, complicated law to be sure.

The decision in this case was that a child born out of wedlock in Jamaica in 1988 to parents that were neither of them United States citizens and both Jamaican citizens was indeed an American citizen. How is that even possible? The child's biological Jamaican parents were never married, but the child's Jamaican father had subsequently placed his name on the child's Jamaican birth registration form seven years after his birth in 1995, thereby qualifying the child as legitimized for purposes of visa preference classification. The child's father then immigrated to the United States when the child was 12 years old, bringing the child with him. The child was admitted into the United States in September 2000 at the age of 12. When the child's father became an American citizen in August 2001, the child automatically became an American citizen by virtue of being in the father's legal custody at that time and being under the age of 18. Fast forward to January 2010 when he committed a burglary, and the United States DOJ attempted to deport him back to Jamaica, but his lawyers successfully argued that he was an American citizen and it was thus discovered the United States had been deporting people for quite awhile based on an incorrect decision made by the DOJ in 2008 during the Bush administration as it applied to the citizenship of Jamaican persons with unmarried foreign parents. It was determined he is indeed a United States citizen whether his Jamaican parents were married or not, and he will therefore not be deported back to Jamaica by virtue of his American citizenship, although it looks to me like he might have already spent or will be spending some time in an American prison.

That about sums it up, although I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would point out this issue as somehow a glaring error created by the Obama administration just because Obama was elected to office in November of 2008. I mean, we all know that a president doesn't take office the year he is elected. Departments like the DOJ don't review every law and precedent of prior administrations when a new president is elected nor sworn in, but sometimes mistakes do come to light after the fact.

In my opinion, this is a better illustration of how eager conservatives are to place blame at Obama's feet for the actions made by the Bush administration (and all prior administrations for that matter), as if somehow America was a perfect nation until Barack Obama was elected in 2008 and actually became POTUS in 2009. LOL.

Darn those - pesky facts! (nm)

[ In Reply To ..]
x

Guess you're in the wrong profession, eh? - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
But maybe not going by your "opinion" piece. LOL

Canadian eh? - nm

[ In Reply To ..]
.

Interesting criticism from conservatives - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
It's not exactly a normal occurrence to see conservatives try to prove the incompetence of the Obama administration by blaming them for the deportation of criminals. This article from the Huffington Post written by the Director of the Federal Immigration Appeals Project is complaining about DOJ's excessive deportation and how they've been wrongfully applying a misreading of rules since 2008 to that end. Had the OP followed the links to get the gist of the article's argument here, they would have discovered that the second link in the article in the original post leads to a story in The New Yorker called "The Deportation Machine" where DOJ is being criticized for the wrongful deportation of brown skinned people in the criminal justice system since the United States ramped up deportation after 9/11/2001.

That article states:

"Between 1892 and 1997, the United States deported 2.1 million people. By the end of next year, if present trends continue, the Obama Administration will have deported that many in a mere six years."

The object of the exercise in the article posted by the OP is to question whether or not the DOJ will undo the damage:

"Will the DOJ communicate its error to affected individuals? How? When? What will the government do about U.S. citizens who already were mistakenly deported? Will the government make any effort to identify them and bring them home?"

Although I'm not surprised to see it on this board where Obama and his administration are attacked for all manner of things, I doubt if we'll see very many conservatives in the clown car complain about Obama's incompetence in attempting to deport criminals based on the 2008 misreading of citizenship laws and calling for Obama to bring them home.

It strike me that almost conservative article/fact - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
that is presented on this board is easily refuted by just a couple of verifications. I have to wonder why they keep trying to pass off this misinformation.

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