The hot-button issue of granting citizenship to the children of immigrants that are born in the U.S. has a new poster child. Everybody meet four-year-old Emily Samantha Ruiz, a Long Island girl who was deported to Guatemala by the U.S. on March 11—despite being a totally legal citizen of the United States.
Emily's parents—who are both illegal immigrants from Guatemala—sent their older child to their homeland for the winter in the hopes the warmer climate would alleviate the little girl's asthma. On the 11th she was supposed to come back accompanied by her grandfather, who had a valid work visa to enter the country. But when their flight to JFK was delayed and sent to Dulles, Immigration officials noticed that Emily's grandfather (whose name has not been released) had entered the country illegally in the 90s and detained him (at which point he apparently had a panic attack and was taken to the hospital).
This left Emily in a legal limbo of sorts. For more than a day she was detained in federal custody in Washington while her parents, who speak only a little English, tried to figure out what was going on.
At which point versions of the story vary. Customs officials say they offered Emily's father Leonel Ruiz a chance to either pick up Emily at Dulles or to have the girl return to Guatemala with her grandpa. But if Ruiz had gone to pick up his daughter, he would have run the risk of being detained himself. And anyway, according to him, he was never offered that choice. Instead, he says, an official told him that Emily could either go back to Guatemala or be put into the custody of Virginia—an idea that terrified the Ruiz family.
“We were very worried, and my wife was crying and crying at what was happening,” Ruiz told the Times. Ruiz's lawyer, David Sperling, is now planning on sending a staffer to retrieve the girl in the coming days.
Meanwhile the U.S. is defending its actions saying that the Customs and Border Protection agency "strives to reunite children who are citizens with their parents. If the parents decide not to take custody of their children, the CBP works with other agencies to guard the security and the well-being of these children. That includes handing them over to other families.”
This story breaks as the issue of automatic citizenship for those born on U.S. soil has been much in the news. Last week Arizona came thisclose to pushing a measure that would have brought the issue to the Supreme Court, and other states (like Kansas and California) have flirted with laws to make automatic citizenship harder for children.
