African-American teen missing since 2010 mistakenly deported to Colombia
African-American teen missing since 2010 mistakenly deported to Colombia
By Alexis Garrett Stodghill
1:28 PM on 01/04/2012
An African-American teen who has been missing since 2010 was found to have been wrongfully deported to Colombia, Dallas outlet News 8 reports. Jakadrien Turner was mistakenly deported by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) in April of 2011 after being arrested as a teen runaway.
The troubled youth had fled her family at the age of 14 under duress caused by the death of her grandfather and her parents' divorce. Having made her way to Houston, Jakadrien was brought into police custody for theft, where she gave a fake name. That name coincidentally belonged to a Colombian illegal immigrant who had warrants out for her arrest.
Jakadrien's grandmother, Lorene Turner, had been looking for her granddaughter ever since she left the family fold, seemingly having vanished into thin air. Staying up many late nights for months searching on Facebook, Turner credits messages on the social network for aiding her discovery of her granddaughter's location. She also received help from Dallas police.
Turner alerted U.S. authorities after discovering that Jakadrien had been working as a cleaner in Colombia. The Colombian government had given her a work card upon her arrival there.
http://www.thegrio.com/news/african-...o-colombia.php
Immigration officials investigating circumstances under which Texas teen deported
Immigration officials investigating circumstances under which Texas teen deported to Colombia
By Associated Press, Updated: Thursday, January 5, 4:40 PM
EL PASO, Texas — The grandmother of a Dallas teen who was deported to Colombia is hoping the 15-year-old can come back soon and says federal officials should have done more to identify the girl after she gave a fake name and claimed to be an adult.
Immigration officials say they’re investigating the circumstances of the case involving Jakadrien Lorece Turner, but that they followed procedure and found nothing to indicate she wasn’t who she claimed to be — an illegal immigrant from Colombia.
The girl, who ran away from home more than a year ago, was recently found in Bogota, Colombia, by the Dallas police department with help from Colombian and U.S. officials. It was unclear when she might return to the U.S. or whether she would face charges.
Her grandmother, Dallas hairstylist Lorene Turner, calls the deportation a “big mistake somebody made” and said federal officials need to do better.
“She looks like a kid, she acts like a kid. How could they think she wasn’t a kid?” Lorene Turner asked on Thursday.
Jakadrien’s family says she left home in November 2010. Houston police said the girl was arrested on April 2, 2011 for misdemeanor theft in that city and claimed to be Tika Lanay Cortez, a Colombian woman born in 1990.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement official told The Associated Press on Thursday that the teen claimed to be Cortez throughout the criminal proceedings in Houston and the ensuing deportation process in which an immigration judge ultimately ordered her back to Colombia.
The ICE official, speaking on condition of anonymity due to not being authorized to discuss additional details of the case, said the teenager was interviewed by a representative from the Colombian consulate and that country’s government issued her a travel document to enter Colombia. The ICE official said standard procedure before any deportation is to coordinate with the other country in order to establish that person is from there.
The girl was given Colombian citizenship upon arriving there, the ICE official said.
Dallas Police Lt. Robert Hinton, head of the department’s youth division told the AP on Thursday that the U.S. embassy in Bogota had confirmed that the girl was found and is under protective custody by the Colombian government’s agency that oversees the welfare of children. The U.S. embassy in Colombia declined to comment to the AP, saying it did not have a privacy waiver from the family of the minor.
A spokesman for Colombia’s Family Welfare agency told the AP that the Foreign Minister was handling the matter and would be issuing a statement. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Sandra Cardona said the ministry had no immediate comment.
Immigration officials deferred questions about when the teen might return to the U.S. to the State Department, which said it was aware of the case but declined to comment further, citing privacy reasons. It was not clear if she might be charged upon her return for falsifying her identity in a criminal process.
Dallas Police detective C’mon (pronounced Simone) Wingo, the detective in charge of the case, explained that in August she was contacted by the girl’s grandmother, who said Jakadrien had posted “kind of disturbing” messages on a Facebook account where she goes by yet another name.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/nation...UdP_story.html
Colombia: Texas teen mistakenly deported will be handed over to U.S. officials
Colombia: Texas teen mistakenly deported will be handed over to U.S. officials
By the CNN Wire Staff
updated 10:16 PM EST, Thu January 5, 2012
(CNN) -- Colombia is preparing to hand over to U.S. officials a Dallas teenager who was mistakenly deported after she ran away from home more than a year ago, the South American country's foreign ministry said in a statement Thursday night.
Jakadrien Turner will be turned over to diplomatic officials Friday so she can be transported to the United States, the statement said. But the foreign ministry did not say when -- or how -- that will happen.
The U.S. Embassy in Bogota is working with Colombian authorities but cannot provide additional details "due to privacy considerations," said a U.S. State Department official who asked to remain anonymous per department policy.
Jakadrien somehow wound up deported to Colombia after U.S. authorities mistook the girl, who lacked identification, for a Colombian national.
Family members said Thursday night that they were thrilled at the news that the 15-year-old would be returning home.
"It's a giant step. I'm relieved, but I won't be completely relieved until I get her in my arms again," the girl's mother, Johnisa Turner, said. "A weight has definitely been lifted."
Grandmother Lorene Turner said U.S. Embassy officials called with the news that her granddaughter would be turned over to U.S. officials.
"When I heard those words I didn't hear nothing else. I flipped out. I can't wait," she said.
But Jakadrien's family was still demanding to know why immigration authorities deported the teen -- a U.S. citizen with no knowledge of Spanish -- and why they simply took her at her word when she gave them a fake name.
The teen's family had been searching for her since she ran away in the fall of 2010. Her grandmother scoured Facebook looking for the girl, viewing Jakadrien's friends' pages for any information.
"There's no words," Johnisa Turner told CNN of the ordeal. "It hasn't been easy at all."
The Colombian Institute for Family Welfare confirmed Thursday that Turner is in its custody, is pregnant, and entered the country as an adult. The institute said Colombian authorities learned about the case a month ago.
U.S. teen mistakenly deported to Colombia
After Jakadrien went missing, the family managed to track her to Houston, where she worked at a DJ club under a different name. They tried to get help from authorities there, to no avail.
Then, to the family's surprise, they learned their teenage daughter was in Colombia, partying with men and smoking marijuana. They later learned from a detective that Jakadrien was pregnant.
How Jakadrien got to Colombia is a mystery to the family. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency maintains she was arrested in Houston for theft and told them she was an adult from Colombia.
The agency says authorities believed her story because she maintained her false identity throughout the process. They handed her over to an immigration judge, who ordered her removed from the country.
"At no time during these criminal proceedings was her identity determined to be false," the agency says.
It says criminal database searches and biometric verification revealed no information to invalidate Jakadrien's claims.
The family's attorney, Ray Jackson, says it doesn't make sense.
"They dropped the ball," he said.
He says the immigration agency took Jakadrien's fingerprints but failed to match them to the name she gave. The name matched a woman wanted by Interpol, Jackson says, so they "shipped her on through."
The agency says it is taking the allegations very seriously and is "fully and immediately investigating the matter in order to expeditiously determine the facts of the case."
For months, family members said they frantically searched for signs of the missing teen.
Jakadrien had run away once before, two weeks earlier, her mother said, and Jakadrien told her the family didn't give her enough freedom. Her good grades at school had dropped off, something Turner blamed on the normal problems of teenagers. In addition, Jakadrien's grandfather, her mother's father, had recently died.
Turner said she contacted Dallas police, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Dallas transportation authorities. Nothing ever came of it, she said.
Grandmother Lorene Turner said she then started following Jakadrien's best friend on Facebook. She eventually tracked her granddaughter to Houston, where she worked at a club under the name Tika Cortez. Johnisa Turner said she saw Jakadrien's face on the marquee on her birthday.
"Oh my god," the mother said when she saw it. "Is this really happening? Is that my child?"
A picture on Cortez's Facebook page further confirmed for the family that the girl with the different name was their daughter. The picture had been taken of Jakadrien with her grandmother. Though her grandmother had been cut out of the picture, her hair still showed on the edge.
Her mother said she told Dallas authorities what she had found.
Then, Jakadrien's Facebook page suddenly said she was in Colombia. The family later learned she had been arrested in Houston for shoplifting, but they say they had no idea how she wound up in Colombia after the arrest.
The family's concerns grew when the detective told them that Jakadrien is pregnant, her mother said.
Johnisa Turner said she believes her daughter was coerced along the way, with someone promising her something that led her to maintain a fake story about who she is.
Jackson says he believes something more sinister is going on.
"There has to be something behind this 15-year-old girl ending up in Colombia, besides the fact that ICE dropped the ball," he said. "Of all the nicknames ... to pick one that's of Latino descent, for that to be a name that sticks and gets you deported, that doesn't make sense."
Pictures of Jakadrien in Colombia showed her sitting on men's laps smoking marijuana, her grandmother said. But Jakadrien, she said, seemed to be reaching out for help, listing on Facebook the names of everyone at parties, perhaps so she could be traced.
Jackson says he doesn't believe Jakadrien was trying to fake her way out of the country by using the false name throughout the process.
"I don't buy that she had the wherewithal to be able to bamboozle the government," Jackson says. "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."
Colombia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday that Jakadrien first arrived in Bogota after she was deported on May 23.
The ministry said it was investigating what sort of verification its consulate in Texas requested before giving the girl an expedited provisional passport as part of deportation proceedings, and how Jakadrien received work authorization for training at a call center as part of the government's "Welcome Home" program.
Attorneys with the program made a sworn declaration in front of a notary with "inexact information" that allowed her to receive work papers, the foreign ministry said.
"Those lawyers are no longer providing services to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs," the statement said.
The teen was placed in a protection program by the Colombian Institute for Family Welfare on December 1 after officials learned of her situation, the foreign ministry said.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/05/us/tex...html?hpt=hp_t1
Deported teen reunites with family in US; she deceived us, ICE says
Deported teen reunites with family in US; she deceived us, ICE says
By msnbc.com staff
Reuters
Jakadrien Turner, 15, in an undated handout photo provided by the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The Texas girl was flying home to the United States on Friday to be reunited with her family, nine months after she was deported to South America in a bizarre mix-up.
Update at 11:05 p.m. ET: Jakadrien Lorece Turner, the 15-year-old Texas girl mistakenly sent to South America in May after claiming to be an illegal immigrant, was reunited with her family Friday night after flying home from Colombia, The Associated Press reported.
She was flanked by her mother, grandmother and law enforcement when she emerged from the international gate Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
"She's happy to be home," the family's attorney, Ray Jackson, said, adding that the family would not issue any statements Friday night.
He said the family was "ecstatic" to have Jakadrien back in Texas and they plan to "do what we can to make sure she gets back to a normal life."
Update at 8 p.m. ET: Turner is back in the U.S. and will be in Dallas on Friday evening, her mother told The Associated Press.
Johnisa Turner said Jakadrien was on a flight from Atlanta. She said she has "a gazillion questions" for Jakadrien. "Our day has been hectic, hers is too," Turner said, "just as long as she makes it home, just as long as she gets here."
From the original post: Jakadrien Turner, arrested as a runaway and then mistakenly deported, is on her way home to the United States after the girl’s grandmother used Facebook to locate her in Colombia, thegrio.com reported Friday.
“They didn't do their work,” the grandmother Lorene Turner said of the federal government in an interview with a Dallas television station. “How do you deport a teenager and send her to Colombia without a passport, without anything?"
But the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the deportation took place because the girl lied about her identity and was not clear about her citizenship status, thegrio.com reported.
Turner was reported missing in November 2010 by her relatives in Dallas. When she was arrested for a minor theft in April 2011 in Houston, she reportedly used the alias Tika Lanay Cortez and claimed to be a 21-year-old from Colombia. She maintained the alias throughout her court appearances, conviction and jail time, Houston officials confirmed.
According to Houston police, Turner had apparently been using the name after running away from home after her parents divorced and her grandfather died.
ICE deported Turner — an African American who speaks no Spanish — as part of a program to remove foreign nationals from U.S. prisons.
After Dallas police helped Turner pinpoint her granddaughter's location in Colombia, local authorities detained her and kept her in detention for more than a month before boarding a plane home on Friday.
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20...ed-us-ice-says
