There are myriad concerns with the deportation system. It is difficult to practice this area of law without eventually feeling like a part of the machine, with tacit approval of its flaws and quirks. Flaws and quirks may at times deprive individuals of their rights, but they are to be expected, so the rationalization goes. But the outrage over the deportation of Jakadrien Turner story raises an interesting question. What makes people so upset? Is it that she is a child? The DHS deports children every day. Is it that she is now pregnant, or that she was deported to a place like Colombia? The DHS legally deports individuals to Colombia all the time, and children who have been deported are often the victims of exploitation. If these things are outrageous to you, then the entire process of deporting children should be outrageous.
But Jakadrien is a US citizen. Above all else, she had the right to not be deported by her government. And yet our system continues to fail to prevent the deportation of citizens (no this is not the first time). Until the system is fail-safe – until the DHS can guarantee it is sophisticated enough to check the name given by a 14 year old African American little girl from Texas so she doesn’t get deported to Colombia, the whole thing should be shut down.
The Jakadrien Turner case is not a strange outlier—it’s a warning signal. And she’s far from the only U.S. citizen who has been wrongfully deported. Reports from the ACLU, legal scholars, and investigative journalists document dozens of known cases in the past two decades where American citizens were either deported or nearly deported due to misidentification, inadequate procedural safeguards, or administrative shortcuts.
One of the core principles of our constitutional system is that citizenship protects a person from arbitrary removal. Yet DHS continues to operate with a “deport now, sort it out later” approach—an approach that simply doesn’t account for the permanent consequences of getting it wrong.
Jakadrien’s deportation wasn’t just a clerical mistake. It was the product of a system designed for speed, not certainty. She was 14. She gave a false name. But rather than verify identity, officials processed her as a Colombian national and deported her—despite red flags, a U.S. accent, no passport, and no Spanish fluency.
This case is a reminder that the immigration system is not just flawed—it’s vulnerable. When a U.S. citizen can be detained, misclassified, and deported based on thin assumptions and minimal review, no one’s status is safe from error.
Calls for a temporary moratorium on deportations, as radical as they might sound to some, aren’t about dismantling immigration enforcement. They’re about pressing pause until there are adequate safeguards to protect against life-altering mistakes.
If ICE cannot guarantee that its system won’t deport citizens—children, in particular—then a moratorium isn’t just reasonable. It’s the only morally defensible response.
Immigration law, more than most fields, walks the line between technical procedure and human consequence. And Jakadrien Turner’s case pushes us to ask: What level of error are we willing to accept? What if the next Jakadrien doesn’t come home?
At the time the story broke, we were skeptical. Early reports suggested a runaway teen had simply given a false name. But as details emerged, it became clear that a systemic failure—despite biometric checks—led to the wrongful deportation of a U.S. citizen. Our original commentary is preserved below for context:
“Consider me skeptical on this one – but the media is reporting this afternoon that a 14-year old Texas runaway was “mistakenly” deported to Colombia in 2010 and has been there ever since. Apparently, she was arrested for theft and gave a fake name, which turned out to be the name of a Colombian immigrant with an arrest warrant. Her grandmother apparently found her on Facebook of all places.
If ICE apprehends an individual and believes they have a previous removal order, that person usually doesn’t get a hearing before a judge – the prior order of removal gets “reinstated” and they get deported again. One could imagine that people slip through the cracks of this system, especially where their claim to US citizenship requires some explaining. But ICE also checks the person’s biometrics and takes a photograph of everyone it detains, to counter the use of fake names. Accidental deportations of citizens do happen, but this case would be considered unusual.”