http://gawker.com/5873138/teen-girl-mistakenly-deported-now-trapped-in-foreign-prison-and-pregnant
Well, I think you know that I work as an immigration/DV attorney for legal aid in Austin and south Texas. We were actually brought in to consult on this, and I honestly can't say everything I know, but what I can say is that almost everything in the linked news stories is bullshit. I'm not going to get into victim blaming, because ICE obviously did not do its due diligence here. But Jakadrien engineered almost everything that happened, and the grandmother's declaration that she ran away because she was "distraught over the loss of her grandfather and her parents’ divorce" is a complete fabrication.
Here's what I know, or at least what I'd be allowed to say.
1) She didn't leave home because she was distraught over grandpa. She had a MUCH MUCH older boyfriend who was a drug dealer/gangbanger in Houston. After a fight with her family over the boyfriend, drugs, and how much school she'd been skipping, she left Dallas to be with the boyfriend. It wasn't made clear to me whether he took her to Houston or she followed him there.
2) There was some sort of fight/split with the boyfriend in Houston. No one is really sure right now if he's the father of the baby or if she got pregnant in Colombia. The boyfriend is in his late-20s/early-30s, previously arrested on suspicion of homicide in the mid-aughts but later released. A real piece of shit, which maybe also explains why he has no compunctions about fucking a 14-year-old.
3) The fake name she gave? That's someone Jakadrien knows who worked as a drug mule/dealer in Houston. The real woman was an associate of the boyfriend. Jakadrien did not pick the name at random, but I don't think Jakadrien knew that this woman had warrants either.
4) Jakadrien did everything possible to avoid giving away her real identity. She was not only afraid of telling her family about the baby and that she had continued to see the drug-dealing boyfriend, but she'd also pissed off associates of the boyfriend in Houston who had some serious gang associations. Like cartel sort of gang associations. After she was picked up, she lied every single step of the way. Had she said at any point that she was a US citizen, she could have brought this whole thing to a halt.
It's still horrible that she's pregnant and stuck in a Colombian prison, obviously. But this is the real story behind whatever the media ends up printing.
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