U.S. citizen deported to Mexico

[Ed Barrow]

Immigration officials are reviewing whether a 19-year-old man deported last week from South Texas is actually a U.S. citizen born in Houston. Luis Alberto Delgado said he and his older brother were stopped last Thursday by a Jim Wells County Sheriff captain, who called the U.S. Border Patrol.

Despite carrying a birth certificate showing he was born at Houston's Ben Taub Hospital, a state of Texas ID card and a Social Security card, Delgado said he was taken into Border Patrol custody, questioned for eight hours and pressured into signing paperwork that cleared the way for his removal to Mexico.

Delgado, who returned to Houston three years ago after spending much of his childhood in Mexico, said immigration officials were suspicious because he spoke very little English. He said they kept saying, "No, these papers aren't yours."

"What they did to me was discrimination," Delgado said in a telephone interview from Reynosa. "I don't understand why they did this."

"I am an American citizen," he said.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/facebook/7077166.html