Nineteen-year-old Jose Hermosillo, a resident of New Mexico, was detained for ten days at the Florence Correctional Center, a privately operated Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Arizona after immigration officials questioned his claim of US citizenship.
Border Patrol agents apprehended Hermosillo in Nogales, a city near the Mexico border located about an hour south of Tucson.
On April 17, nearly ten days after his detention, a federal judge dismissed his case.
However, a senior Department of Homeland Security official provided a different version of events.
In an email to The Guardian, the official stated, “The narrative being pushed about Jose Hermosillo is false. On April 8, Hermosillo approached Border Patrol in Tucson and claimed that he had entered the US illegally through Nogales. He expressed a desire to turn himself in and completed a sworn statement identifying himself as a Mexican citizen who had entered unlawfully.”
