Immigration Authorities Kept an 8-Year-Old US Citizen in a Brooklyn Shelter for Nearly Seven Months

RGM’s story, detailed in court filings, paints a picture of a federal bureaucracy uninterested in exploring evidence that the boy was in the wrong place, unnecessarily separated from his family.

It also illustrates the strain that new Trump administration policies have placed on families trying to reunite with their children, forcing them to risk arrest or deportation if they come forward.

RGM’s grandmother declined an interview request through the family’s attorney, and his mother didn’t respond to attempts to reach her by phone. New York Focus is withholding their names to avoid subjecting their family to targeting by immigration enforcement.

In response to questions, the federal Administration for Children and Families, which includes ORR, said it does not comment on individual cases. In court filings, the agency did not confirm or deny RGM’s grandmother’s account of telling officials about her daughter’s citizenship. It said no one told them RGM was a citizen until late May and argued that his case was complicated by his relatives’ concerns about the sponsorship process. It didn’t address why it didn’t look into his citizenship status earlier.

Rachel Levenson, an attorney for the nonprofit immigrant rights’ organization Make the Road New York who worked on the family’s case, said ORR failed to follow the law and its own policies requiring the release of children with US citizenship.

“They were told he had a US citizen mother, they were provided a birth certificate showing the mother is a US citizen, and for months they took absolutely no steps to investigate,” Levenson said.

“It is pretty horrifying that it does not appear to have been even that alarming to them,” she said.

She gave birth to RGM in February 2017 in Mexico. US rules about passing on citizenship to children born abroad are complex, but RGM’s case was straightforward, according to Peter J. Spiro, a law professor at Temple University and expert on citizenship law. Based on his mother’s years of residence in New York and the laws in place when he was born, RGM automatically inherited his mother’s US citizenship.

When RGM was a toddler, his mother got an American passport and moved back to the US, leaving RGM with relatives in Mexico. His grandmother visited and sent money for the boy’s care, she said.

Then, late last year, immigration officials called RGM’s grandmother to tell her that RGM was in federal custody in Texas. She said she gave them the boy’s birth certificate, which showed that his mother is a US citizen.

“They told me that it did not matter that [RGM’s] mother is a citizen,” she said in the affidavit. 

The court records suggest that RGM’s family initially didn’t realize that he was born a US citizen. It wasn’t until May that his immigration attorney informed the Office of Refugee Resettlement of his citizenship status. 

Regardless of whether the family understood his status, the federal government should have, according to Jen Smyers, who served as deputy director of ORR under the Biden administration.

After reviewing one of RGM’s court filings, Smyers said it appeared that whoever allegedly told his grandmother that his mother’s citizenship was irrelevant was poorly informed, and that that detail should have immediately triggered an inquiry into the possibility that the boy was a citizen.

“ORR doesn’t have statutory authority to hold a US citizen in custody,” she said. “Per the policy guide, if it’s found that there’s a citizen in custody, ORR has to release them.”

Advocates also complain that the process exposes sponsors and their family members to potential arrest and deportation, as ORR now shares information with the Department of Homeland Security and sometimes asks sponsors to attend appointments at Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices.

Early in the boy’s detention, both RGM’s mother and grandmother, who is a legal permanent resident, had stepped forward to sponsor him, but both hesitated when they learned that the vetting process would require their household members to provide identity documents and fingerprints. At the end of February, RGM’s grandmother told ORR “that she no longer wanted to sponsor RGM and she also requested that she no longer have calls or visits with him,” according to a court declaration from an agency official. On the same day, his mother “confirmed that she cannot sponsor due to her partner’s legal status,” the official claimed.

In early April, RGM’s grandmother got back in touch with the agency and said she did, in fact, want to proceed with sponsorship, according to the declaration, but she never submitted a sponsorship application. In her affidavit, she said she had been doing everything possible to reunite with the boy.

“He has had a lot of instability in his life and I am ready and eager to provide him with consistency and care,” she said. “I want to give him a future here in the United States: to take him to school and to show him my love.”

The ORR official’s court declaration noted that his agency took custody of RGM after the Department of Homeland Security determined he was an “unaccompanied alien child,” with no legal status in the US. But while ORR tried to get his relatives to go through the sponsorship process, no one apparently looked into the possibility that he was actually a US citizen.

“From ORR’s perspective, the difficulty here is the very unusual set of facts,” the ORR official wrote. “Since he has come into ORR custody, the purported mother and grandmother have gone back and forth on whether to sponsor and neither has submitted a sponsorship application package.”