The Fresno Bee reported that Bukle “said he doesn’t want anyone else to experience what he went through”—and there have been far too many who have experienced it. The non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a 2021 report that 800 potential U.S. citizens were either arrested or detained between 2015 and 2020. As many as 70 were deported. And because of ICE’s known aversion to record-keeping, who knows who else we don’t know about.
“Cases like mine are important because it helps agencies like ICE realize that what they are doing is completely wrong and helps others who are harmed by ICE know that there are people out there who care about their rights and will fight alongside them,” he told the outlet.
Bukle, who is originally from the British Virgin Islands and has been a U.S. citizen since the age of 9, should have been released by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation after completing his time in 2020. But he’d instead been included on a list of immigrants for ICE to pick up. In Bukle’s case, it wasn’t even ICE that got him, but rather a third-party contractor named G4S Secure Solutions, Inc.
Folks wondered aloud if using a third-party contractor this way was even legal, and as it turned out, it wasn’t. It’s illegal under federal law, but ICE had been doing it anyway since at least 2016 because, well, ICE is a cabal of sadists intent on making immigrants’ lives miserable. Under a court settlement stemming from an Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus and ACLU Foundation of Northern California lawsuit, the mass deportation agency finally agreed to stop using the services of contractors like G4S Secure Solutions, Inc. in this manner, in addition to having to fork over $200,000 in legal fees.
“From the moment he was in ICE custody, Brian told officers over and over again that he is a U.S. citizen, but they ignored him,” Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus and the ACLU Foundation of Northern California said in announcing the new settlement. He’d been detained at Bakersfield’s Mesa Verde ICE Processing Facility, a privately operated prison long on our radar for human rights abuses and completely preventable COVID-19 outbreaks. Officials “didn’t care about me or my life,” Bukle said last year.
Officials at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had also been aware of his immigration status. Research has shown that Black immigrants are significantly more likely to be targeted for deportation.
“Brian was in ICE custody for 36 days—achieving freedom only after getting in touch with an immigration attorney who finally compelled ICE to admit what the documents in its possession had shown all along: Brian has been a U.S. citizen since he was a child,” the organizations continued. ICE had also ignored its own policy directing officials to take certain actions to investigate “the potential U.S. citizenship of individuals encountered by ICE,” court documents had said.
“We are pleased that Mr. Bukle prevailed in his claims against ICE, but we are mindful that no amount of money can give someone back the time they lost while wrongfully detained,” ACLU of Northern California staff attorney Minju Cho told The Fresno Bee. “No amount of money can undo the trauma that a person experiences in immigration detention.”
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