Peter Guzman

Peter Guzman is not illegal. He is a United States citizen, but this fact did not stop ICE officials from deporting him “on a bus with $3 in his pocket and put him out in Tijuana” (ACLU). On May 11, 2007, Guzman was taken from an LA County jail and sent to Mexico even though he had the documentation to prove he was a United States citizen. His family was never notified of where he was taken and for the next three months his family looked for him as they “slept in a banana warehouse and started their days at 6a.m., visiting hospitals, jails, shelters, and truck stops. His other scanned photos of the deceased from a Tijuana morgue.”

According to the ACLU, who has just filed a lawsuit on his behalf, Guzman was coerced into waving his legal rights as a US citizen. Guzman struggles with basic literacy, “visual processing, conceptualization skills and memory” and therefore did not fully understand the documents he signed to wave his rights.

The story of Guzman, who had to survive in Tijuana, where he knew nobody, by begging and sleeping outdoors, shows that the motivations behind many ICE raids and deportations have more to do with racism than they do with keeping law and order and protecting our borders. As the ACLU writes, “Jail personnel and ICE agents conduct screenings into inmates’ immigration status that ‘presume foreign citizenship of inmates based upon their race, ethnicity, appearance and/or surname.”

“Family of U.S. Citizen Illegally Deported to Mexico Says Government Endangered His Life” UCLU of Southern California. 27 February 2008. <>