After being deported from JFK Airport, stuck in exile and later detained by immigration officials, U.S. citizen Blanca Maria Alfaro is relieved to have a passport again.
“This isn’t fair, all of this that they have done to me. I wouldn’t want it to happen to anyone else,” said Alfaro, who is now living in Long Island’s Huntington Station. Her new passport arrived in the mail Nov. 19.
Alfaro, 33, was born in Houston, Tex. But because she relocated with her father to his native El Salvador when she was 4, she speaks Spanish instead of English.
Her lawyer believes that federal officials, focusing on cracking down on immigration fraud, violated Alfaro’s due process rights as a U.S. citizen.
“I think it happens quite often. They are putting the priority on weeding out fraud,” said Bryan Johnson.
A State Department Official confirmed that Alfaro was issued a new passport after submitting additional information, and said the agency takes “seriously our responsibility to protect U.S. borders through the vigilant adjudication of U.S. passport applications.”
Alfaro’s situation is not entirely uncommon. Last year, Mark Lyttle, a mentally disabled North Carolina native, got a $175,000 settlement after officials deported him to Mexico. He spent months wandering through Central America, until an employee at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala tracked down his family.
Alfaro’s troubles began as a teen in 1998, when officials at JFK Airport first stopped her after she landed for her first visit to relatives in New York.
According to Alfaro, an immigration officer told her that the U.S. passport she carried was not hers. An officer said that she should write down her correct name on a piece of paper.
She penned “Blanca Maria Alfaro” but officers laughed and ripped it up, she said.
“I told them I was from here, from the United States. They insisted, no, I was from El Salvador,” she said.
After hours, they told her that if she didn’t tell them her correct name she’d go to jail — where there were “a lot of bad women,” Alfaro said. Tired, scared and frustrated, she wrote down her half-sister Mayra’s name.
According to U.S. Department of Justice documents, officials with the then-Immigration and Naturalization Service took down a sworn statement from Alfaro saying she was born in El Salvador and her true name was Mayra Mabel Alfaro.
“Then they stopped bothering me, but they kept me handcuffed and my feet too,” she said.
They confiscated her passport and put her on a plane back to El Salvador.
Upset, she went right away to the U.S. Embassy and applied for another passport, explaining what had happened. After a nine-month investigation, embassy officials decided the airport officers had made a mistake. They agreed she was indeed an American citizen, and issued her a new passport.
With it in hand, she successfully travelled to the U.S. three times, making short visits to see her brother-in-law and other relatives in Long Island.
Alfaro’s troubles began again in 2005, when she applied for tourist visas so her children could visit New York with her. The request apparently flagged her 1998 run-in, so despite the fact that they had affirmed she was a citizen in 1999, embassy officials again took her passport.
“They said they had an order from the State Department to confiscate my passport,” she said.
Fearing she would never be able to resolve her citizenship, this March she decided to travel by land from El Salvador to the Mexico-U.S. border at Hidalgo, Tex. There, she presented herself to an officer and said she was a U.S. citizen — showing her social security card, her Salvadoran I.D. and Texas birth certificate and explaining her situation.
Seeing records from the 1998 interrogation, when Alfaro admitted to being born in El Salvador, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials decided to detain her, sending her first to a Texas facility and then to another in Louisiana.
“When you’re detained, you don’t sleep. Sometimes there was just water from the sink, and it was really cold,” she said. “They laughed at me when I said I was a U.S. citizen … no one believed me.”
After 15 days in custody, officials released her to argue her case.
There was one major issue — unbenownst to Alvaro — an unscrupulous Salvadoran lawyer she hired back in 1999 to get a Salvadoran identity card took an illegal shortcut and filed a false El Salvador birth report, even though Alvaro had given him her Houston birth certificate and qualified for Salvadoran citizenship as the U.S.-born daughter of Salvadorans.
“I didn’t realize. I was ignorant,” Alvaro said. She managed to anull the fake certificate.
After several months of paperwork back-and-forth, including Texas vaccination records, the U.S. Department of State decided that Alvaro was again a U.S. citizen after all.
“I feel happy having this passport in my hands,” said Alvaro. “I hope that they never bother me again in the airport. I’m afraid they will detain me again.”
