In Spring 2008, things were finally looking up for Davino Watson. He had pleaded guilty to selling a small amount of cocaine in September 2007 in New York, but on May 8, the 23-year-old successfully completed the state's Shock Incarceration Program, a bootcamp-style lockup for non-violent and non-sexual offenders. But “three seconds” after Watson's release, he tells Newsweek, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents cuffed him and began deportation proceedings, alleging he was in the country illegally. Watson then spent the next three-and-a-half years mostly in ICE's Buffalo, New York jail, fighting to stay in the United States.

But Watson was a U.S. citizen during his entire 1,273-day detention. In fact, he has been a citizen since 2002, as he repeatedly told the agents during his detention. Under U.S. law, ICE cannot detain U.S. citizens. ICE documents indicate that the agency realized its error in November 2011. A federal lawsuit filed October 31 in the Eastern District of New York details Watson's kafkaesque ordeal, but immigration law experts estimate that thousands more Americans have and continue to contend with similar detentions. Some, including individuals with mental disabilities, have even been deported.

Davino Watson was born in Jamaica on Nov. 17, 1984. He arrived in the U.S. on Aug. 4, 1998 as a lawful permanent resident to join his father and step mother, who already lived in the U.S. He became a citizen under the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, a law that allows children under 18, who are lawful permanent residents, to automatically become citizens when their parents naturalize. Children who become citizens under this law do not have to submit any additional paperwork.  In addition, American immigration law considered Watson to be “legitimated;” simply put that means Watson is legally considered his biological father’s son even though his parents were unmarried at the time of his birth. American immigration law recognizes a Jamaican law abolishing “any legal distinctions based on legitimation in 1976,” Watson’s lawyers, Mark A. Flessner Christopher G. Kelly, and Robert J. Burns of Chicago’s Holland & Knight LLP, and Mark Fleming of the National Immigrant Justice Center, say in the suit. http://www.newsweek.com/why-did-immigration-and-customs-enforcement...