“Oops, our bad.” Are you kidding me?
Jakadrien Turner, a Dallas teenager who’s been missing for over a year, has finally been found living in Colombia.
The girl’s grandmother, Lorene Turner, says Jakadrien ran away from home in the fall of 2010 when she was just 14 years old. The girl managed to make her way to Houston, where she was arrested.
That’s when things get bizarre. Jakadrien gave the officers a fake name and the alias she chose matched up with the name of a 22-year-old Colombian citizen who had been in the U.S. illegally. The Colombian national had a warrant out for her arrest.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) then deported Jakadrien Turner to Colombia in April of last year.
“They didn’t do their work,” Lorene Turner said. “How do you deport a teenager and send her to Colombia without a passport, without anything?”
Turner said she’d been scouring the internet every night searching for clues as to her granddaughter’s whereabouts.
“Once I get home I am up until 3 or 4 in the morning searching and looking,” Turner said. “It’s all I can think about. Finding my baby.”
As it turns out, after Jakadrien was deported, she was given a work card in Colombia and released onto the streets.
“She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was,” Turner said.
Through her granddaughter’s Facebook messages, Turner says she tracked Jakadrian down.
Federal authorities got an address and U.S. Embassy officials in Colombia asked police to pick the girl up.
Jakadrien is now being held in a detention center in Colombia while awaiting more information on her case.
“ICE takes these allegations very seriously,” said ICE Director of Public Affairs Brian Hale. ” At the direction of [the Department of Homeland Security], ICE is fully and immediately investigating this matter in order to expeditiously determine the facts of this case.”
I just don’t get it. How does this happen to a non-Spanish-speaking teenager right here in the USA?
More in the video below.
Related articles
- ICE Officials Mistakenly Deported Missing Dallas Teenager (thinkprogress.org)
- Teenager Missing Since 2010 Was Accidentally Deported To Colombia (outsidethebeltway.com)
Get Blippitt via RSS feed, Facebook, Twitter, Google+,
and be sure to get our Daily Email Broadcast.
