Tim Steller's column: Tucson feds dragged out U.S. citizen's faulty detention

The U.S. Attorney’s Office put out a press release on Friday, April 11 trumpeting the 261 immigration-related criminal cases they filed that week.

Arizona’s federal prosecutors have been bragging about their immigration prosecutions weekly this way since Feb. 7.

Well, you can subtract one prosecution from the April 11 total.

On April 8, a bizarre sequence of events began in Tucson that led to the arrest and excessively long detention of a 19-year-old U.S. citizen from Albuquerque. His alleged crime: Being in his home country illegally.

The story has caught fire nationally, as a possible example of overreach by the Trump administration in its zeal to rack up deportations. Indeed, there have been other examples of citizens arrested for allegedly being in the country illegally, or of permanent residents having their status revoked for dubious reasons.

But the story of Jose Hermosillo’s arrest is more complicated than that, raising questions especially about his behavior and that of the federal prosecutors who moved slowly to address the mistaken situation.

Hermosillo, 19, told my colleague Emily Bregel Monday that he was in Tucson with his girlfriend visiting her family when he took a walk. He said he encountered a Border Patrol agent who asked him about his immigration status and accused him of being in the country illegally, even though Hermosillo said he is a citizen.

The Border Patrol’s version of the encounter is completely different. They said Hermosillo walked up to the agency sector headquarters on East Golf Links Road, rang the buzzer, came in and made a confession.

In fact, the Department of Homeland Security posted a transcript of an alleged interview in which Hermosillo said he is a Mexican citizen who crossed the desert to come into the country illegally. A clue to what was going on might have been Hermosillo’s scrawled signature at the bottom: Just the first name “J O S E” was there and barely legible.

From the time I first started looking into this case, when I interviewed criminal-defense attorney Greg Solares on Saturday, I’ve wondered what the key is to unlock how this sad situation started.

I suspect that Hermosillo’s girlfriend, Grace Hernandez, gave us that key when she told Arizona Public Media’s Danyelle Khmara this week that Hermosillo has learning disabilities and is illiterate.

“He doesn’t know how to read,” Hernandez said. “He doesn’t really understand. He says yes to everything. So he could have done it without knowing what it was.”

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That starts to make the situation make sense for me. But then it makes me wonder why the Border Patrol agents who questioned Hermosillo didn’t give this weird situation a second look. It may be common for undocumented people to walk up to agents near the border, but it’s odd for a person to turn himself in at the hard-to-reach Border Patrol sector headquarters in Tucson.

It also is disturbing the way Border Patrol Agent Eric Wood worded the criminal complaint against Hermosillo. It says “agents found Jose Hermosillo in the United States at or near Nogales, Arizona.” Neither Hermosillo nor the Border Patrol says they found him near Nogales.

For me, the situation really turned nefarious after Hermosillo’s initial appearance on April 10, where the attorney Solares met Hermosillo, who was crying in the courtroom.

“I received a photograph of the birth certificate the following day,” Solares said. “I provided this to pretrial services. I emailed a copy to the prosecutor assigned to the case. This was Friday. I didn’t hear back from them. The weekend goes by.”

This wasn’t Good Friday, by the way — it was Friday, April 11, not a holiday weekend. And the federal court officers apparently let it slide.

“I’m telling them, ‘You don’t have an alien in custody. You need to relay this to the prosecutor since the prosecutor’s not getting back to me,’ “ Solares said.

“I never heard back from them. He stayed in custody until Thursday morning which was the 17th. I see him in the morning. I catch the prosecutor in the court. He’s still not wanting to release the charges.”

“I’m completely frustrated. You think the government is going to do the right thing at that time,” Solares said. “What they were getting at was that he had made some kind of an admission.”

He had, according to Border Patrol, made an admission, though Hermosillo now disputes that. But in any case, they had had a week to verify that it was false and Hermosillo was in fact a U.S. citizen. Finally, assistant U.S. attorney Joseph Rieu asked to drop the case on April 17, but he wasn’t released till the early morning of the next day.

Federal prosecutors have had no explanation for the delay. They said in a statement to Bregel Tuesday that “the U.S. Attorney’s Office does not have anything to add beyond what is found in the public record.”

What is found there is a yawning gap of a week when an apparently low-functioning 19-year-old U.S. citizen was sitting in detention for being in his own country illegally. It appears to have been his fault to start, yes, but our public officials have to be better at correcting such errors.

Even if it means making a subtraction from the immigration-case count.