A teenage African American girl from Dallas who has been reportedly missing since 2010 was recently found pregnant and being held in a foreign prison.
According to various reports, Jakadrien Turner was 14 when she ran away from home after her grandfather died and her parents got a divorce.
Several months later, Jakadrien turned up in Houston and was arrested for theft. She had no identification, and gave police a fake name.
When police ran the name, they found out that it belonged to a 22-year-old illegal Colombian immigrant who had multiple arrest warrants.
That’s when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials stepped in, and took the girl’s fingerprints, but somehow deported her to Colombia without even trying to successfully verify her true identity.
WFAA in Houston reports that upon her arrival in Colombia, a Spanish-speaking country, Jakadrien received a work card and found work cleaning homes, though one would imagine things would be pretty hard for a 14-year-old girl working in a country where she doesn’t understand the language.
“It’s very frustrating,” Lorene Turner, the girl’s grandmother told WFAA.
Turner says she has spent countless hours searching for her missing granddaughter on Facebook.
“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.”
Turner finally found Jakadrian after searching for her daily since the fall of 2010. “God just kept leading me,” she said. “I wake up in the middle of the night and do whatever God told me to do, and I found her.”
Turner said that with the help of Dallas Police, she unexpectedly found out that her now 15-year-old granddaughter had been deported to Colombia in April of 2011, and not only that, but she was in prison … and pregnant.
“They didn’t do their work,” Turner said. “How do you deport a teenager and send her to Colombia without a passport, without anything?”
Despite numerous pleas from the girl’s family through U.S. officials, who were in direct contact with officials at the U.S. embassy in Bogota, the Columbian government refused to release the child and allow her to be sent home.
“She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was,” the girl’s grandmother said regarding her work release.
WFAA reported:
Through her granddaughter’s Facebook messages, Turner says she tracked Jakadrian down. U.S. Federal authorities got an address. U.S. Embassy officials in Colombia asked police to pick her up.
But that was a month ago, and the Colombian government now has her in a detention facility and won’t release her, despite her family’s request. “I feel like she will come home,” the grandmother said with tears in her eyes. “I just need help and prayer.”
There are still many unanswered questions about how an African-American girl who speaks no Spanish is mistaken for a foreign national. Immigration officials are investigating and released a statement late Tuesday.
“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.”
ICE officials also noted there have been instances where ICE has seen cases of individuals providing inaccurate information regarding who they are and their immigration status for ulterior motives.
Whatever the case may be … there should be some serious attention brought to the fact that an unidentified 14-year-old girl was just abruptly shipped off to foreign country where she got pregnant and was later sent to prison.
[WFAA, Dallas News]
