The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Monday against the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office in Florida after Peter Sean Brown — an American citizen — was illegally jailed and was informed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would try to deport him to Jamaica.
“I am and have always been a citizen of the United States,” Brown said in a video posted by the ACLU.
Brown, who was born in Philadelphia and has lived in Florida for 10 years, reported to the Monroe County Sheriff’s office for disregarding probation for a marijuana-related offense. He was placed behind bars after ICE sent the office a “detainer,” which would facilitate deportation to Jamaica, according to the lawsuit.
According to ACLU, some officers mocked Brown, who asserted he was a U.S. citizen from Philadelphia and not Jamaica, telling him in a Jamaican accent that everything was “gonna be alright.”
Brown, who is black, filed written complaints with the sheriff’s office and reached out to ICE, but he was eventually taken into custody by ICE and transported to an ICE facility in Miami. Shortly before he was scheduled to head to Jamaica, ICE released him after viewing his birth certificate.
The ACLU’s lawsuit against the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office accuses them of violating Brown’s Fourth Amendment rights, which bars unauthorized searches and seizures.
“I would never have expected in a million years that this would happen,” Brown said in the video. “With policies like this and people implementing them like that, it’s only going to continue. There has to be a stop to it at some point before it becomes all of us.”
Several similar incidents in Florida have occurred the past several years. For example, the ACLU sued Miami-Dade County in 2017 when a U.S. citizen was jailed based on an erroneous ICE detainer.
