Dulce Consuelo Diaz Morales was arrested on Sunday. ICE won’t release her despite extensive documentation of her citizenship, her attorneys told HuffPost.
A Maryland woman has spent days in immigration detention despite being a U.S. citizen with a valid birth certificate and other documentation — documents ICE claims aren’t authentic, her attorneys told HuffPost Thursday.
Dulce Consuelo Diaz Morales, 22, was born in Maryland and spent time in Mexico before coming back to the United States, Victoria Slatton, one of the attorneys working on her case, told HuffPost in a phone call Thursday. Slatton has worked to draw attention to Diaz Morales’ case, including in several TikTok videos.
Shirley Elvirita, Diaz Morales’ 17-year-old sister, told HuffPost over the phone Thursday night that she, her sister and their father were doing laundry in Baltimore on Sunday, and afterwards, the sisters went to pick up some Taco Bell. After getting back on the road, Shirley recalled, they were surrounded by several vehicles filled with law enforcement personnel, who pulled them over. Officers ignored Shirley’s questions and took her sister “forcefully” into one of the vans. They told Shirley they would let her go – but not her sister.
I’d actually probably freeze up because I have trouble answering questions with false assumptions, the assumption here being I’m an immigrant. If someone asked “are you in the country legally”, I’d say yes and potentially not even realize they think I’m an immigrant
The subtext works both ways, though. The question is malformed in my example because it implies an incorrect fact, and you rightly bristle at it because of that. But the statement “she’s here legally” is similarly implying a subtly different question that isn’t being asked, and then answering that question instead of the real one. So it made me bristle in the same way. And it’s a technique that’s often used intentionally to dishonestly reframe conversations, especially around contentious topics. The hostile responses seem to be incorrectly (but unfortunately reasonably these days) assuming this intent.
Unfortunately, the question was raised by ICE about whether the woman was in the country legally or not. It shouldn’t have been in question, but it was. ICE detained her claiming she was in the country illegally, thereby raising the question was she there illegally or legally and the answer is she was in the country legally because she was a citizen. I just didn’t think I needed to specify her being a citizen, I thought all that mattered to the discussion was whether her presence was legal or illegal.
With my autism, receiving a reply that said “she wasn’t in the country legally” because she was a citizen was genuinely confusing. Are citizens not to be classified as legally present when ICE asks if they’re legally present or not?