Texas teen deported to Colombia back in US
A 15-year-old Texas girl who was deported in May to South America after claiming to be an illegal immigrant was back in the United States and will be in Dallas on Friday evening, her mother said.
Johnisa Turner told the Associated Press that her daughter, Jakadrien Lorece Turner, was on a flight from Atlanta. She had said earlier that she planned to meet her daughter when she arrives in the city and that she has “a gazillion questions” for Jakadrien.
“Our day has been hectic, hers is too,” Turner said, “just as long as she makes it home, just as long as she gets here.”
The teen has become the center of an international mystery. Many facts of the case are still unclear, but U.S. and Colombia officials have pointed fingers over who is responsible for allowing a minor be deported to a country where she is not a citizen.
Jakadrien’s family has questioned why U.S. officials didn’t do more to verify her identify, while U.S. immigration officials insist they followed procedure and found nothing to indicate that the girl wasn’t — as she claimed — a woman from Colombia illegally living in the U.S.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the case was brought to the State Department’s attention in mid-December.
“We didn’t have any involvement at all in this case until it came to light that there may be a problem with an American minor in Colombia, and that — and then we became involved both with Colombian authorities and with folks in Dallas,” Nuland said.
The teen, who ran away from home more than a year ago, was found in Bogota, Colombia, by the Dallas Police Department with help from Colombian and U.S. officials.
According to the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the girl was enrolled in the country’s “Welcome Home” program after she arrived there. She was given shelter, psychological assistance and a job at a call center, a statement from the agency said. When the Colombian government discovered she was a U.S. citizen and a minor, it put her under the care of a welfare program, the statement said.
The family says they have no idea why she ended up in Colombia. Johnisa Turner said Jakadrien is a U.S. citizen who was born in Dallas and was not fluent in Spanish. She said neither she nor the teen’s father had ties to Colombia. Jakadrien’s grandmother, Lorene Turner, called the deportation a “big mistake somebody made.”
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