According to media reports, immigration officials on the Texas-Mexico border locked a US-born Texas man behind bars for five days over citizenship concerns. Now he’s being deported.
Dr. Edgar Basaldua has been driving between his home in McAllen, Texas and his private practice in Reynosa, Mexico every day for years. The border crossing was routine, but Monday 25th August was a little different.
Despite having Social Security, a Texan driver’s license, US passport and birth certificate, Basaldua was arrested by Telemundo by border guards when he returned home from work. They then took him to the Port Isabel Detention Center, where immigrants are being held.
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“It’s traumatic,” Basaldua told the KGBT television news. “They call it a detention center – it really is a prison.”
Basaldua told the media that officials said they would hold him until they found evidence that he was born in the United States. Problems apparently arose from Basaldua’s dual Mexican and American citizenship.
“I don’t know if the problem is necessarily that he has dual citizenship,” Basaldua’s lawyer Gregorio Lopez told Telemundo. “I think what immigration officials will say is that he is actually not a citizen of the United States.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement told KGBT that they could not comment on the case, but offered that agents might deal less with people using fake documents that are easily identifiable than with people using real documents that belong to someone else.
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On Friday, August 28th, Lopez Basaldua’s release was secured from behind bars. Now the doctor will be deported if he can’t prove he was born in Texas. Lopez said the relocation process was ongoing.
Basaldua told KGBT: “I will not give up my American citizenship. I have been one all my life.”
He said he hoped to get records from the Texas Department of Health’s vital statistics division to prove his place of birth.
