It was expected that the Trump administration would target illegal immigrants as soon as they had the chance. With Trump surrogates evenly distributed throughout the bureaucratic sprawl of agencies in Washington, it was only a matter of time before Trump's nationalist agenda would seep into the legal immigration process that many thought would be protected. Last week the administration announced that they would be looking to cut down the process of accepting legal immigrants into the United States.

ICE mishandled Davino's detainment

Hints of a Trump-style detainment for regular citizens who are marked for deportation had already happened before Donald Trump became President.

Last Monday, a New York federal appeals denied $82,500 awarded to a U.S. citizen who was wrongly detained for three-years and almost deported from the United States. In 2002, Davino Watson became a U.S. citizen due to the fact that his Jamaican-born father had become a naturalized citizen.

Five years later, when Watson was arrested for selling cocaine he told the authorities repeatedly that he was a citizen -- giving authorities his father's name and contact to verify. However, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had already made the mistake of misidentifying his father with someone else who was not a citizen, which resulted in Davino's detainment -- extending into three-years. The plan by ICE authorities was to deport him.

Justice denied for U.S. citizens

They reportedly never called the number Davino gave them to identify his status, further showing a deliberate attempt to wrongfully detain and deport him. It was determined in a ruling last year by Senior U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein that Watson deserved the $82,500 award for four weeks of the three year detainment.

But the story gets more complicated due to a variety of details such as the fact that Davino did not have a lawyer to defend him when ICE held him. In the ruling by Weinstein last year, he said that if he had representation, he might have spent less time being held.

This comes to the second problem, which, according to U.S. Circuit Judge Debra Ann Livingston, is that Watson's statute of limitations had run out while he was being held.

In the opinion of her and another judge, Watson was not entitled to the amount awarded. Decisions such as these seem to be very much in the style of the Trump administration where the kind of protection provided through reimbursement -- which many consider reasonable justice for being wronged -- is denied. While the Trump administration had nothing to do with this particular decision, it is the kind of injustice more American immigrants should expect in Donald Trump's America.
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