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According to the Austin Chronicle, a man was born in 1986 to active US military members at a German army base after being deported to Jamaica as a child.
Jermaine Thomas, whose Jamaican-born father became a US citizen during his 18-year military career, moved from base to base along with his father and mother for much of his childhood.
At the age of 11, after his parents divorced and remarried with another soldier of his mother, he lived with his retired father in Florida. Unfortunately, his father died of kidney failure in 2010 shortly after Thomas’ arrival.
He reported that much of his life afterwards was spent in Texas, in the homeless, and in and out of prisons.
It is unknown exactly when Thomas was first ordered to leave the country, but 2015 court records show cases that went all the way to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court upheld the U.S. Court of Appeals’ ruling and rejected Thomas’ petition for review of the deportation order, saying “his father failed to meet the physical existence requirements of the law at the time of Thomas’ birth.”
The court also pointed to Thomas’ previous criminal conviction.
A general view of Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. Kingston is located on the southeast coast of Jamaica and is a government and commercial hub. (Alessandro abbonizio/afp via Getty Images)
Without us, German or Jamaican citizenship, Thomas would have been stateless, but he remained in America, but most recently lived in Killeen, a city about an hour north of Austin.
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He told the Chronicle that the deportation to Jamaica began with eviction from his apartment.
While moving his belongings out of his apartment, he was arrested by local police on suspicion of trespassing, a misdemeanor in Texas.
A court-appointed lawyer, Thomas, who lost his job during lockup, told him he wanted to stay in jail for most of the year awaiting trial, and instead of being released from Bell County Jail, he was transferred to an immigration and customs enforcement detention camp just north of Houston, where he was detained in two months.
Now in Kingston, he told Chronicle he lives in a hotel, but he is not paying who is paying for it or the US or Jamaican government.
Unsure how he will get the job or whether he is allowed, Thomas added that he is not sure if it is legal to be in the country.
“If you need to deploy to the US military and the Army somewhere and you need to have your child there, then your child will make a mistake after you die, you will sort your life out for this country, are you okay with them just kicking your child out of the country?” Thomas said on the phone from his hotel room in Kingston.
Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to Chronicle’s request for comment.
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