[andyt]

US federal officials sought Thursday to figure out how a runaway teenager in Texas used an assumed identity so convincingly that she ended up being deported to Colombia.
Jakadrien Larise Turner, who is now 15, apparently reinvented herself as Tika Lanay Cortez, a 21-year-old illegal migrant from Bogota, when she was arrested in Houston last year on a theft charge.
In the weeks that followed, everyone who dealt with her -- from the lawyer at her trial to the Colombian diplomat who met her prior to deportation -- never suspected she was anyone else than who she was claiming to be.
"At no time during these criminal proceedings was her identity determined to be false," a spokeswoman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency told AFP in Washington.
She said the agency -- the branch of the Department of Homeland Security that polices US borders -- was "fully and immediately investigating this matter in order to expeditiously determine the facts of this case."
Turner -- who apparently speaks no Spanish -- ran away from her Dallas area home in 2010 when her parents were getting a divorce, her grandmother Lorene Turner told local television station WFAA.
"How do you deport a teenager and send her to Colombia without a passport, without anything?" she asked, implying that law enforcement agencies had failed to thoroughly verify the teenager's identity.
She said she had spent hours trawling through social networking sites until she discovered through Facebook that her granddaughter was in Colombia, going by the names of Tika SoloToolong and Tika Confero.
WFAA reported that Turner is now in a detention facility, where Colombian authorities are refusing to release her, a month after the US embassy in Bogota asked police to pick her up. No reason for her detention was given.
Turner's last wall post on Facebook, in mid-November, peppered with spelling mistakes, claimed she was "in a relationship with same man I broke up with ... he show me that he is serious with me, an so on, so ok lol!!!!!"
Immigration and Customs Enforcement said criminal database and fingerprint checks it carried out during the deportation process had "revealed no information to invalidate" the girl's claimed identity.

[saturn_656]

Quote:

Turner -- who apparently speaks no Spanish -- ran away from her Dallas area home in 2010 when her parents were getting a divorce, her grandmother Lorene Turner told local television station WFAA.

I'd call it a perfect storm of idiot cops and federal agents.

[Robair]

Quote:

"How do you deport a teenager and send her to Colombia without a passport, without anything?"

Why would an illegal immigrant have a passport?

Why would Columbia accept her???

[Psudo]

Quote:

everyone who dealt with her -- from the lawyer at her trial to the Colombian diplomat who met her prior to deportation -- never suspected she was anyone else than who she was claiming to be.
[...]
Turner -- who apparently speaks no Spanish -- ran away from her Dallas area home in 2010 when her parents were getting a divorce, her grandmother Lorene Turner told local television station WFAA.

saturn_656 wrote:

I'd call it a perfect storm of idiot cops and federal agents.

And lawyers, and foreign diplomats. That's an amazing example of cascading failure.

Robair wrote:

Quote:

How do you deport a teenager and send her to Colombia without a passport, without anything?

Why would an illegal immigrant have a passport?

Columbia issues passports, too. I think it'd be hard to operate in normal life without some form of ID.

Robair wrote:

Why would Columbia accept her???

Now that I cannot imagine.