A U.S. citizen who had been in the custody of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department before he disappeared in May after being wrongly deported to Mexico was found this week and ordered released to his family.
Pedro Guzman, 29, who is developmentally disabled, was taken into custody Sunday while trying to cross the border at Calexico, Mexico, said Michael Soller, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. The ACLU has represented Guzman's family in its attempts to get the federal government to help find him.
Guzman, of Lancaster, was transported to the Los Angeles County Jail. On Tuesday at a hearing in the Antelope Valley, Superior Court Judge Carlos Chung ordered him released to his family.
Guzman, who cannot read or write, spent much of the 89 days in Baja, California, on foot, avoiding human contact, eating from garbage cans and bathing in rivers, family members said at an afternoon news conference at the ACLU's Los Angeles office. Guzman, who was said to be malnourished and afraid of people, remained at home in Lancaster with relatives.
"They didn't return me back my whole son," said his mother, Maria Carbajal, who broke down sobbing. "They returned half my son to me. He isn't normal."
Carbajal said Guzman tried to cross the border on several occasions but was turned away by U.S. officials. She said he had probably walked about 100 miles during his ordeal.
Guzman was arrested earlier this year on charges of trespassing and spraying graffiti at an airplane junkyard in Lancaster. In April, he was sentenced to 120 days in jail, but that was reduced to 40 days.
On May 11, before his sentence was up, Guzman called his family from Tijuana and told them he had been deported.
Sheriff's officials had turned Guzman over to federal immigration agents after he apparently indicated that he was born in Mexico. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials denied at the time that anything improper was done, issuing a statement that said it deports individuals only "when all available credible evidence suggests the person is an alien. That process was followed here and ICE has no reason to believe that it improperly removed Pedro Guzman."
On Tuesday, an immigration official reiterated the agency's position. "We're confident our standards and procedures were followed correctly," spokeswoman Lori Haley said.
