According to the grandmother of a teen missing since 2010, the girl was mistakenly deported to Colombia.
The girl was 14 when she ran away after experiencing a great deal of stress over the divorce of her parents and the death of her grandfather. The girl’s grandmother, Lorene Turner, said she had been searching for her granddaughter on Facebook since her disappearance.
“Once I get home I am up until 3 or 4 in the morning searching and looking,” Turner said.”It’s all I can think about. Finding my baby,” she told WFAA-TV in Dallas.
With the help of the Dallas police, Turner found her granddaughter Jakadrien – in Colombia. Apparently U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had deported Jakadrien in April of 2011.
“They didn’t do their work,” said Turner. “How do you deport a teenager and send her to Colombia without a passport, without anything?”
It seems that after running away from home, Jakadrien made her way to Houston, where she was arrested for theft and then gave the police a fake name. When police ran the name, they discovered that it belonged to a 22 year old illegal immigrant from Colombia who had several warrants.
Although ICE took the teen’s fingerprints, they didn’t do the due diligence required to confirm her identify and deported her. The Colombian government released her after giving her a work card.
“She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was,” said her grandmother.
After turner tracked down her granddaughter using Facebook, U.S. Embassy officials helped track her down. But the teen is still locked away in a detention center in Colombia and there is no date set for when – or if – she will be released.
ICE says it is investigating the matter.















