(KTLA) — A man born to an active-duty member of the United States military on an Army base in Germany in 1986 before coming to the states as a child was deported last week to Jamaica, a country he’s never been to, according to a report by The Austin Chronicle.
Jermaine Thomas, whose Jamaican-born dad became a U.S. citizen during his 18-year military career, spent much of his early life moving from base to base with his father and mother, the latter a citizen of Kenya at the time of his birth.
At 11 years old, after his parents’ divorce and his mother’s second marriage to another soldier, he went to live with his father, who had since retired, in Florida. Unfortunately, his father passed away in 2010 from kidney failure shortly after Thomas had arrived.
Much of his life after that, The Chronicle reported, was spent in Texas, homeless and in and out of jail.
It’s unclear when exactly Thomas was first ordered to leave the country, but court records from 2015 show a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, in which the U.S. Department of Justice argued that he was not a citizen simply because he was born on a U.S. Army base in Germany.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the DOJ, upholding the U.S. Court of Appeals decision and denied Thomas’ petition for a review of the deportation order, saying in part that “his father did not meet the physical presence requirement of the statute in force at the time of Thomas’s birth.”
The court also noted Thomas’ prior criminal convictions, one for domestic violence and two “crimes involving moral turpitude.”
Without U.S., German or Jamaican citizenship, Thomas was stateless, though he remained in the states, most recently living in Killeen, a city about an hour north of Austin.
He told The Chronicle that deportation to Jamaica started with an eviction from his apartment.
While moving his belongings out of the apartment, he was arrested by local police on suspicion of trespassing, a misdemeanor in Texas.
Told by a court-appointed lawyer that he’d likely stay in jail for the better part of a year while waiting for a trial, Thomas, who had lost his job while in lockup, signed a release agreement with certain conditions, but 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 for two and a half months.
Now in Kingston, he told The Chronicle he’s living in a hotel, though he’s unsure who is paying for it, the U.S. or Jamaican government, and does not know how long he’ll be able to stay there.
Unsure how to get a job or if he’s even allowed, Thomas added that he’s unsure if it’s even legal for him to be in the country at all.
“If you’re in the U.S. Army, and the Army deploys you somewhere, and you’ve got to have your child over there, and your child makes a mistake after you pass away, and you put your life on the line for this country, are you going to be okay with them just kicking your child out of the country?” Thomas said in a phone call with the outlet’s reporter.
Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to The Chronicle’s request for comment.