Don’t blame ICE, the cool acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Blame Jakadrien Turner, the 14 year old girl who ran away to Houston, got caught stealing something (a loaf of bread?) and gave the coppers a fake “Spanish” sounding name that just happened to be the name of a 22-year-old Columbiana illegal, who had some warrants and a seat on the next flight out.

Hasta Luego, Chiquita.

With the help of Dallas police, Lorene Turner searched for her missing granddaughter:

“It’s very frustrating,” Lorene Turner said.
 
She has spent hours on Facebook trying to find her granddaughter, Jakadrien.
 
“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.”
 
Turner has been searching for Jakadrien since the fall of 2010, when she ran away from home. She was 14 years old and distraught over the loss of her grandfather and her parents’ divorce.

She ultimately found her on Facebook. In Columbia, where Jakadrien, now 15, had been shipped by ICE.

ICE took the girl’s fingerprints, but somehow didn’t confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.
 
“She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was,” Turner said.

Naturally, ICE is investigating how such a horrible mistake could possibly happen. Being a helpful sort of guy, I’m happy to save ICE the effort. One of your grocery clerks was too lazy to do the job, and went off the name along (forget prints, DOB, all those other cool metrics used to identity a person), stamped the papers for deportation and, woosh, another file closed. So what if she was African-American and spoke no Spanish. That’s not the criteria on the grocery list anyway.

So Jakardian was reunited with Grandma, right? Well, not quite.

U.S. Federal authorities got an address. U.S. Embassy officials in Colombia asked police to pick her up.

But that was a month ago, and the Colombian government now has her in a detention facility and won’t release her, despite her family’s request.

Want to bet nobody at the U.S. Embassy thought it was a good idea to just ask Jakadrien to come on by?  The News8 story provides no insight into why she is now in custody, but it seems likely that there are comestibles empleados in Bogota, just like here.

Things like this shouldn’t happen. They do, but they shouldn’t, because we have plenty of rules, tons of technology, procedures, all of which exist for the purpose of things like this not happening. And yet they do.  That Jakadrien gave Houston police a fake name is likely to be the hook, with the great might of the United States government, as reflected by ICE, pointing the finger at a 14-year-old’s childish effort to conceal her identity.

People have been concealing their identities for a long time. Law enforcement knows it, and manages to find amazing ways to beat the effort when they want to.  Then again, when they couldn’t care less (as in, when they put the wrong person in jail and spend the next few months deliberating over the identity of the warm body) mistakes happen.  As  Walter Olson noted, in L.A. County, it can happen as much as once a day.

It’s not that we lack for procedures to assure the identities of those taken into custody. Even without an effort to conceal identity, there are lots of people who share the same or similar names. We’ve long known that names aren’t enough to identity anyone since the late Renaissance. Dates of birth, social security numbers, identification numbers stamped on mug shots all help.

It’s not that we lack the technology, whether via fingerprints, DNA, biometrics, to distinguish one person from another.  The government is behind mountains of technological advancements to identify people, not to mention their thoughts and intentions.  We’ve got tech up the wazoo.

When someone with a modicum of authority within the vast and powerful government of the United States is so cavalier as to send a 14-year-old runaway to Columbia, the natural impulse is to attribute venality to the person.  But it’s far more likely that it’s just pure, unadulterated laziness.  Cliché alert: A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Despite the trillions of dollars, the wealth of cool gadgets, the serious words of press releases, everything eventually comes down to somebody doing their job properly. Human error.

“ICE takes these allegations very seriously,” said ICE Director of Public Affairs Brian Hale. ” At the direction of [the Department of Homeland Security], ICE is fully and immediately investigating this matter in order to expeditiously determine the facts of this case.”

ICE officials also noted there have been instances where ICE has seen cases of individuals providing inaccurate information regarding who they are and their immigration status for ulterior motives.

I told you they would blame Jakadrien. If they admit that some lazy imbecile couldn’t be bothered to take the additional step of verifying this child’s identity before putting her on a plane, then the entirety of the structure of government, with its vast power and resources, might be suspect. Because no matter how much money we pour into it, no matter how many procedures they have or how much tech is at their disposal, no one has figured out a way to remove humans from the process.  To err is human. 

And this time, there’s a 15-year-old African-American girl who speaks no Spanish sitting in a Columbian jail because of it.  Bienvenidos a Columbia, Jakadrien. Next time, don’t make it so difficult on the grocery clerk if you know what’s good for you.

Update: She’s coming home.

Jakadrien Lorese Turner, 15, flew from Bogota to Atlanta and is expected to arrive in Dallas tonight, her mother tells the Associated Press.

What are the chances she’ll be arrested at the border as an illegal re-entry?