A family was given $1.5 million because their two US citizen children were wrongfully jailed at the US-Mexico border.
In the legal case that ended on Friday, US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel gave $250,000 to the mother of the children, $175,000 to the boy, and $1.1 million to the girl.
At the time, Julia was nine years old, and her brother Oscar was fourteen. On March 18, 2019, they were caught as they crossed into the US from Tijuana, Mexico, to go to school.
Both kids, whose last names were kept secret by the court, were born in the US and are citizens of the US. Court records show that their mother, Thelma Medina Navarro, is a Mexican citizen with a temporary US border-crossing card.
US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officials stopped Julia and two family friends as they tried to cross the border at the San Ysidro point of entry, which is close to San Diego. They thought Julia didn’t look like the picture on her passport.
After that, she was taken into a room and questioned by a single Customs and Border Patrol officer. The court said this was against policy because interviewing a child requires an extra witness.
In the questioning room, Julia was forced to lie and say that she was her cousin. This made the police think that she and Oscar might have been involved in smuggling drugs and using fake names.
“There is no logical reason why the US would give Julia for lying about being her cousin,” Judge Curiel wrote during the ruling on Friday. “Because the confession wasn’t recorded, witnessed, or even written down, no one will ever know why a 9-year-old U.S. citizen lied and said she was someone she isn’t.”
After several rounds of questions, the kids were split up and put in cells at the border crossing’s Admissibility Enforcement Unit. Oscar was there for 14 hours and Julia for 34.
The Border Patrol finally let the kids go after the Mexican consulate put pressure on them. The kids’ mother, Thelma Medina Navarro, talked to the media about what happened.
According to court papers, Julia had trouble sleeping and had bad dreams after what happened, and she needed counseling after she got out of jail.
