I had the pleasure of speaking to Mr Thomas, the son of a naturalized American army man who was born on a U.S army base in Germany. Jermaine was deported to Jamaica, an island that he doesn’t know and where he wasn’t born.
It remains a mystery how he was accepted by the Jamaican government without any documents or family on the island to accept him.
Mr. Thomas said he was deported after spending two months in a Texas immigration lock up on grounds of trespassing after his dog Sassy was left on an abandoned property.
When asked about his charges Mr. Thomas wrote
‘’The criminal trespassing was a trumped-up charge that went from the police saying they got a call about a dog being chained up. As you see in the video, I had Sassy leash in my hand before they pulled up. I was targeted & retaliated from our previous encounter during the eviction process. They said I was doing too much by raising my arms, showing that I was harmless & unarmed because eight of them & 3 of them kept grabbing their pistols. I showed them my mail to that address & let them know I had squatters rights. They completely disregarded that & procedded to have all our property put in the front yard which is improper. All the property is supposed to be placed past the sidewalk on the curb. Since it wasn’t, I didn’t criminally trespass & I asked the constables if I could stop people from helping themselves to our property & they said yes. I never entered the property & my first & last name is not on the eviction notice so technically I was never served a notice. When I came to check on Sassy, I saw constables on my way then police & I was wearing the same clothes so being familiar with their routes, I knew they were tracking me & waiting to harass me but I wasn’t doing anything wrong so I went anyway. Sure enough, they pulled up “6 officers” because of an alleged call that a dog was chained up, 3 animal control trucks, & a city collections truck to throw all our property away. Mind you, I didn’t know about the eviction notice when it happened because my friend got served as he was being arrested for a charge he didn’t commit either. The police & impound officers ask if Sassy had a chip, was up to date on immunization records so I called my daughter & she told them yes, they checked but wouldn’t let her come pick her up because the name on the chip wasn’t hers. They then asked me my name & I asked them theirs. They refused & I told them I didn’t commit a crime so there’s no need to identify especially since they refused to identify themselves. My daughter asked to be on speaker phone so I obliged & she told them she requested a supervisor because they’re not trained to deal with my mental health issues. They refused that too so she had me request one & they refused again handcuffing me, calling the landlord, getting them to press charges and right before I was placed in the vehicle the main officer asked me where I was born. Then they took me to the station for booking’’
For the record, Mr Thomas who is not thirty-eight years old was born on a U.S army base in Frankfurt Germany by American parents but was classified as stateless by the American supreme court in 2015. Mr. Thomas said he tried to appeal his ‘’statelessness’’ he was unable to because of funding cuts.
When asked how he has been able to survive, Mr. Thomas says he has lived with friends and has stayed at shelters and has done construction work through agencies and his friend’s LLC in order to survive. Thomas said he has never been to Jamaica and doesn’t have any relatives there.
The fact that as the child of a U.S citizen who served the army and ended up stateless speaks to the brokenness of the system.
Questions arise when the country where Mr. Thomas was born, was not the country he was deported to .
Equally like Jamaica, you can file to be a German citizen once you have a German parent and become a citizen so Thomas has no legal status in Germany and none in Jamaica. He was born to a U.S citizen who served the United States of America and is currently in the Open Arms Jamaican shelter in Kingston being taken care of by the Jamaican government because he has no family on the island.
What law was used to deport Mr. Thomas on the charge that his dog was trespassing and what exactly was given to the Jamaican government to accept him , a stateless man ?