Levy Jaen wakes up some nights in his Queens home drenched in sweat, panicking after dreaming that he was still in jail, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers telling him to pack his things because he was getting deported.



It’s a vivid reminder of the nearly two years he spent locked up in an ICE detention center in New Jersey, explaining to anyone he could find — officers, judges, attorneys — that he was a US citizen, that the deportation order against him shouldn’t apply to him and that he shouldn’t have to leave his four children and the life they had in New York.

During his time in detention, which began in May of 2016, Jaen called his kids daily: three sons who are now 13, 14, and 26, and one daughter who is 19. He worried constantly about how his 26-year-old son was doing taking care of them, the youngest of whom is autistic.

“Daddy, when are you coming home?” his children asked him.

“It’s going to be okay,” he’d say. He’d lie: “Daddy is coming home soon in a couple of months.” He missed two Christmases and multiple birthdays.

It wasn’t till April of this year that the 2nd Circuit US Court of Appeals affirmed his citizenship and ordered him released, before publishing a written opinion on the case last week, in which the court chastised the government for detaining him all those months as his appeals worked through the government’s processes. Last week, he talked about that hardship for the first time.

“All this suffering, not just for me but for my family and my kids. It was a hardship,” Jaen, 46, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s inside of me still.”

His case hinged on how the US government defines the way citizenship is transmitted from a parent to a child and how society determines what is a family. It’s also a window into the US immigration system, which advocates say was unnecessarily inhumane and complicated even before Donald Trump became president. When Jaen was incarcerated, Barack Obama was still in office. One of the appeals court judges said she was “troubled” by the government’s actions.

"I write separately to observe that though this decision rests upon perennial principles — in other words, no grand innovation of law undergirds our decision today — the government … chose to detain Jaen for the entirety of this appellate process,” Circuit Judge Rosemary Pooler, who was appointed to the court by former president Bill Clinton, wrote in a commentary on the case. “I am troubled by these choices, particularly given the legal question at issue — Is Jaen a US citizen? — whose affirmative answer has resulted in the United States government holding a United States citizen in immigration detention for nearly two years.”

Jaen’s path to the country is complicated: His parents, who were married in 1952, had moved to New York in the late 1950s and his father later became a citizen. His mother, however, gave birth to him in Panama, where the family was from, and his original birth certificate lists a man his mother had had an affair with as the father.

Still, his mother stayed with her husband, who considered Jaen his son until his death decades later, his attorneys say. In 1988, at the age of 15, Jaen came to the US on a visa and had lived in New York ever since, going to high school in Queens. He spent his life assuming he was a US citizen, like his siblings.