Philly-born black man nearly deported to Jamaica for smoking weed while on probation

A Philadelphia-born man was nearly deported to Jamaica -- which he'd briefly visited once, years ago on a cruise -- after turning himself in for a probation violation.

Peter Sean Brown tested positive for marijuana while on probation earlier this year and turned himself in to police in April, but he wound up on a fast track for deportation despite being a U.S. citizen, reported the Miami Herald.

The 50-year-old Brown was born American, raised in New Jersey and lived in the Florida Keys, but he was locked up on request by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for weeks while law enforcement worked to deport him, according to a new lawsuit.

Brown insisted to every jail employee he encountered that he was a U.S. citizen but was only met with mockery.

"One guard talked to him in a Jamaican accent, calling him 'mon,' while another sang to him the theme song from the 1990s television sitcom, 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,' which mentions the main character being from West Philadelphia," the newspaper reported.

A friend finally sent ICE a copy of Brown's birth certificate after he spent three weeks in jail, and he was released.

“I would never have expected in a million years that this would happen,” Brown said in a video released by the ACLU, which is representing him in the suit. “With policies like this and people implementing them like that, it’s only going to continue. There has to be a stop to it at some point before it becomes all of us.”

The day after his arrest, the black restaurant worker was placed on a detainer by ICE, as part of a federal program that relies on “Basic Ordering Agreements,” or BOAs, which pays $50 for each person they hold for the immigration law enforcement agency.

Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay's would not comment on the $50 payment in Brown's case.

Brown's fingerprints were forwarded to the FBI, and ICE asked the sheriff's office to hold him for 48 hours, but he remained jailed for weeks, unable to reach a person on an ICE hotline.

A judge gave him an additional 12 months of probation and ordered him released at an April 26 hearing, but Brown instead remained in jail and was transferred the following day to an immigration detention center in Miami.

The lawsuit says Ramsay's office had refused to look at his birth certificate, but ICE agents agreed to review the document and "hastily" released Brown after discovering he was American, not Jamaican.

“The sheriff’s inmate file for Mr. Brown confirmed, in multiple places, that he was a U.S. citizen,” the suit reads. “The file lists his place of birth as “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania” in capital letters. This file was available to jail staff throughout Mr. Brown’s detention.”

The ACLU warned Ramsay's office about a year ago about illegally detaining immigrants, but the sheriff denied wrongdoing.