Apparently if you are a US citizen and are "mistakenly" held in prison for multiple years to be deported, even though you keep telling ICE and the immigration judges that you are, in fact, a US citizen, and even if ICE lazily bungles its way into leaving you right where you are, not only can you not get a lawyer to represent you and try to fix the problem (because illegal immigrants don't get legal representation), but if ICE holds you in prison long enough, you can't even sue for false imprisonment because the statute of limitations for false imprisonment expired while you were still being falsely imprisoned.
But, hey, he's an illegal alien. Or they thought he was, which is the same thing. So they could do whatever they wanted, as long as they did it for long enough. Even if they shouldn't have. Because America!
U.S. Citizen Who Was Held By ICE For 3 Years Denied Compensation By Appeals Court
Davino Watson was imprisoned as a deportable immigrant for 1,273 days, despite having U.S. citizenship. Now a court says he is not eligible for $82,500 in damages he was awarded.
It shares some "logic" with how US cops only need to justify they felt threatened after a kill, and face little or no corrective action when these subjective feelings reveal grossly aberrant.