WASHINGTON

He was born in Puerto Rico, but he says he looks Mexican, so Eduardo Caraballo, who got involved in a stolen car case in Chicago, said he was threatened with deportation back to Mexico, where he never came from.

Caraballo spent three days in jail recently in connection with a car that was stolen, but not, he said, by him. His mother posted bail, but instead of his release, Caraballo was told by authorities that he was being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement because he was an illegal immigrant.

Caraballo said he repeatedly told officers that he was born in Puerto Rico and therefore an American citizen. His mother also presented his birth certificate, but despite that and his state-issued ID, officials told him he was facing deportation.

“I’m pretty sure they know that Puerto Ricans are citizens, but just because of the way I look — I have Mexican features — they pretty much assumed that my papers were fake,” he told NBC Chicago.

“They were making me feel like I can’t voice my opinion or I can’t even speak for myself to let them know that I am a citizen,” he said.

Caraballo said he was posed with a series of specific questions about Puerto Rico that he could not answer. He said he moved to the states when he was eight months old and has only been back to Puerto Rico once since birth.

His mother contacted the office of stateside Puerto Rican Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, D-Ill., and immigration officials released Caraballo on Monday.

Gutiérrez said the situation for undocumented-Latino lookalikes is getting worse with each passing day.

“We know of instances in which young people in his [Caraballo’s] same situation are actually taken to the border and deported from the United States,” he said, pointing to a disturbing connection to the situation in Arizona.

“In Arizona, they want everybody to be able to prove they’re legally in the country,” said the nine-term congressman, born in Chicago of Puerto Rican parents. “They want everybody to prove that they’re an American citizen. Here we had an American citizen, that the federal government . . . could not determine, for more than three days, his status as an American citizen. It’s very, very, very dangerous ground to tread.”

Caraballo said he is considering legal action and hopes his story is a lesson.

“Immigration should analyze the way they judge people,” he said. “They can’t just judge people by their color or their features, by the way they look, they should actually investigate thoroughly, and they should do that before they put the hold on somebody,” he said.