Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

"We have to be careful we don't release the wrong person"

Hence, we imprison and deport American citizens for immigration violations.

Thomas Warziniack was born in Minnesota and grew up in Georgia, but immigration authorities pronounced him an illegal immigrant from Russia.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he’s never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack’s claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona.
During a deportation hearing Thursday morning, pleas by Warziniack’s family and lawyer to release him, as well as a copy of his birth certificate proving his citizenship, did little to deter the government.
“The immigration agents told me they never make mistakes,” Warziniack said in a phone interview from jail. “All I know is that somebody dropped the ball.”
The story of how immigration officials decided that a small-town drifter with a Southern accent was an illegal Russian immigrant illustrates how the federal government mistakenly detains and sometimes deports American citizens.

McClatchy [link to http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/25392.html no longer works]
The whole article (which is a must read) makes The Trial seem like a due process Shangri-La by comparison.
The title quote, BTW, is from Ernestine Fobbs, whom McClatchy describes as a spokeswoman for “ICE, the federal agency that oversees deportations”.

7 comments on ""We have to be careful we don't release the wrong person""

  • beri says:

    Please provide a link so I can read the article referenced in your post.
    thank you

  • Chris says:

    @Beri
    http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/25392.html
    (The ‘McClatchy’ after the block quote is a hyperlink inside tags. Sorry this wasn’t as clear as I thought)

  • Anton Chuvakin says:

    Wow, this this for real? I thought that entering us for non-citizens is sometimes a hassle, but this!!!???

  • Anton Chuvakin says:

    Wow, is this for real? I thought that entering us for non-citizens is sometimes a hassle, but this!!!???

  • Peter says:

    I find it incredibly evil that the government choses to believe the guy when he is stoned out of his mind on heroin, but intentionally choses to ignore him when he is sober and has supporting documentation.

  • albatross says:

    Geez, you’d almost think all those nasty things Americans were willing to see done to Arabs in the name of the War on Terror were beginning to be done to Americans, too. Who could possibly have forseen such an event?

  • jrk says:

    Was he a war protestor? I hear this happens to people, in fact, it is hard to find. But that is because the media doesn’t put 2 and 2 2gether.
    Watch for more stories, of police “mistakes” and then google their names + protest

Comments are closed.