Immigration officials detaining, deporting American citizens

[Lone_Star_Dem]

Source: McClatchy News

FLORENCE, Ariz. — 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.

<snip>

U.S. citizens who are mistakenly jailed by immigration authorities can get caught up in a nightmarish bureaucratic tangle in which they're simply not believed.

An unpublished study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit organization, in 2006 identified 125 people in immigration detention centers across the nation who immigration lawyers believed had valid U.S. citizenship claims.

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/25392.html

[Deja Q]

1. Sounds Polish, his surname, but I digress...

Maybe they're offshoring his job but like him too much to really let him go? (as ironic as it sounds in the new global entity?)

[Zywiec]

2. Wonder why they thought he was Russian?

After he was arrested in Colorado on a minor drug charge, Warziniack told probation officials there wild stories about being shot seven times, stabbed twice and bombed four times as a Russian army colonel in Afghanistan, according to court records. He also insisted that he swam ashore to America from a Soviet submarine.

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/25392.html

[stillcool]

3. That might confuse things a tad...