Nobody’s Safe

Well, for now, nobody poor is safe. But give them time.

McClatchy, Immigration officials detaining, deporting American citizens:

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.

On Thursday, Warziniack was told he would be released. Immigration authorities were finally able to verify his citizenship.

“The immigration agents told me they never make mistakes,” Warziniack said in a phone interview from jail.

It's really worth reading the whole article: no right to a lawyer, no help getting documents, no one believes the documents you get or the witnesses you find, and you have the burden of proof of showing you are a citizen — while in custody.

(spotted via Emergent Chaos, “We have to be careful we don't release the wrong person”)

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5 Responses to Nobody’s Safe

  1. LACJ says:

    This is where we are. Now what? Serious initiatives would seem to be called for.

  2. Soon we’ll have to ask the federal government for permission before moving from Kansas to New York, and police officers will stop us randomly to make sure our papers are in order. Rambo and Rocky IV will be banned because their references to the Soviet Union threaten national security, 1984 will be revised to take place in 2012, The Academy awards the Terminator President of the United States for his role in True Lies, Moses is Chairman of the National Rifle Association, Darth Vader reads the Bible, Superman is confined to a wheelchair and the Rockefellers move into the secret moonbase while Bu$h Co retire to Paraguay. Free and Fair elections are re-instated in the North American Union with the supervision of United Nations inspectors.

  3. That’s why I keep telling people that you HAVE to accord supposed foreign terrorists all the procedural rights: If you don’t, the government merely has to claim that you’re not an American, and magically, all your opportunities to prove that you are will vanish.

  4. Alan Andrews says:

    Well, it should be obvious. They (the nefarious “them”) don’t want WHITE foreigners to take up residence in the United States (or North America, for that matter) and as a consequence, even if it’s completely inadvertent, increase the white population, which is just below replacement (which means negative growth, in other words). Doing so would be exactly counter to the ongoing and in-play effort to transform the US (and North America, for that matter) into a “Non-White Country.” I thought you knew. Haven’t you been going to the meetings? It’s part of the reason they (whoever “they” are) trotted out Obama this go around.

  5. Alan Andrews says:

    http://www.star-telegram.com/national_news/story/433670.html

    Ah, so he had a southern accent, too, huh? Well, that seals it!

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