« Ron Paul - 12% in Georgia | LRC Blog | LRC Home | Ron Paul's New Economic Advisor » January 24, 2008 "Your Papers, Citizen. . . Sorry, Not Good Enough" Posted by Anthony Gregory at January 24, 2008 06:02 PM
The government can't do anything right. "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." "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." This is nothing anomalous, apparently. "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 An unpublished study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit organization, in 2006 identified 125 people in immigration detention centers across the nation who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." How many illegal immigrants does the US fail to catch? Millions. But of the many thousands harassed and put in detention centers (where, unlike on the free market, they get food and clothing paid for by the taxpayer) it looks like a non-negligible number are citizens. Hmmm. As messy as things are with the unsatisfactory status quo, I shudder at the thought of what a real crack down on illegal aliens would look like. Thanks to Jason Ditz for the link. Reddit . Digg this . Stumble It . Shout It . Save to del.icio.us . Discuss on Newsvine [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
