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Friday, January 25, 2008

At least when they deported Emma Goldman, they had a reason
Posted by Jill | 9:55 AM
A bad reason, but a reason. Poor Thomas Warziniack was guilty only of the crime of Being a Drug User And Probably Mentally Ill While Having A Funny Name -- but it was enough to get him detained in a deportation facility for weeks:

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. "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.

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.

[snip]

Officials with ICE, the federal agency that oversees deportations, maintain that such cases are isolated because agents are required to obtain sufficient evidence that someone is an illegal immigrant before making an arrest. However, they don't track the number of U.S. citizens who are detained or deported.

"We don't want to detain or deport U.S. citizens," said Ernestine Fobbs, an ICE spokeswoman. "It's just not something we do."

While immigration advocates agree that the agents generally release detainees before deportation in clear-cut cases, they said that ICE sometimes ignores valid assertions of citizenship in the rush to ship out more illegal immigrants.

Proving citizenship is especially difficult for the poor, mentally ill, disabled or anyone who has trouble getting a copy of his or her birth certificate while behind bars.

Pedro Guzman, a mentally disabled U.S. citizen who was born in Los Angeles, was serving a 120-day sentence for trespassing last year when he was shipped off to Mexico. Guzman was found three months later trying to return home. Although federal government attorneys have acknowledged that Guzman was a citizen, ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said Thursday that her agency still questions the validity of his birth certificate.

Last March, ICE agents in San Francisco detained Kebin Reyes, a 6-year-old boy who was born in the U.S., for 10 hours after his father was picked up in a sweep. His father says he wasn't permitted to call relatives who could care for his son, although ICE denies turning down the request.

The number of U.S. citizens who are swept up in the immigration system is a small fraction of the number of illegal immigrants who are deported, but in the last several years immigration lawyers report seeing more detainees who turn out to be U.S. citizens.


(h/t: He Who Must Not Be Named)

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5 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Jill,

Proving citizenship is especially difficult for the poor, mentally ill, disabled or anyone who has trouble getting a copy of his or her birth certificate while behind bars.

... can be a difficult if not impossible chore for ANYONE.

Did you know that ANYONE can get a copy of YOUR birth certificate? Talk about identity theft. But if you want to prove that point, call your friendly registrar of births [that's in Trenton BTW. I assume you were born in NJ] and ask for one. At the very least, they'll ask for your parent's name and your birthdate and then tell you where to send the check/money order.
And if you think I'm wrong, try it!!!

But where is this note going? Birth certificates are so easy to get that simply having SOMEONE's should mean nothing in this day and age. But alas! Won't happen. But you can ponder it.

I wonder if a "real ID' drivers license would have solved his problem?
1/25/08, 12:03 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...
Not surprising considering the current administration's agendas. After all, how many poor, mentally ill, disabled people become Republican business owners/CEOs? (OK, mentally ill may not be the best yardstick...)
1/25/08, 12:45 PM  
Blogger doc w said...
Erik

An ICE official said: The burden of proof is on the individual to show they're legally entitled to be in the United States," said ICE spokeswoman Kice.

From: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/25392.html

Up to us to prove we're citizens - a presumption of guilt is it not?
1/25/08, 1:02 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
I was born here. Because of a snarl in my amicable divorce, I've been unable for 13 years to get the DMV to correct my name on my driver license. Ted, I have to change my name legally before I can change the address on my license. You think I can get a 'real ID'? No. Because I essentially can't prove who I am, and if some agency says so, neither can you.
1/25/08, 1:13 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
tata,
My sympathies! What name is on your passport?

I had the 'misfortune' of having a renewal passport issued by mail with my name misspelled. [I had submitted my previous expired passport along with the application.] Trivially simple to get fixed, right? WRONG!

They insisted that I PROVE that my name was misspelled. They would NEVER make such a mistake. It must have been misspelled on the original, etc... Or even more to the point, I must really be that OTHER person and am simply trying to get an illicit passport.
I ended up having to go to the passport office with all my ORIGINAL paperwork -- including a proper birth certificate [I'd had a passport for about 30 years by then!]. They looked at my new and old passports and the birth certificate and pronounced: We don't know this is you! Anybody can get a birth certificate with your name on it. And credit cards and drivers license with the OTHER [correct] spelling were totally ignored. They're not 'real' ids!

They did send a letter of apology after my Congressman got involved. But I suspect to this day that my name is in some 'troublemaker' database -- although my last renewal was uneventful!

Even more interesting: They wondered why I cared that my name was misspelled. Huh!? They're the ones who insist on accuracy. But this was way before 9/11! And when I first contacted them about the issue, the question was: How badly misspelled is it? Like there's some level of misspelled that's OK!

But more to the point, the ID chain must start somewhere. In the US we have chosen to have it start 'after the fact' from an otherwise insecure 'birth certificate'. Once you get a birth certificate in SOMEONEs [anyone's] name, you become that person -- forever and legally it appears.

No one seems to care -- and they certainly don't check -- that there were 1000 'John Samuel Smith's' born at 10:30 AM on Dec 17, 1963 to Emma and John Smith in some hospital in some town. You have the paper; you're legal. No one questioned me when I got a SECOND copy of my birth certificate. No one questioned my wife!
1/26/08, 10:52 AM  
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