Immigration Officials Detaining, Deporting American Citizens
January 26th, 2008Over Christmas, I was speaking with Becky’s uncle, who lives in Auckland. He said, “The guy who mows my lawn is an American. He considers himself to be a political refugee. He’s so grateful to be here.”
Of course, you can imagine my shock…
Via: McClatchy:
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 finally became a free man. Immigration officials released him after his family, who learned about his predicament from McClatchy, produced a birth certificate and after a U.S. senator demanded his release.
“The immigration agents told me they never make mistakes,” Warziniack said in an earlier 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.
An unpublished study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit organization, in 2006 identified 125 people in immigration detention centers across the nation who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.
Research Credit: PD
State Dept/Homeland Security/CIA/etc psyop: “Let’s see what happens if we pick up some unquestionably American citizens and hold them for a significant amount of time on the completely bogus charge of being illegal immigrants. Things to look for: who finds out? who cares? does the MSM pick up the story? And most of all, can we use this as leverage to get the masses to actually WANT a federal ID card, like Real ID, so as to “preclude” such “accidents” from happening to them?”
We are all just little SIMS to be fucked with “for the greater good”.
When we first relocated from the states, I was joking with an old friend of my German wife, another Eifelaner now living on the outskirts of München, a natural place for a magazine/media type over here to settle.
I said “you know, I wonder what sort of press attention we could muster if I was to go to the Kreisverwaltung and apply for political asylum in Germany?
Being the earnest anti-Bush Green sort who still believes in systemic reform and most all of the other pipe dreams of the modern techno-intellectual set, he got really excited and rather serious at what to me was mostly a jest.
It dawned on me at that point that though I had been propagandized from birth, as have we all in the media-driven “western world”, he had grown up in a Europe with stiff borders, with the “threat” of Soviet tanks parked just a few hours east. With the Red Brigades and NATO and the EEC and Gladio and an education system that officially frowned on any and all overt displays of national pride or sentiment. The post-nazi pendulum swinging back to the other extreme.
Much as value is assigned in the real estate business, the difference between a dissident and a political prisoner is axiomatic: location, location, location.
Here to resides the difference between Ulli and myself, having lived the relatively coddled life of an American, surrounded by such overabundance at relatively low cost. The dischord in that reality, especially in the face of so much lack elsewhere, left me with smoldering guilt from a very young age. While I’ve long since gotten over the guilt, I still feel the twinge every time I fire up the chainsaw, the hedge trimmer or the mower and bring the Benzinsklaven to bear.
Was I ever really an American citizen, if I never felt any honest investment in the system? I did my best on the civic duty scale, stewardship and all of that appealing to me greatly, but no matter how many trails I helped maintain or folks I helped out of a jam in the Cascade backcountry or on the ski slopes, none of it was done out of a sense of duty to anything but karma. What kind of citizen does that make a person exactly?
And Nut, we’re only SIMS if we accept the programming. Since the strategy of the system appears more cumulative than targeted, basic avoidance strategies can go a very long way toward any personal deprogramming strategy. I’ve known I was a memetic warrior since age twelve, and it still took me a good fifteen years or so to break entirely free of the more insidious consraints hammered into me by the milieu.
Nowadays I’m a political refugee like the guy in Auckland, mowing fields and working forests and learning to work in stone. Am I just a hopeless romantic, an expat ostrich hiding behind my little walls of stone? Perhaps. But it sure feels a whole hell of a lot better than constinuously grinding my soul down to a nub crunching words for some piece of the machine or another — just to be able to feed myself.
Ironically enough, on crap that was making me sicker and sicker every year, and I was pretty f**king health-conscious as a mountain biker, ski patrol, backpacking type in my spare time. Despite this, I signs of disintegration were already appearing by my mid-20’s. The advent of the Internet as a functional replacement for my old friend the library was the straw that broke the camel, proverbially speaking.
These days I avoid refined sugars like a junkie should avoid heroin. Hydrogenated fats and the world of processed crap is a like a vague and distant nightmare. I am spoiled beyond compare consuming a diet that makes most of the visiting Americans passing through vaguely uncomfortable.
Raw milk. Raw cream. Raw egg (from our own chickens) in specific preparations. Meats raised without drugs on grass we can walk on and whole feeds produced the old-fashioned way. Basically, what you read over on Farmlet, with our own local variations and favorites. Ice cream as a health food. Life is good.
Why would anyone want to go back to a country working hard to outlaw the possession of raw milk?
“And Nut, we’re only SIMS if we accept the programming. Since the strategy of the system appears more cumulative than targeted, basic avoidance strategies can go a very long way toward any personal deprogramming strategy.”
My point was: we’re SIMS from “their” point of view. The subject of this story was treated like a SIM, not a human being, and I think it’s indicative of what’s happening, (or what’s accelerating) in our society; and the more people realize this, the better the odds are that a real change can happen. I’d say Mr. Warziniack was pretty significantly fucked with, and the people who did it, if my psyop speculation is correct, thought of him as a SIM and nothing else.
But your response seems to imply that Mr. Warziniack could have avoided this unforeseeable action had he not “accepted the programming” and/or practiced “basic avoidance strategies”. He was a drifter, for God’s sake, how much did he “accept the programming”? Exactly which “basic avoidance strategy” should he have employed to avoid being profiled and then selected to undergo an experiment being conducted by the power-mad? It seems to me, the only way he could have avoided it would be if he had fled the country, in a generalized anticipation of such events, as you have done. And I respect that: that you, and Kevin, have seen the writing on the wall and have carved out a niche for yourselves outside the belly, if not, perhaps, the reach, of the beast. But I don’t see Kevin offering up, to the 300 or so million of us who still live here, above-it-all nostrums that seem to imply that Mr. Warziniack’s the one to blame for his incarceration. And if all you’re saying is, “He got fucked because he was stupid enough not to leave the country”, why don’t you just say it? And if there’s more to it than that, if “basic avoidance strategies” actually means something specific and practicable, then please, share it with us. But perhaps the only thing we HAVEN’T done is the one REAL thing you HAVE done (and can legitimately lay claim to), namely, decide that the US is the Titanic, and it’s every man for himself.
Some memetic warriors fight in the trenches, and others from relatively safe havens far away. Each should acknowledge the work and challenges of the other.