ICE Detaining American Citizens

Most people have already heard the story of Pedro Guzman. Mr Guzman was a mentally-disabled man who was deported to Mexico by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. The problem was that he was an American citizen born in Los Angeles. The mentally-disabled man wandered around northern Mexico for three months before his family found him and brought him back.

Now we hear about Thomas Warziniack. Mr. Warziniack is an American citizen who was born in Minnesota and raised in Georgia. He is also mentally ill and tells wild tales of being a Russian Colonel (even though he speaks with a southern accent and cannot speak any Russian).

Mr Warziniack got in trouble in Colorado, and was sent to prison there. Prison officials believed his wild stories and turned him over to ICE, even though the Colorado court that convicted him had already declared him to be an American citizen.

Warziniack's sisters tried for weeks to get him out of ICE detention, but were ignored by the government agents. These agents claimed they were unable to verify he was a citizen. Evidently, these agents are totally incompetent. It took a reporter only minutes to find his Minnesota birth certificate and verify his citizenship.

ICE would like for us to believe these are rare and isolated cases. ICE spokeswoman Ernestine Fobbs says, "We don't want to detain or deport American citizens. It's just not something we do." But it looks like she's trying to put a good face on a bad situation. There is evidence that many more American citizens are being detained and possibly deported.

In 2006, the Vera Institute of Justice (a nonprofit institution) did a study in which they identified about 125 citizens being held by ICE. The study only surveyed six detention facilities. They are now trying to examine all facilities, but that's a huge job. There are 15 federal detention facilities and about 400 state and private facilities. That means the number of citizens wrongly held is probably much higher.

One problem is that once you are pegged as illegal and placed in a facility by ICE, you do not have a right to an attorney. Couple this with incompetent or uncaring ICE agents, and it can be very difficult for a citizen to prove his status.

This is a by-product of the Republican fear-mongering of the last few years. Their demonizing of immigrants has caused a lot of pressure to be put on ICE, and the organization now seems to consider deportation more important than the protection of citizen's rights. These illegal detentions and deportations will continue to happen as long as the Republican leadership continues their racist scare tactics.

Hopefully, the people will boot these fools out in the next election and we can restore some sanity to our government and our country.