<p>Well, yes. Russians, Poles…whatever. Even when they were born in Minnesota.<br /><br />
The lead paragraph in this McClatchy report sets up the <a id="zyw2" href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/25392.html" target="_blank" title="story">story</a>: "Thomas Warziniack was born in Minnesota and grew up in Georgia, but immigration authorities pronounced him an illegal immigrant from Russia."<br /><br />
And, of course, you can guess what happened: "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."<br /><br />
Warziniack had a drug problem. When arrested, he told authorities improbable stories of having swum ashore from a Russian submarine. Maybe he’d seen the Alan Arkin movie. But he had a southern accent and did not speak Russian. A Colorado court hearing his case figured out quickly that he was a U.S. citizen by birth. The court records, however, according to McClatchy, still list his his current location as "the Soviet Union." <br /><br />
That threw Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for a loop, and Warziniack was almost deported, although not to the Soviet Union, saved at the last moment by a birth certificate that ICE at first did not credit. <br /><br />
An attorney at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College says she has identified at least seven U.S. citizens whom ICE has mistakenly deported since 2000.</p>




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