1115.org

In the time of Bush, what does it take to save a man from being royally f*cked by the all-knowing, all-wise federal government?

Judging by the story of Thomas Warziniack, it takes something suspiciously like divine intervention.

You can be born and brought up in the United States, with papers and everything, even a birth certificate. Doesn’t mean diddly-squat when the immigration gestapo decide that you’re an illegal immigrant. Because you probably don’t walk around with your original birth certificate in your back pocket. And judging by the story of Thomas Warziniack, they probably don’t look twice at even a notarized copy.

If you thought we were a nation of laws — except for minor aberrations like waterboarding, and secret CIA prisons, and indefinite detention without trial or habeas corpus — think again. The immigration gestapo is, quite obviously, not bound by anything resembling what we like to think of as our laws.

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.

Certainly don’t need to be bound by laws or legal niceties if you never make mistakes. Can’t argue with that.

It’s still interesting, though, to tot up exactly what Warziniack was put through.
— first of all, he was presumed to be guilty (of being an illegal immigrant)
— no question of even the most elementary investigation, of course (hey, when you never make mistakes…)
— forget Warziniack’s self-serving protestations of innocence; even court rulings are irrelevant to our immigration gestapo.

Do please spend a moment thinking about what would have happened to Warziniack if McClatchy hadn’t a) stumbled upon his case, and b) chosen to inform his family.

A nation of laws, indeed!