U.S. Citizen Freed From Immigration Detention

The Star-Telegram reports that Thomas Warziniack, the Minnesota native whom U.S. authorities have been trying to deport as an undocumented immigrant from Russia, was freed Thursday after his family produced a birth certificate and a U.S. senator demanded his release. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had held Warziniack, 40, for weeks in an Arizona detention facility despite his assertions that he is a U.S. citizen. His family learned about his predicament from McClatchy Newspapers, which wrote about his case this week in an article about Americans caught up in a bureaucratic tangle when officials do not believe their claims of citizenship. An unpublished study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit organization, identified 125 people in 2006 who were in immigration detention centers nationwide and who immigration lawyers believed had valid U.S. citizenship claims.

For a Greg Siskind blog entry on the issue, see here.

KJ