Chilling !!
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An unpublished study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit organization, in 2006 identified 125 people in immigration detention centers across the nation who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.
This is what always bothered me about the secondary stop before San Onofre going between San Diego and Orange County on the I-5. If you looked like you're not American -- and you don't travel with a birth certificate because you are NOT crossing an international border, because you're in your own country -- who is to say some border agent just could decide you look suspicious and take you in for a day or two until someone finds your birth certificate at home. I guess it didn't bother me as much in the 1990's because I always thought of it more as a drug enforcement check to keep drugs from getting to LA from TJ. But I'm sure its a lot scarier now after 9/11 to go through? (From 1989- 1995 I used drive from SD to Irvine every single week and it just got to be a routine drive through Camp Pendleton with a great view of the ocean. Its the only place left undeveloped on the Southern California coastline. ) But if I were an American of Hispanic ancestory I would feel like I wouldn't want to be driving between SD & LA very often. I think people want to keep the drugs out, but they also don't want to be "profiled" or thought of with suspicion either. Over 1/3 of the population of CA is hispanic.
I was looking for a picture of this sign because its stayed in my memory ( that's how you know you're getting close to the border stop) and found this interesting story about the sign and what it means to different people: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050410/news_1n10signs.html
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