http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2005/Art/0721/news3.php

By Matt Reynolds
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
July 20, 2005

Back home in a country he hasn't known for 15 years, Andrew Daneček, right, catches up with his brother Jiří in Prague while awaiting his fate.
Andrew Daneček, 55, has lived in the United States for 15 years. He has a house in the suburbs, a mortgage, a pension plan, two cars and dachshund named Charlie.

He left all that behind July 13 as he and his wife, accompanied by their 9-year-old daughter — an American citizen — were deported from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to the country of his birth: the Czech Republic.

"Nothing makes sense," Daneček said, speaking four days later, as he moved his belongings from a temporary apartment in Smíchov to a new residence in Prague's Řepy district. "My world is upside down."

American immigration authorities deported Andrew and his Czech-born wife, Blanka, after discovering the reason the couple had entered the United States no longer applied. In 1990 officials in Vienna allowed Daneček and his wife open-ended entry to the United States on "humanitarian parole" so they could seek treatment for their son Chris, who had leukemia. Chris, now 26 and living in Boston, has been healthy since the early 1990s.

The family believes they will eventually be allowed to return to the United States. Chris, who married an American in 2001, has applied for U.S. citizenship and plans to subsequently apply for immigrant visas for his parents.

"We are hopeful that we can straighten everything out," Andrew Daneček said. "We consider the U.S. our home. We are of course frustrated, but we're trying to be positive."

After 9/11, the agency that let all the terrorists into the country cracked down on America's enemies: a farmer from New Zealand, married to a former California mayor and the mother of a U.S. citizen. She overstayed a visa by a week a few years ago:

http://www.almanacnews.com/morgue/20...11.maggie.html

Thank you, INS. I no longer feel threatened by terrorist New Zealand farmwives.

Dolts.

Am I missing it, or why didn't they apply for citizenship if they planned on staying here? Not to excuse the stupidity of the law, but...

__________________
"If these walls could talk, I'd listen to the floor."--Rev. Horton Heat

You're right, Syc, but I can't believe the resources the agency puts into cases like this, while it lacks the ability to track overseas students who enter the country but never show up on campus. The bad guys are likely to fall into that group, but people like the family in this case are an easy win for the agency's statistics. Unfortunately, that is what matters to the agency; not how well it protects us from the bad guys.