America's Voice Blog

Posted 08/31/09 at 05:04pm

U.S. Taxpayers Pay to Send U.S Citizens on Free Trips To Mexico?

So apparently, the US government has been spending its time -- and our money -- to send American citizens...on free trips to Mexico?

In April, our government admitted that it wrongly deported a North Carolina native, Mark Lyttle, who speaks no Spanish and is mentally ill -- a fact of which federal agents were allegedly aware.

The Charlotte Observer notes:

Lyttle is one of a growing number of people who have been swept up in the federal immigration detention system since 2001, when terrorist attacks prompted an unprecedented effort to find and deport illegal immigrants. The U.S. government deported 350,000 people in the fiscal year that ended in October 2008.

Mark Lyttle says he told agents that he was a U.S. citizen, but that nobody believed him.  According to Jacqueline Stevens, an Associate Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who has closely followed Mark’s case:

Mark says he remembers the interview. The woman told him he had brown skin, so maybe he was from Mexico. Or maybe he was "Oriental," whatever that means. She was going to alert ICE to follow up.

And so after being deported to Mexico twice, the Charlotte Observer reports that, “Mexican authorities sent him to Honduras, where he was imprisoned before being sent to Guatemala.”

And here’s the most ludicrous bit --

It took one -- ONE! -- day for someone at the US Embassy in Guatamala to prove that Mark was a US citizen, and hand him a US passport.

Lyttle, whose history included mental instability, took the deportation in stride—as the Charlotte Observer reported:

Lyttle says he claimed to be Mexican at the first interview because he thought it was pointless to argue with the agent, who was convinced that he was an illegal immigrant. His birth father was Puerto Rican, and Lyttle says he is often mistaken for Mexican.

He says he figured he would take a free trip to Mexico.

So, now it’s time to ask ourselves, what’s a bigger waste of our federal tax dollars on immigration?

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