AP on deportation of American citizens

On my first time back on American soil after the 9/11 attacks, a customs agent at San Francisco's airport asked me, "if you don't even live here anymore, why do you bother to keep your US citizenship?" 

If I'd been asked that before 9/11, I might have gotten in touch with the agent's supervisor. But from September 11 onward, I was afraid of underestimating what I assumed to be a grave national mood, based on conversations with fellow American citizens in Seoul (including a friend-and-future-girlfriend who thought her own family was freaking out), discussions with my family members in California and Minnesota, and what I'd seen on TV — particularly comedy programs that had taken on a somber tone. 

I was also afraid I could get in trouble with a touchy, if not trigger-happy, Federal bureaucracy that may have felt that there was no such thing as doing too much in the name of national security. 

So my hearty "Screw you!" would never come. Nor would my speech that some six million Americans choose for whatever reason to live abroad, and I — we! — should not have to explain ourselves. Living in Seoul was as much my right as living in Seattle, Sioux Falls, or Saratoga. 

Where am I going with this? I guess what I'm getting at is that the comment upset me. What if our government went all out in the wake of 9/11 and decided to start putting Americans inpatriotic and not-so-patriotic piles. As someone who has lived over a third of his life outside the US, would someone decide I should be stripped of my citizenship? I'd be lost without my Americanness. I could get ROK citizenship in a heartbeat — and doing so would make my life simpler — but I would never imagine doing it if it required giving up my US passport. 

And that's something in the back of my mind as I read the story of Pedro Guzman and others like him:

Pedro Guzman has been an American citizen all his life. Yet in 2007, the 31-year-old Los Angeles native — in jail for a misdemeanor, mentally ill and never able to read or write — signed a waiver agreeing to leave the country without a hearing and was deported to Mexico as an illegal immigrant.

For almost three months, Guzman slept in the streets, bathed in filthy rivers and ate out of trash cans while his mother scoured the city of Tijuana, its hospitals and morgues, clutching his photo in her hand. He was finally found trying to cross the border at Calexico, 100 miles away.

These days, back home in California, "He just changes from one second to another. His brain jumps back to when he was missing," said his brother, Michael Guzman. "We just talk to him and reassure him that everything is fine and nobody is going to hurt him."

In a drive to crack down on illegal immigrants, the United States has locked up or thrown out dozens, probably many more, of its own citizens over the past eight years. A monthslong AP investigation has documented 55 such cases, on the basis of interviews, lawsuits and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. These citizens are detained for anything from a day to five years. Immigration lawyers say there are actually hundreds of such cases.

That is so scary as to be unimaginable. Cheech Marin played this for laughs in his 1980s video "Born in East L.A." where he's caught up in an INS raid and shipped off to Baja and has to sneak his way back in. 

It also reminds me of the case discussed in the Asia-related blogs in 2006, of a twenty-something Japanese woman in Japan's Saitama Prefecture (where "Y" is from) who was arrested by the police who thought she looked like a foreigner. 

I don't really know how to end this open-ended post, except to say that it's bad enough that xenophobia prevails in so many countries, but perhaps even worse when the xenophobia is applied to actual citizens.