Old Deportation Orders Put Many Out Unjustly, Critics Say

[Khephra]

Handcuffed, shackled, interrogated for nine hours and then locked up for two days, Prof. Anatoly Bogudlov, a retired astrophysicist, kept expecting Department of Homeland Security agents to realize they had made a mistake when they arrested him at Kennedy Airport last week as he returned from a trip to Moscow.

But though his arrest was based on bureaucratic errors buried for years in immigration files, it was not exactly a mistake. Professor Bogudlov, 65, a permanent resident of the United States who has visited Moscow 10 times in the last eight years, has become one of 400,000 aliens caught up in a new Homeland Security program to track people with old deportation orders against them.

The crackdown began in 2002 against immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries and last June turned to those convicted of crimes, but in recent months it has shifted to those from any country who have violated civilian immigration rules. Many of those immigrants, like Professor Bogudlov, have no idea there was an order of removal against them, because two-thirds of such orders were issued in absentia when the immigrant failed to show up for a hearing, according to the government's own study of the issue.

In some cases, the immigrant deliberately fled. But years of backlog, wrong addresses and other faulty data so plague old Immigration and Naturalization Service files, the 2002 Department of Justice study found, that the agency had a chronic problem notifying immigrants of hearings and of removal orders.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/19/nyregion/19detain.html?ex=1077771600&en=155dcccd9162a054&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE