A man the U.S. didn't want
Native son lost in web of errors
BY KRISTIN COLLINS - Staff Writer
Published: Sun, Aug. 30, 2009 02:00AM
The U.S. government admitted in April that it had wrongly deported a North Carolina native, but newly released documents show that federal investigators ignored FBI records and other evidence showing that the man was a United States citizen.
At the time of Mark Lyttle's deportation, immigration officials had criminal record checks that said he was a U.S. citizen. They had his Social Security number and the names of his parents. They had Lyttle's own sworn statement that he had been born in Rowan County, N.C.
None of this stopped them from leaving Lyttle, a mentally ill American who speaks no Spanish, alone and penniless in a country to which he has no ties.
Lyttle's 350-page federal Department of Homeland Security file, released to The News & Observer, shows that the government deported him entirely on the basis of some of his own conflicting statements, even though agents knew that Lyttle is bipolar and has a learning disability.
"I tried to tell them I was a U.S. citizen born right here in Rowan County," Lyttle says now. "But no one believed me."
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, more than 18,000 of them from a three-state region that includes North Carolina.
As the number of deportations swells each year, it is straining the nation's immigration investigators and courts -- and raising questions about the rights afforded to immigration detainees, many of whom have no lawyers.
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http://www.newsobserver.com/110/story/1667768.html
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