Plea to Obama Led to an Immigrant’s Arrest

[Ed Barrow]

Source: New York Times

The letter appealing to President Obama was written in frustration in January, by a woman who saw her family reflected in his. She was a white United States citizen married to an African man, and the couple — college-educated professionals in Manhattan — were stymied in their long legal battle to keep him in the country.

Could the president help, asked the woman, Caroline Jamieson, a marketing executive. She described the impasse that confronted her husband, Hervé Fonkou Takoulo, a citizen of Cameroon with an outstanding deportation order from a failed bid for asylum.

The response came on June 3, when two immigration agents stopped Mr. Takoulo, 34, in front of the couple’s East Village apartment building. He says one agent asked him, “Did you write a letter to President Obama?”

...

But on Thursday night, Mr. Takoulo was just as suddenly released, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had been questioned about the case by The New York Times. Officials said they were investigating how the letter — one of thousands routinely referred to the agency by the White House to gather information for a reply — had been improperly used by the agency’s “fugitive operations” unit to find and arrest Mr. Takoulo, who has an engineering degree and no criminal record.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/nyregion/19immig.html?partner=MYWAY&ei=5065

[rocktivity]

1. Who's next? The mother of the girl who told Michelle Obama

that she didn't have any papers?

(Gets off shiftless lazy ass and does her own research): No, thank goodness!

x(
rocktivity

[NV Whino]

2. That was my first thought when I saw the headline.

[backscatter712]

3. Still bunches of Bushies embedded in all levels of government. n/t

[alp227]

4. White woman, African man...Obama's parents? Oh wait...

Dangit ICE get your hands off of the president's correspondence!!!!