From ABC News:
All of her life, Zoila Meyer believed she was an American. She even won election to the City Council of Adelanto.
But now she is facing a threat of deportation for illegally voting, because she never became a citizen after being brought to this country from Cuba when she was 1 year old.
“To be honest with you, I’m scared. How can they just pluck me out of my family, my kids?” the 40-year-old mother of four said in a telephone interview Friday.
“If they can do this to me, they can do it to anybody,” she said.
After Meyer was elected to the council in Adelanto in 2004, someone told officials that she was born in Cuba, prompting an investigation.
Eventually, “the police came to me and said, ‘Zoila, you’re not a citizen. You’re a legal resident but you’re not a citizen,’” said Meyer, who now lives in the San Bernardino County desert town of Apple Valley, near Adelanto.
She resigned after 10 weeks in office in Adelanto, a town of about 23,000.
Meyer, whose story was first reported in the Victorville Daily Press, applied to become a naturalized citizen and continued with her life: raising her children and attending two local colleges to earn degrees toward her goal of working in the justice system as a forensic nurse.
However, because she was not a citizen, Meyer faced a felony charge of illegally voting in the 2004 election.
In April 2006, she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of fraudulent voting and was placed on probation, fined and ordered to pay restitution.
What Meyer didn’t realize is that fraudulently voting is a deportable offense.
On June 18, Meyer said, immigration officials showed up at her home and told her to appear at their San Bernardino office.
Her husband drove her to the office on Tuesday, “and they handcuffed me,” Meyer said. “They put me in jail and they frisked me and processed me.”
“I said ‘You’re doing this because I voted?”‘
The case is unusual but immigration officials were just doing their job when they arrested Meyer, said Lori Haley, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Less
aynrkey
bostonteapartygoer
Kenn Jacobine
mattdharris
Mike Seebeck
Miche
paulie
Jim Davidson
ponggod
Stuart Richards
Todd Andrew Barnett
This is what happens when people worry about imaginary lines on the map. When a person can’t even know for herself where she “belongs” it is time to re-evaluate the premises.
I undrstand what you’re saying Kent, but then who do I vote for? I’m all for a completely open world, but it won’t happen in our lifetimes, so until then…what? How do we transition to that?
This woman is getting a raw deal, though. Isn’t it enough that she was removed from her elected position? Can’t they just leave it at that? She is a legal resident, afterall.
If we desire an open world there’s no transition necessary. You just wake up and make it so. Transition is another way of maintaining the status quo. As we saw this last election cycle people aren’t interested in libertarians who are “pragmatists” or transitionalists. We are, by definition radicals and it’s not something we should ever be ashamed of or hide in an effort to gain electoral victories. Lying for the sake of political victories is still lying and should be anathema to anyone who calls themselves a libertarian.
That’s one of the reasons I admire Kent. He doesn’t tone down the rhetoric to avoid scaring the sheep, as I’ve seen so many of the “pragmatists” do.
The lady in this article was a victim of politics, no the bureaucracy. I’ll put a hundred bucks on the table that she was outed by her opponent or her opponents party. Politics is a vile business filled with power grubbing vipers, as we can see here. Victory at any cost? Not worth the price.
I don’t know what Ms. Meyer’s politics were/are, but I’m afraid she was probably just another tyrant wanna-be. I”m not gonna try to find out because it doesn’t change the injustice and therefore doesn’t matter to me. Did you go to the ABC News website and read the horrible comments people made against her? It made me sick to read what people had written. One guy wrote something like “You don’t care enough about America to even know if you are a citizen or not? Go back to your own country!” I’d like to let that ignoramus know she IS in HER country. Regardless of whether she understands liberty or freedom or what her views were on “illegal” immigrants before this happened. She is as “at home” here as the creep who wrote those words. I’ll end my “self righteous” rant now.
It’s somewhat hard to believe that this woman went some 30+ years without realizing that she wasn’t an American citizen, but I suppose it’s possible, and it raises a host of questions about the fairness of deporting illegal immigrants.
If Ms. Meyers was brought here by here parents at the age of 1 year, then she didn’t do anything wrong. Yet she is the one who is being punished.
I echo Kent’s sentiment about America being her country. If you’ve lived in America since the age of 1 and never knew any other country, then obviously you’re going to feel that America is your country.
Imagine that you learned at age 40 that your parents weren’t you true biological parents and that they had adopted you at the age of 1 year. What would your response be? Of course they’re your parents! The state coming in and saying “technically, they’re not you’re true parents” does change the fact that they’re the only parents that you’ve ever known.
“You just wake up and make it so.”
MRJarell, you need to wake up and face REALITY! I agree with you in principle and it would be great if it were possible, but transition is necessary when you have to deal with the will of other countries and their citizens/residents. I am a libertarian all the way, but others are not. If they were I would not have posed the question because we wouldn’t have borders and we wouldn’t need them. It would just be the way. Until we change our damaging government to one of peace and then convince others we are sincere, then I don’t blame anyone for wanting secure borders. We have to set the example. That is my idea of a transition. Look at Europe. They set a positive example of open borders but there is no way in hell any of them would have agreed to it the day WWII ended. They needed to prove peaceful. They did and now they have free movement. They also have socialism. Whaddya gonna do?