USCIS Priority: Deport 11-Year Olds

I have this urge to put USCIS on the Morons of the Week every single week but alas, we have to pass on the title every now and then.

What have they done this time? Try to deport a 11 year old to a country she does not know and not because she is in the United States illegally.

Her mom and dad are legally allowed to stay at their home in Georgia, but an eleven-year-old child has been ordered to leave the country by July 23.

Ewelina Bledniak’s parents say it’s a paperwork mistake, made by the lawyer they hired when she was two and they moved to the states.

Dad Hubert is now a U.S. citizen who owns a tile installation business in their small town. Mom Agnes is a legal resident going through the process to become a citizen. But Ewelina’s plight came up when the Bledniaks applied for a green card for their daughter.

Immigration officials found her paperwork wasn’t in order and told her she had to leave by the 23rd, lest she be thrown out of the country and sent “home” to Poland. It’s a home she hasn’t seen in nine years.

Her parents are going to take her to Poland on the 20th to meet with the U.S. Embassy there and hopefully get the issue straightened out, but it’s already creating a hardship. The family has to leave their jobs during a downturn in the economy, and they don’t know when Ewelina will be allowed home. At eleven, they can’t very well leave her alone across the world. She may lose a whole year of school, and she doesn’t speak Polish – attending school there won’t help.

I feel so much safer now. Really.

And this is all due to an immigration lawyer’s mistake. It’s too bad these immigration lawyers aren’t deported each time they toy with our lives. Nancy was also rendered ‘illegal’ by a forgetful lawyer, Mohammad would be legal today had it not been for $20 and two cases of legal malpractice, and so many more students whose stories we might never get to hear.

Why is this story making media waves? Well, the immigrants are Polish, not Mexican.

The good thing is that she is not 18 so she has not started accruing illegal presence so she won’t face the awful 10-year ban.

It’s simply a minor inconvenience in her case, not a life-altering change that many who are deported have to undergo.