Memo to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Kafka’s The Trial is not an instruction manual!

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he’s never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack’s claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona. 

The real money quote comes from the ICE official near the bottom of the story:

“The burden of proof is on the individual to show they’re legally entitled to be in the United States,” said ICE spokeswoman Kice. 

As they say on the blogs, read the whole thing (it’s a McClatchy article). A commenter on the article adds this joke from the old Soviet Union:

One day a bear is walking along when he sees all the animals running out of the forest. He stops a rabbit and asks what’s happening.

“Run for your life!” the rabbit says. “The KGB is catching and castrating all the camels!”

“Why should I worry?” says the bear. “I’m not a camel.”

“After the KGB has cut off your balls, try to prove it!”

How chilling is it that morbid jokes from the Soviet Union now have a resonance here in the United States?