Saturday, April 17, 2004

She Sounds Dangerous, Don’t Ya Think?

“The 50-year-old Fairfax County housewife already had spent one month in jail for embezzling money from the cash register of the restaurant where she had worked as a waitress. She had paid $3,000 in restitution, far more than the $70 she had admitted taking.

O’Brien, a native of South Korea, also had paid dearly in shame. She hadn’t even told her American husband of 25 years, a foreign aid officer who was working abroad when she committed the crime and served her time. Her four children - three of them born here - kept her secret well.

On Jan. 8 she told her husband, home on leave, that she was going to the store. Instead, she met her probation officer in Fairfax.

That is when the United States immigration system swallowed her life.

The probation meeting was a setup. O’Brien, petite and refined, walked into a room of armed federal agents and local police. They pushed her against the wall, handcuffed and manacled her.

She barely had time to call her stunned husband with the long-hidden truth before she was hustled into a van, still manacled and with no seat belt, for a jolting ride to the Hampton Roads Regional Jail in Portsmouth.

O’Brien is still there three months later, awaiting possible deportation to a country she no longer knows and far away from the family she has raised in America.”

Sheesh.

From this story via The Agitator.

Posted by John Venlet on 04/17 at 06:18 AM
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