Deported and Exiled U.S. Citizen Gets Passport Back

The New York Daily News reports that formerly deported and exiled United States citizen Blanca Maria Alfaro has finally had her passport returned to her, again. Ms. Alfaro was born in Texas, but her family moved to El Salvador when she was a child. Her ordeal includes having her passport stripped on multiple occasions, being detained by immigration officials for over two weeks, and being threatened with jail to coerce her to make a sworn statement that she was not a United States citizen at the airport.

From the article:

According to Alfaro, an immigration officer told her that the U.S. passport she carried was not hers. An officer said that she should write down her correct name on a piece of paper.

She penned "Blanca Maria Alfaro" but officers laughed and ripped it up, she said.

"I told them I was from here, from the United States. They insisted, no, I was from El Salvador," she said.

After hours, they told her that if she didn't tell them her correct name she'd go to jail — where there were "a lot of bad women," Alfaro said. Tired, scared and frustrated, she wrote down her half-sister Mayra's name.

Great work by immigration lawyer Bryan Johnson to get this matter straightened out.