You can’t make it up. From the AP:

A woman who wrote President Barack Obama, asking for help resolving her husband’s immigration problem got a response she didn’t expect: Federal agents turned up at her New York City home and took her husband to jail.

Officials tell The New York Times that Caroline Jamieson’s letter to the president was mistakenly forwarded to an immigration fugitive unit. After the newspaper inquired about the case, the man, Herve Fonkou Takoulo, was released.

Takoulo is an engineer from Cameroon. He came to the U.S. legally, but was ordered to leave when a judge rejected his application for political asylum. Now he has a second green card application pending based on his 2005 marriage to Jamieson.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is preparing to sue the state of Arizona over a law that simply requires police to question an individual’s immigration status after stopping that person for a legitimate reason, and on the basis of reasonable suspicion regarding that person’s status. Arizona, of-course, is suffering a veritable crime-wave thanks to the Mexican drug wars which are leaking across the border; a border which the federal government refuses to seal off.

So, to recap: a woman pleads the case for her husband, a man who legally entered the United States in the first instance; a man who apparently is well-educated and presumably employable (an “engineer” according the report) and a man who married an American citizen (this same woman) a full five years ago. You might think, based on all this, that it’s a little less urgent to arrest and deport this man, versus all those Mexican criminals causing such a headache to the people of Arizona; i.e. the people who are about to be sued by the Obama administration. You might think that this is a guy who might deserve a little break, or at least a blind eye for a while. Yet, her letter pleading for help to President Obama merely earns a visit from federal agents who put her husband in jail.

Naturally, I am not maintaining that President Obama himself read this letter, and so is personally responsible for what took place. Nevertheless, the story sums up the irrationality of his administration’s immigration policy. And let Governor Brewer of Arizona take note: This story should be among the defense exhibits during the upcoming prosecution of the state of Arizona by the federal government. If a man like Herve Fonkou Takoulo gets treated this way, based on a letter to Obama, then why should Mexican drug criminals of Arizona be given some kind of immunity?

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