Last night, Cerise and I dropped by the Round Robin Bar at the Willard Hotel to enjoy some of their exquisite cocktails before the theater. After we had ordered, she surveyed the crowd, then leaned close, speaking softly.
“See that fellow over there?” Cerise asked. “The one drinking alone? That’s Bletchley. I know his wife. We met contra dancing at Glen Echo. She invited me and some of the other dancers over to her house for a barbecue last August. He makes pretty good beer can chicken, and he was a really nice, jovial host, even though she tells me he hates contra dancing.”
“Did she say how come?” I inquired.
“Apparently,” she giggled, “holding hands with other guys makes him nervous.”
“Well,” I remarked as I looked him over, “beer can chicken notwithstanding, he certainly seems miserable tonight. Why not invite him to join us and see if we can cheer him up?”
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Cerise whispered.
Bletchley didn’t appear to recognize Cerise at first, but I could see, after she reminded him, that he was, if somewhat reluctant, at least willing to share his problems with others. “This is my friend, Tom Collins,” she introduced me as they sat down at the table. Bletchley was half way through what appeared to be something mixed with cola, although whether it was rum, bourbon, vodka or cognac, I could not tell. “He’s a policy consultant.”
“Not the Tom Collins,” Bletchley gasped, “the one they say is the smartest person inside the Beltway?”
“Which is a lot,” I replied by way of confirmation, “like being the tallest building in Baltimore.”
“Baltimore?” Bletchley shuddered, then took a deep swig of his drink. “That hell hole? Oh, God – what if ICE transfers me there after this?”
“After what?” Cerise asked in her most sympathetic voice.
“The Jakadrien Turner Affair,” he moaned disconsolately.
“You mean,” I sought to confirm, “the fourteen year old runaway girl from Dallas, Texas who was apprehended in Houston for shoplifting in 2010, gave the police an alias instead of her real name, and, because of that, ended up getting deported to Columbia?”
“Yep,” Bletchley sighed as he drained his glass and raised his hand, signaling the server to bring another drink.
“But you work in the Communications and Media Liaison Division of the ICE Office of Public Affairs up here in DC,” Cerise observed, “and presumably, the ICE employees who interviewed the girl in Texas are responsible for turning her over to the Columbian consulate.”
“After which,” I reasoned, “it was the Columbian authorities who are to blame for whatever happened next. So how did you end up in the hot seat?”
“Because,” he quietly wailed, “as Chief of the Procedural Actions Interpretation Branch, it’s my job to provide a plausible explanation for what happened – one which avoids creation of negative public image attributes pertaining to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And in this case, that’s proving to be a pretty near Herculean task!”
“Why?” Cerise asked. “Is it the widespread national publicity?”
“Nah,” Bletchley averred, attacking his new highball with grim determination, “lots of immigration cases get high publicity ratings. It’s not that.”
“Then, is it the extraordinary backlash associated with this incident?” I ventured. “The child’s family had a conference call with the NAACP and leaders of the congressional Black Caucus. Then everybody went on the warpath.”
“I’m not going to say that sort of stuff happens all the time,” he conceded, “but it happens often enough for us to have a standard operating procedure to cope with it, which, by the way, I am carefully following. So, no, that’s not it, either.”
“Is it the potential for this situation to adversely affect diplomatic relations between the United States and Columbia?” Cerise wondered.
“You don’t have to be His Excellency, Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Columbia, Peter Michael McKinley,” Bletchley sneered, “to know that the Paisas can’t even tweet unless Uncle Sam pays for their iPhones. And nothing ICE does will change that.”
“Okay,” Cerise shrugged, “I give up. So I guess it’s time for me to ask the Passover Question: what makes this deportation different from all others?”
“The incredibly profound, utterly unbelievable idiocy, incompetence and disorganization displayed by ICE personnel!” Bletchley complained, perhaps a bit too loudly. “The kid’s a runaway from Dallas, right? So when she gets arrested in Houston, the last thing she wants to do is tell the cops her real name, because then, she’ll be sent home. So what does she do? She makes one up, of course! That’s what children who get arrested always do, right off the bat – they say they’re somebody else! But does this kid say she’s Amanda Hugginkiss or Alice B. Toklas or Gwen Stacy or Lisa Simpson or something? No, she has get cute – come up with something really authentic, something really smart. She has to say she’s Tika Lanay Cortez! How clever that little hoyden was, don’t you think, huh? She knew that a Hispanic girl would give three names and that ‘Cortez’ is some kind of Spanish surname, so she just tacked a couple of other names she’d heard out on the street in front of it and bingo – she’s a Latina. Great – except, it just so happens that Tika Lanay Cortez was the exact same name as a real person wanted on a bunch of outstanding warrants! And guess what – the real Tika Lanay Cortez is also an illegal immigrant from Columbia! So what do those nitwits at ICE down in Texas do when they take her fingerprints? Do they run them through the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, for which the United States taxpayers shelled out a couple of hundred million dollars for just such occasions? No, they do not, and therefore, they fail to realize that this person who says they are Tika Lanay Cortez is not the Tika Lanay Cortez wanted on all those outstanding warrants, not the Tika Lanay Cortez who is an illegal immigrant from Colombia, and not the Tika Lanay Cortez whose fingerprints the FBI already has! But that’s not all – do they read the ICE file on the real Tika Lanay Cortez, which they could have done, right there on the ICE virtual private network if they had wanted to, and see that she was born in 1990? Do they then take a look at this kid who says she is Tika Lanay Cortez and ask themselves, ‘Does this little brat look like she’s twenty-one years old?’ No, they do not! Furthermore, do they examine a picture of the real Tika Lanay Cortez and notice…”
“I think we get the idea,” Cerise interrupted.
“Hold on, hold on, there’s more,” Bletchley protested, “the worst part – the most absurd part! Here’s this fourteen year old who says she’s named Tika Lanay Cortez, who’s supposed to be twenty-one and from Columbia. Okay, then, does she speak Spanish? No, she doesn’t speak a word of it! But did any of those knuckleheads at ICE down in Texas think to ask her, ‘¿Qué prefiere para el desayuno, un plato de huevos fritos y pan tostado o la comida para gatos envueltos en papel higiénico?’ and then listen to her reply? Obviously not! See my problem now? What can our official press releases possibly say? Which clever replies to the predictable media questions should I include in our briefing notes to the White House Press Secretary? How am I supposed to spin all of this inexcusable lameness so ICE doesn’t look like a we’re a bunch of nose-picking, mouth-breathing, pin-headed retards?”
“There’s a clue,” I noted, “in your Spanish question about breakfast preferences. Did you know that there’s a part of Columbia where the inhabitants normally speak only English?”
Bletchley’s eyes went wide. He slowly lowered his drink, which had been halfway to his mouth, back to the table and stared at me intently. “There is?”
“The Columbian Department of the Archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina,” I confirmed.
“And what,” Bletchley breathlessly beseeched, “is that?”
“Two small island groups in the Caribbean located about five hundred miles northwest of the Colombian mainland and approximately one hundred and forty miles east of Nicaragua. A colony was established there in 1630 by Puritans who found the climate in Massachusetts and Rhode Island unsuitable. They started sugar, tobacco and indigo plantations with African slaves and hired out their ships as privateers to plunder the Spanish Main. That second activity got them invaded and occupied by the Spanish in 1641, and they later became part of Colombia. Today, the descendants of the African slaves, a group called the Raizal, still speak a dialect of English called San Andrés–Providencia Creole. So there’s your explanation – the ICE officers who interviewed her thought this girl was a Raizal from the San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina Department.”
“But wouldn’t she have had that weird Afro-Caribbean creole accent,” Cerise asked, “like a Calypso or something?”
“After an indeterminate number of years in the United States?” I replied. “Why, at worst, she’d probably end up sounding like a Louisiana creole, if not just a typical working-class southern African-American – which is exactly how she sounded, right?”
“Amazing,” Bletchley murmured. “I had no idea. Yeah, yeah – that could do it. It’s got potential – it makes the ICE officers involved look very… informed. It’s still a mistake, of course, but it’s a really… convoluted mistake, one made at a very high intellectual level.”
“And the fact,” Cerise interjected, “that Jakadrien Turner was claiming to be named Tika Lanay Cortez still makes sense in light of that analysis?”
“Yes,” I assured her, “it does, because the culture in the archipelago is a mixture of African and Spanish, just like those three names are.”
“An obscure part of Columbia where the descendants of African slaves speak an English creole dialect,” Bletchley mused as he contemplated the ceiling. “Well, anyway, nobody will be able to say I wasn’t trying my best, that’s for sure.”
“Propose it as an explanation for the Spanish language issue in this case,” I suggested, “and I’d say, at the very least, your worries about being transferred to the boondocks are over.”
“Good point,” Bletchley nodded. “They’re not going to send somebody who thinks like that to Baltimore or Cleveland. But I’m still not completely out of the woods on this yet. If I want to rescue my next performance review rating, I’ve got to figure out some other stuff, too.”
“Such as what?” Cerise inquired.
“Okay,” be began, “there’s that whole list of things I mentioned before about the ICE officers not running the girl’s fingerprints, not reading the ICE file on Tika Lanay Cortez, and not looking at Tika Lanay Cortez’ picture.”
“What,” I quizzed him, “are the three best lies inside the Beltway?”
“Um…” Bletchley stopped to consider. “Wait, wait… don’t tell me… ah… ‘The check is in the mail,’… uh… ‘The copier is broken,’… and… er… ah… and… um…”
“Internet access is unavailable,” Cerise cut in.
“And, oh yeah,” Bletchley agreed, “that’s it – ‘No Internet,’ ‘The VPN server is down,’ ‘The fire wall is malfunctioning,’ something along those lines.”
“It’s the latest version,” Cerise declared, “of ‘The computer made an error,’ and it works just as well in 2012 as it did back in the day.”
“Precisely,” I confirmed. “Now, what’s the only possible reasonable explanation why the ICE officers didn’t run the girl’s fingerprints, read the ICE file on Tika Lanay Cortez, or compare Cortez’ picture to the person they had in custody?”
“Because… because,” Bletchley stuttered in sudden delight, “because Internet access was unavailable!”
“Right!” I responded.
“And therefore,” Cerise elaborated, “as usual in Washington whenever something incredibly moronic happens, nothing and no one is to blame.”
“Outstanding!” Bletchley proclaimed as he broke into a broad smile, hoisting his drink aloft triumphantly. “Here’s to the Internet! Where would people like me be without it?”