Seventy Years, A Refugee Camp, Alligator Alcatraz
Paul Bojerski, seventy-nine, was born to Polish parents in a German refugee camp after World War II and emigrated legally to the United States with his family in 1952; in July of 2025 he was detained at a routine ICE check-in and sent to the Everglades detention camp known as Alligator Alcatraz on a decades-old removal order that had previously gone unenforced.
#bureaucratic cruelty #deportation machinery
Paul John Bojerski was born in 1946 to Polish parents in a German camp for displaced persons left over from the war. The family emigrated legally to the United States in 1952, when he was five. He grew up in Cleveland, never became a citizen for reasons no surviving paperwork makes clear, accumulated a deportation order at some point that authorities had elected for decades not to enforce, and lived a working life in Florida — retired optician, husband, stepfather. He had checked in regularly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for years. In July 2025, at one of those routine check-ins at age seventy-nine, he was told that if he did not leave the country voluntarily, ICE would deport him.
He could not leave. He had no passport, no country of citizenship to receive him, no other state that recognized him. He returned to ICE on October 30 as instructed; he was taken into custody and sent to Alligator Alcatraz, the federal detention site improvised in the Everglades, then transferred to the Krome Detention Center near Miami. His attorney, with thirty years in immigration practice, told the Orlando Sentinel that Bojerski’s case was the most bizarre one he had handled. The decades-old removal order had not changed. What had changed is that someone, somewhere, decided that this was now the kind of order that would be acted on.