Deporting American citizens?

This is one example of how inept the U.S. immigration service is and how the immigration system is broken. How idiotic can they be not to run the quick and simple checks?

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 01/24/2008 | Immigration officials detaining, deporting American citizens

FLORENCE, Ariz. รข?? Thomas Warziniack was born in Minnesota and grew up in Georgia, but immigration authorities pronounced him an illegal immigrant from Russia.Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he’s never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack’s claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona.