ICE tried to send one immigrant to a country he never lived in. Then he lawyered up.
toggle caption Credit: Surovtsev family
Samantha Surovtsev met her husband, Roman Surovtsev, in 2017 while jet skiing.
When they started dating, Surovtsev was honest about his past. He told her that he had come from the former Soviet Union as a refugee at the age of four. And that when he was a teenager, his green card was revoked after pleading guilty to carjacking and burglary charges in California.
He explained that after being released from prison, in 2014, he spent time in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody while they tried — and failed — to deport him to Ukraine and Russia.
Both countries, according to legal filings reviewed by NPR, could not provide or confirm Surovtsev's citizenship since he left before the fall of the Soviet Union. They couldn't give him the travel documents needed for deportation.
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Since then, each year, Roman Surovtsev did a check-in with ICE.
In the meantime, the Surovtsevs' liv
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