INS still working to identify Gibbons
The United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is working assiduously to determine the nationality of Edgar Garfield Gibbons, who was deported to Guyana mistakenly as a Guyanese. Head of the Consular Section at the US Embassy, Vincent Principe, told Stabroek News yesterday that the issue was a priority for the INS and that it was sparing no effort to determine Gibbons's nationality. However, he said that he could not give a time frame by which the INS would complete its investigation. Gibbons arrived here on April 28, 1999 from the US from where he was deported after serving a one-year sentence for marijuana possession. He was identified as Guyanese in an INS sweep of the jail and despite his protestation that he was not Guyanese, was sent here. The local authorities have determined that he is not Guyanese and have so informed the US authorities. The US embassy has said that based on the information given on oath by Gibbons it could not issue him with a travel document as it was unable to verify his birth in Monroe, Louisiana, or the death of his father, Byfield Gibbons in Vietnam in 1968. His mother, he had stated, died of natural causes in 1969. Stabroek News located and spoke with a Guyanese named Edgar Garfield Gibbons who migrated to the US in 1978 and lived in the New York tri-state area. He had lost his alien registration card 16 years ago and was issued with a new one.
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