US must remove Gibbons - Gajraj Stabroek News February 27, 2000 The premise on which Edgar Garfield Gibbons was sent to Guyana has been proven wrong and Home Affairs Minister, Ronald Gajraj, is unwilling to wait longer than the next fortnight for him to be taken back to the United States. Gajraj, in an invited comment to Stabroek News, said that the premise on which Gibbons was deported to Guyana in April has been proven false and the government was not prepared to accommodate Gibbons while the US authorities changed their position. Gibbons was deported to Guyana as a Guyanese in error when a sweep of the Texas jails was made by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Gibbons was serving a one-year jail sentence at the time for marijuana possession. It was his second conviction for this offence; on the first he served a four-year term. The Gibbons born in Guyana, whom the deported Gibbons was taken to be by the INS, and whom Stabroek News located, migrated to the US in 1978 and has lived in the New York Tri-State area since then. The US embassy, since the matter was brought to its attention forcibly by the press, has issued a statement that it was not in a position to document Gibbons as a US citizen since the authorities in the US have been unable to confirm that he was born in the US. Since then the INS in Houston have said that Gibbons is not a US citizen and has enlisted the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Interpol in its efforts to determine his true nationality. That office has said too that Gibbons would be left here until his nationality was determined and arrangements concluded between the US and Guyana governments for transporting him to the country of his birth.