Law Humor

I guess this is one way to save money on a divorce.

According to the Daily Mail Online, an immigration officer who worked for the UK Border Agency managed to get his wife out of his hair for three years by putting her name on the no-fly list while she was visiting the in-laws overseas. Officials confirmed on January 30 that the man had confessed to adding his wife's name to the list after she left for Pakistan, with the result that she was not allowed to get on a plane to come home. Airline and immigration authorities refused to explain to her why she was not being allowed to travel, although I imagine she put two and two together after her immigration-officer husband stopped answering his phone.

As you might expect, the husband was smart enough to tamper with immigration databases but not smart enough to avoid getting caught. Or, at least, it appears that at some point during the three years he forgot he had exiled his wife, and that he had done so by putting her on a list of people considered potentially dangerous. He later applied for a promotion, which required a new background check, which showed that, lo and behold, he was married to somebody on a terrorist watch list. That raised some eyebrows, and the officer then admitted he had tampered with the list.

He has been fired, and boy is he going to be in the doghouse when Mrs. Immigration Officer gets home after three years in Pakistan. Man, he better have some flowers waiting, is all I can say.

According to the report, the UK Border Agency has, like our own Department of Homeland Security, been criticized for "poor performance" and has suffered a number of humiliating incidents, "for example the incident 19 months ago when an illegal immigrant escaped from the Channel Tunnel port at Folkestone by clinging to the underside of a bus carrying Border Agency staff."

Now they seem like our Department of Homeland Security, but with Benny Hill music.

To my knowledge, no DHS or TSA official has tried the no-fly trick on his or her spouse, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time. They did put an eight-year-old on it, although they said they didn't. The Humiliating Bus Incident reminds me of the U.S. fugitive who authorities could not locate for almost two years although she was working for the Department of Homeland Security the entire time. That's not quite as awesome as escaping by clinging to the underside of a bus carrying DHS employees, but it's still pretty remarkable.