Foreign student in Fayette among casualties of war

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Folu Oladipo is a prisoner of war.

The hopeful future pilot is not in jail -- not anymore -- but he's got about as much freedom since his Sept. 26 arrest in Fayette as any other prisoner.

He can't work. He can't go to school. He can't go home.

He is one of the first casualties of the so-called first war of the new millennium. But here's the catch: He's not a terrorist; he's never even been to the Middle East.

Folu is a 20-year-old British citizen from Nigeria who until recently was a student at Central Methodist College. His crime? He's from a foreign land, and he ordered flight magazines. Add that to a common violation of the terms of his student visa and you end up with five days in jail and a long wait toward eventual deportation.

"It's destabilized my life," Folu says. "It seems like a lot of innocent people are being affected."

At the direction of Attorney General John Ashcroft and others, officials from the Immigration and Naturalization Service and various federal agencies have become more vigilant than ever about sharing information and seeking people who might have violated terms of immigration visas -- student and otherwise.

Folu's story started on Sept. 26, when he was arrested by Fayette police at the request of the INS.

Folu's student visa required him to stay in school for the duration of his stay in the United States. As time passed, he realized that CMC was not the place for him. He wanted to study aviation engineering at Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg. But to do that he had to drop out of school and make some money for the move.

So this semester, he didn't attend classes.

"I knew it was a violation of my visa status," Folu says. "It wasn't a big deal before the terrorist attacks. But it's a big deal now."

'I was really surprised'

Wichmer agrees. He says an overstay of a student visa is "very typical. There's no way the INS would know about them. But now they're in active pursuit."

Folu believes INS officials were tipped to his status by postal workers, who noticed he had a foreign sounding name and had subscriptions to flight magazines.

"I knew I hadn't done anything wrong," he says. "I was really surprised that living in a small town like Fayette, that I would be arrested."

Fayette police took Folu to the Howard County Jail. Later that day, INS officials cuffed and chained him and took him to Platte County jail near Kansas City.

As he headed toward an unknown period of custody, residents in Fayette reacted with fury.

"He's such a nice kid. He really wanted to learn to fly," says the Rev. Sara Chaney, a United Methodist minister who is director of church relations for the small college. "It was sort of like the long arm of the law reaching out to Fayette."