What happens if despite your claims that you're a US citizen, you are deported four times and at one point detained for nearly two years? Yahoo News! has the story of Sigifredo Saldana Iracheta who was born to an American father and a Mexican mother in a Mexican city south of the Texas border. After a prison sentence for a drug conviction, he was deported, and denied his applications for a certificate of citizenship.

In rejecting Saldana's bid for citizenship, the government sought to apply an old law that cited Article 314 of the Mexican Constitution, which supposedly dealt with legitimizing out-of-wedlock births. But there was a problem: The Mexican Constitution has no such article.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this month ruled that Saldana had been a citizen since birth. Saldana's key to success? He was "persistent."