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  1. #1
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    Boston Financier Steps in to Bail Out Illegals

    Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, March 19th, 200

    Boston Financier
    Steps In to Bail Out
    Illegal Immigrants
    Textile-Factory Raid
    Spurred Him to Act;
    'Un-American' Images
    By MIRIAM JORDAN
    March 19, 2008; Page A1
    NEW BEDFORD, Mass. -- One frigid March morning last year, federal agents raided a factory in this old whaling town, arresting hundreds of illegal immigrants as they sewed vests and backpacks for U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Most were shackled and sent to a detention center in Texas, where they faced rapid deportation unless they could post thousands of dollars in bail -- money they didn't have -- to buy time to mount a defense.


    Then, a mystery benefactor appeared. The anonymous donor ponied up more than $200,000 to spring 40 people from detention.

    The payments, which until now haven't become public despite extensive news coverage of the raid itself, came from Bob Hildreth, a Boston financier who made his millions trading Latin American debt. He was "infuriated" at the televised images of workers being shipped to Texas, he says. Helping them make bail is "payback."

    The raid broke families apart," says the diminutive 57-year-old, who once taught high-school history. "This was extremely un-American."

    In the annals of philanthropy, donations of bail money are unusual. They are also risky for the giver. While none of his recipients have skipped out on bail, it is a real possibility, since the chances of winning the right to remain legally in the U.S. are slim. Bail-skippers would open Mr. Hildreth to criticism that he helped people evade the law.

    "He's going to hear that he's helping these people stay here who have no right to stay here," says Harvey Kaplan, a Boston immigration lawyer who represents some of the immigrants. "He'll get hate mail."

    Most of the people whom Mr. Hildreth helped bail out did enter the U.S. illegally, their lawyers acknowledge. The question will be whether they can claim political asylum or make other arguments to win the right to stay.

    The factory raid has been a hot topic around New Bedford, where prominent local talk-radio host Ken Pittman has taken a strong stance against illegal immigration. Upon hearing of Mr. Hildreth's payments, Mr. Pittman said: "I would ask him to show the same compassion for American workers displaced by these illegal aliens."

    A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that staged the raid, declined to say whether it knew who posted the bail. She said any person is free to post bond for anyone.

    Mr. Hildreth is a multimillionaire who built his fortune trading in Latin American bonds during the 1980s debt crisis that gripped the region. "I love making money," says Mr. Hildreth, who recently traded in his 20-year-old Volvo for an orange Mini Cooper.

    He also professes a lifelong love affair with Latin America. As an economist with the International Monetary Fund, he lived in Bolivia in the 1980s. Later, after returning to the U.S., he began trading in Latin American loans at Wall Street giants including Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. He now runs his own small firm, International Bank Services, which buys and sells corporate debt.

    The descendant of Irish immigrants and of Puritans who settled in Boston in 1632, he twice tried his hand teaching, following in the footsteps of his parents, both of whom were teachers. Both times, however, he returned to finance.

    A Key Moment

    A key moment, he says, was a verbal spat with a student over abuse of bathroom-pass privileges. "After four months teaching, I found out I stunk at it," he says. "I'm an investment banker."

    Instead, he decided to use his money to improve education for immigrants. Over the past two decades, he says, he has given several million dollars to fund literacy and citizenship classes in Lynn, Mass., to build a preschool in an immigrant-heavy Boston neighborhood, and to set up an endowed chair in Latin American studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

    The factory raid last March was one of the largest in the nation in recent years. A total of 361 people were arrested. Some were detained on the East Coast, but most were dispatched to Texas, home to particularly tough immigration judges.

    The factory's former owner, Francesco Insolia, was arraigned in August in federal district court in Boston on charges of harboring and recruiting illegal immigrants. Efforts to reach Mr. Insolia's lawyers were unsuccessful yesterday. The factory is now under new ownership.


    Associated Press/File
    Maria Escotto shares a moment with her daughter at Our Lady of Guadalupe church on March, 9, 2007. She was detained in the immigration raid on the Michael Bianco factory on March 6.
    Images of shackled prisoners stumbling as they boarded a plane for Texas are what spurred Mr. Hildreth to call Greater Boston Legal Services, a nonprofit group coordinating a legal response to the raid. "I told them to contact me if they had some bonds that needed to be paid," he recalls.

    Nancy Kelly, an attorney at the group, says: "It was almost too good to be true."

    Mr. Hildreth agreed to help individuals post bail if they or their families would also put up a significant chunk of money. The legal-aid group, GBLS, would email Mr. Hildreth with individual requests. He would then wire the money back to the lawyers.

    Last May 3, for example, GBLS attorney John Willshire-Carrera sent Mr. Hildreth an email that read: "Bob, we have two more for tomorrow, if possible....Bond set at 5,000, family is paying 2,500. Bond set at 7,500, family is paying 2,000."

    The following morning, Mr. Hildreth emailed his response: "8k sent."

    Mr. Hildreth says the $200,000 tab "ended up being much more than I thought it would be."

    $28,000 Bail

    Typically in cases like these, bail is set somewhere between $1,500 to $7,000, although the number can be much higher. For instance, bail for one detainee, Luis Lopez, was set at $28,000 by a judge who is known for particularly high figures.

    "It took me a little while to get my mind around that one," says Mr. Hildreth, who contributed $23,000. Mr. Lopez's family paid $5,000.

    At an event earlier this month in New Bedford to mark the anniversary of the factory raid, hundreds of immigrant families gathered to offer support. Many are Guatemalans of Mayan descent; party-goers sipped cups of hot milk and rice, a traditional Mayan drink.

    "What's this?" asked Mr. Hildreth when someone handed him a cup.

    The last person to benefit from Mr. Hildreth's help was also the last person on the factory floor during the raid. Manuel Perez, who is deaf, was working on a double-needle sewing machine. He was oblivious to the commotion unfolding around him until he finally noticed that his co-workers were "hiding behind boxes," he recalled recently.

    "I am happy to be back with my family," he added, now back in Massachusetts after getting bailed out in Texas. "I hope to get a work permit."

    So far, two cases involving Mr. Hildreth have been resolved, according to the legal-aid group. One person decided to seek asylum in Canada and another accepted voluntary removal to Guatemala.

    Mr. Hildreth recently was told that, once cases like these are resolved, the bail money gets returned to him. So he plans to set it aside as a bail fund for future cases.

    "I had no idea the money would come back," he says. "I had never bailed out anybody in my life."

    Write to Miriam Jordan at miriam.jordan@wsj.com

  2. #2
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    Illegal workers get help from fund
    Group assists in posting bond for immigrants held in ICE raids
    By SUSAN CARROLL Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
    Aug. 7, 2008, 5:31AM
    95Comments 4Recommend


    Kalman Zabarsky Boston University
    Robert J. Hildreth, 57, is the public face of the National Immigration Bond Fund, a fledgling organization that helps immigrants swept up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement workplace raids post bonds.

    Share Print Email Del.icio.usDiggTechnoratiYahoo! Buzz
    Resources
    BOND FUND FACTS

    Q: How does the fund help with bonds?
    A: The fund works with local organizations that represent or assist people arrested in immigration raids. These local organizations can ask the fund to pay half of the bond if they have helped the detainee raise the other half.

    Q: If I donate, can I ask that the money go for a specific person?

    A: No. Your donation will go into the national pool to help match the money that family and friends raise for a particular person. If you want to help an individual with bond, you should contact the local organization or family members assisting that person.

    Q: Will the money I give to the bond fund be reimbursed when the case is over?

    A: No. At the end of a case, the immigrant will return the money paid by family and friends, and give the other half to the fund. The fund will use that money to help other detainees get out of immigration detention.

    www.immigrantbondfund.org

    Source: National Immigration Bond Fund

    IMMIGRATION BLOG
    • Immigration Chronicles: Who tipped off ICE about Hispanic motorists in Chicago? When federal immigration agents raided a Houston rag factory and took 166 suspected illegal immigrants into custody, a Boston philanthropist and multimillionaire was ready to chip in bond money to help the workers.

    Robert J. Hildreth, 57, is the public face of the National Immigration Bond Fund, a fledgling organization that helps immigrants swept up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement workplace raids post bonds.

    The controversial fund has the backing of major immigrant advocacy groups and religious leaders but has drawn criticism from anti-illegal immigration organizations.

    Since spring 2007, the fund has paid more than $180,000 to bond out immigrants snared in ICE raids in California, Massachusetts and Maryland.

    Word of the fund is spreading but not quite fast enough for some immigrants caught up in the recent crackdown on businesses that hire illegal immigrants. In the past nine months, ICE has detained about 4,500 undocumented workers and 111 employers, according to ICE statistics.

    Hildreth said he and bond fund leadership, which includes leading advocacy organizations such as the National Immigration Forum, decided about four months ago that the organization should broaden its reach across the country. It is now soliciting donations nationally, hoping to raise its profile and political clout to help lobby for immigration reform. So far, it has raised $200,000 for the national fund, but the money is going out as quickly as it comes in, organizers said.


    On-the-ground support
    The higher profile might have aided the bond fund during its recent outreach in Houston.

    After ICE agents raided Action Rags USA, the Houston rag factory, on June 25, bond fund organizers struggled to find "on-the-ground support" to help mobilize the families of detained immigrants, Hildreth said. One of the principles of the fund requires detainees' families make matching contributions, which helps ensure they appear in court, organizers said.

    "I was very disappointed in Houston because we were ready to help," Hildreth said.

    Maria Jimenez, a longtime Houston activist and special projects coordinator for the Center for Central American Resources, said local aid groups didn't learn about the fund until long after the raid. At least 74 of the 166 workers were released for humanitarian reasons within a week of the sweep.

    "It wasn't until two weeks later that the attorneys got a notice the bond fund was available, we only had one person who was still being detained and whose family couldn't raise the bail money," Jimenez said.

    Hildreth saw TV footage in March 2007 of workers picked up in an ICE raid in New Bedford, Mass., boarding a plane bound for Texas, where they were to be held before deportation.

    "I was really ticked off," he said. "Within 24 hours, ICE decided to take them to the detention centers in Texas just to facilitate removing them as fast as possible. I thought that was unfair.

    "If they stayed in Massachusetts, close to where we could have bonded them out, they could have gotten due process."

    Hildreth called an attorney with Greater Boston Legal Services, which provides free legal assistance to low-income clients, to offer his help posting bonds.

    Nancy Kelly, the managing attorney of the organization's immigration unit, took Hildreth's phone call, and remembers thinking it was "too good to be true."

    "It was amazing," she said.

    Hildreth, the son of schoolteachers, said part of his motivation to help immigrants came from his father, a historian.

    "One of his big themes was that the immigration story in the United States is vital to the health and growth of our country," he said. "He drilled that into me."

    After graduating from Harvard University, Hildreth worked for the International Monetary Fund from 1975 to 1980, living in Washington, D.C., and La Paz, Bolivia. He returned to the U.S. and worked for major Wall Street firms until starting his own business in 1989, Boston-based IBS Inc., which buys and sells loans in international markets.

    "I've been involved in Latin America since college," he said. "I know many, many, many Latin Americans, including many, many Mexicans, so I have a personal friendship, a personal affinity."

    "And," he added, "I am a devout Roman Catholic and a liberal."

    In all, Hildreth said he paid $130,000 to help the New Bedford workers, and detainees' families chipped in $100,000, securing the release of 40 people, he said. He said none of them skipped bond.

    The fund has infuriated some advocates for stricter immigration reforms, who have called it "traitorous" on Internet message boards.


    Risk of losing money
    Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which lobbies for stringent immigration controls, said many illegal immigrants historically have failed to leave the country as ordered by the government. The number of immigrants labeled as "fugitives" or "absconders" by ICE totaled more than 594,000 in October 2007, the most recent statistics available.

    "These contributors better be prepared to lose a lot of money," Mehlman said.

    Hildreth is frank about the bond fund's goal: to push for immigration reform that would grant legal status to illegal immigrants in the U.S.

    "There's one more reason — besides humanitarian — that this bond fund was created and it's just as important. It's political," he said. "We hope that if we get a lot of history helping people in raids, plus a lot of contributions, even if it's only a buck, then we can really have a voice next year in the immigration debate."

    The bond fund primarily helps people detained in workplace raids, but also occasionally takes on other immigration cases for humanitarian reasons. Hildreth helped a teenager who was housed in an immigration detention center for youths in Nixon, Texas, after the center was shut down amid allegations of sexual abuse by guards. After the center closed, one teenager's Texas attorney contacted the fund for assistance.

    "We were able to find a family a pro bono lawyer, and convince a judge to let us post a $4,000 bond to get him out of jail and into a permanent situation," he said. "When the $4,000 comes back, we're going to offer that as a scholarship fund for him."

    Chronicle reporter James Pinkerton contributed to this report.

    susan.carroll@
    http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/met ... 29129.html
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