Thread: A family struggles for legal status

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Young mom: 'I'm not hurting anybody'
A family struggles for legal status, but the process can take decades
By KRISTIN HARTY, The News Journal
Posted Sunday, August 20, 2006

At 22, he set off on foot, unafraid, walking north toward America.

Fernando Tapia only wanted a better life when he snuck across the border from Mexico.

He wanted a good job and a big family and a house with running water. He wanted his children to get an education beyond the fourth grade.

Now 49, he has achieved many of his dreams.

He lives in an air-conditioned two-bedroom apartment west of Wilmington. He earns a decent living at a New Castle packaging company. He has raised two children in the wealthiest country in the world. He dotes on his grandchildren, ages 1 and 3, both U.S. citizens by birth.

But Tapia's simple desire to settle in America has turned into an odyssey.

Like many illegal immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere, he wandered for years in the legal limbo of the U.S. immigration system. Many in his family remain stuck there.

Granted amnesty in 1986, Tapia later earned his citizenship. But his children, who grew up in America, haven't had the same chance.

Yuridia, 23, and Fernando Jr., 22, are living here illegally. Yet Yuridia's daughter, Tapia's granddaughter, is an American citizen. The family celebrated the baptism of Gabriela Emily Tapia on July 23.

Not everyone was there.

Other twists of fortune have pulled the family apart. Tapia's wife, Martina Ladenci, died years ago before ever joining her husband in the United States.

And Fernando Jr. couldn't attend because he was in jail. Just days before he was to receive his green card, he was arrested and charged with a string of felonies, including attempted murder.

Tapia doesn't know what happened on July 16, the night Fernando Jr. and a dozen other young men got into trouble. A man was shot to death and two others were injured in what police say was gang-related violence.

More than a week after the shooting, Tapia sat on the cool floor outside a New Castle County courtroom, holding his 3-year-old grandson, Martin. He waited, with other family members, for Fernando Jr.'s first court hearing.

Tapia is concerned about his son, but he is not afraid. He trusts that Fernando Jr. will tell the truth. He trusts that the American courts will do what is right.

Wearing a royal blue baseball cap embroidered with a U.S. flag, Tapia reached across his squirming grandson to tickle Gabriela. One sock on, one sock off, she cooed and flirted with anyone who caught her eye.

Tapia wouldn't trade this life, despite its difficulties. He would not have lived it differently -- not from the moment 27 years ago when he decided to head north.

'I felt no fear'

His house was made of adobe -- dirt and sticks and stones mixed with water and dried in the sun. The bathroom was a little hole in the dirt outside.

Tapia was the oldest of eight children, raised near Chiautla, a small town in central Mexico.

At 6, he began working in the fields to help feed his family. By 14, he quit school to farm full time, taking on other jobs as well -- cutting lumber and selling vegetables.

He had heard stories of men who paid $250 to be escorted across the border.

One day in 1979, he set out alone.

"I knew the people on the other side are human beings, just like in Mexico," he said recently through an interpreter.

In California, he lived with friends and worked in nurseries, sending money home to his parents every month.

He was happy, but lonely. In 1982, he returned home to Chiautla to marry his childhood sweetheart. The groom wore black platform shoes and a robin's egg blue suit he had sewn himself. The bride wore a store-bought gown.

Nine months later, Martina gave birth to their first child, Yuridia Elena. A year later, in December 1983, Fernando Jr. was born.

Back in California, Tapia missed his family. He wanted to bring them to America, but the timing was never right. One day in 1984, he decided he couldn't wait any longer.

The phone call came the next day around 7 a.m.

His wife was dead.

She had boarded a bus to go to the bank to cash her husband's check.

"They were the old vans, like minivans," said Yuridia, who was 18 months old when her mother died. "They called them combes. ... Somebody in front said there was gas escaping. Everybody panicked. When they wanted to get out, they rushed out. My mother was crushed."

Martina was 24. She'd been two months pregnant.

Today, her photograph, enlarged from a snapshot and framed, hangs above a window in Tapia's apartment. Smooth-cheeked and pretty, she wears a pink dress and has a flower in her hair.

"For years, there were days that I did not remember," said Tapia, who attended his wife's funeral and then returned to California to work.

"There were days in which nothing mattered," he said. "I got lost."

Making a family again

Tapia sent for his children six years later, in 1990. Yuridia, 8, and Fernando Jr., 7, had been living with his mother in Mexico.

By then, Tapia was a legal U.S. resident, one of 3 million immigrants who received amnesty in 1986.

But he didn't know what to do to get his children to the United States legally. So they crossed the border in the back seat of a car, using false documents that their father had borrowed from a friend.

In Los Angeles, Yuridia and Fernando Jr. attended public school while their father worked as a tailor -- a trade he'd learned from his uncle in Mexico. Yuridia graduated from Huntington Park High School in 2001.

Fernando Jr. dropped out.

Tapia feared for his son and began searching for a place to move -- a place where he had extended family, could find a good job and get Fernando Jr. off the streets.

It wasn't until three years later, after the family came to Delaware, that trouble took them to immigration court.

A heart-stopping strategy

Wilmington attorney Rick Hogan looked at the summons Tapia handed him and knew he had to move fast.

Fernando Jr., then 20, had been ordered to appear in immigration court. The government had learned of his undocumented status in the spring of 2004, after he was arrested on misdemeanor charges that later were dropped.

Fernando Jr. would be deported -- unless Hogan could help.

Fresh out of Villanova Law School, Hogan, 35, plowed through his legal books. He crafted a strategy to keep Fernando Jr. in the United States.

But it wouldn't be easy.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants try to adjust their residency status. The backlog is immense. Of the three ways to become a legal U.S. resident -- political asylum, work or family sponsorship -- family sponsorship has the longest delay.

In 2006, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will allow up to 226,000 people to apply for residency through a family sponsor, a limit set by Congress each year. But those applications -- particularly for immigrants from Mexico, China and India -- won't be processed for years.

Tapia's daughter is in one of the most congested categories. She filed paperwork to change her illegal status in April 2001. The government this month is processing applications that were filed in July 1992.

Unless Congress reforms immigration law, Yuridia likely will be waiting another five to seven years, Hogan said.

"This is the dysfunctional part of immigration," Hogan said. "Everybody says, well, they should get in line like the rest of us did. But the line is so far out the door and down the street that to tell a person, OK, you have to put in your application and then you just have to be patient. ... Patience means decades."

So Yuridia lives quietly, under the radar, staying out of trouble until she's legal in the government's eyes.

Soft-spoken like her father, she juggles the tasks of a mother of two, taking the bus or getting a ride from others because she can't get a valid driver's license. She has no health insurance or Social Security number. Even renting a movie is difficult without proper ID, she said.

"It's stressful," she said. "It's been too long. The law doesn't give me a chance to advance."

Ironically, her brother's initial minor brush with the law put him in the fast-lane for legal residency. Hogan's strategy was twofold. First Fernando Jr. would have to stay out of trouble. Second, his father -- a permanent resident, but not yet a citizen -- would have to become naturalized before his son turned 21.

That meant Tapia would have to pass the citizenship test -- requiring him to converse comfortably in English -- before Dec. 15, 2004.

Tapia had about four months.

Drama, then delays

The students sat on mismatched couches in Tapia's tiny living room on a recent Sunday afternoon, holding English workbooks, trying to follow along.

All adults, middle-aged and from Mexico, the four have lived in the United States for years.

"OK, so let's practice again," said English tutor Carolyn Becker, after playing a CD of a basic conversation. "Fernando, you be ... you want to be the manager?"

"Yes," Tapia said.

"Ladies, why don't you answer together," Becker said. "No? Maria, you want to do it alone? OK ... very brave. Go ahead, Fernando."

"Good morning," Tapia said, reading from his book.

He spoke with a thick accent, slowly and with effort.

"It's 9 o'clock. ... You're ... right ... on ... time. ... That's great."

"Uh ... thank you," Maria Oliver said.

"Let ... me ... tell ... you ... a little ... about ... the ... job," Tapia said.

Two years ago, these same co-workers from the Hibbert Group helped Tapia study for his citizenship test. Though all understand English, learning to converse is much more difficult, Becker said.

For Tapia in 2004, the stakes were high. Hogan had made that clear.

"I had to sit down with son and daughter and dad and say, 'I don't want to put all this pressure on you, but if you don't pass the test, you're son's got to go back to Mexico,' " Hogan said.

"I kept telling Yuri, just quiz him -- in English only. When you guys are making dinner, speak in English. He has to get ready. We don't have time to do this twice."

On the day of the test, Tapia was uptight. "His hands usually don't get sweaty, but he was like this," Yuridia said, rubbing her hands together. "He was nervous."

But when he walked out of the test less than 30 minutes later, Tapia was smiling.

After another year and a half of delays, Fernando Jr.'s big day arrived. The judge was expected to approve his green card on July 13.

'This is a great day'

Fernando Jr. rubbed his hands together as he walked up the aisle of Judge David Ayala's courtroom at U.S. Immigration Court in Philadelphia.

Hogan questioned his client. The government had no cross-examination.

"Do you have any outstanding court cases in any other court in the United States?" Hogan asked.

"No, sir," Fernando Jr. said.

"Any other arrests that you know about?"

"No, sir."

"Where are you working?"

"Columbus Inn in Wilmington."

"What's your position there?"

"Cook."

"What was your position when you started there?"

"Pantry chef."

"So you're moving up?" Hogan asked.

"Yes, sir."

"No other questions."

Tapia watched as the judge leafed through papers and spoke softly into a tape recorder. Suddenly, it was over.

Outside in the hallway, the attorney patted Fernando Jr. on the shoulder.

"All right! Finally," he said. "It only took a year and a half. But you're good to go. ... Next week you're going to be legal."

The young man was already making plans. First he would go to the Social Security office to get a number. Then, he would go to the Division of Motor Vehicles to get a driver's license.

Soon, he would get his GED. He might go to culinary school.

Tapia stood by and smiled.

"It takes a lot of pa-shee-ence," he said, sounding out a new word.

He looked proudly at his son: "This is a great day."

That weekend, Hogan left a message for his client: He could pick up his green card on Friday, July 21.

But the Tapia family couldn't find Fernando Jr.

'Why be afraid?'

On July 23, Brother Chris Posch lifted Gabriela Emily Tapia above his head and presented her to the congregation of St. John's Holy Angels Catholic Church in Newark.

"Gabriela, welcome to the Catholic faith!" the priest proclaimed in Spanish before drums sounded festively.

Tapia stood near the baptismal basin, his eyes misting. By birth, his granddaughter is an American. On this day, she became a child of God.

That night, Yuridia and her boyfriend, Martin, would host a party for about 60 relatives. She knew her brother wouldn't be there.

A few days before, Yuridia had called Hogan, crying, to tell him Fernando Jr. was in jail.

The young attorney, stunned, had difficulty absorbing the news.

"It's just the worst possible thing that could happen. Even if the biggest charges are dropped, it's going to have huge immigration consequences."

Yuridia Tapia believes the best of her brother, that justice will be served.

Like her father, who hopes to open his own sewing business once his English is good enough, Yuridia Tapia has dreams.

She wants to go to college and study nursing, or maybe social work. She wants to raise her children well -- as Americans -- giving them a better life than she has had.

"My father taught me not to be afraid," she said.

"Why be afraid? I'm just living and working for what I have. I'm not hurting anybody. So why should I be afraid of anything?"

Contact Kristin Harty at 324-2792 or kharty@delawareonline.com.

Man, you need a conversion chart to keep this story straight

They all have a story, well so do the rest of us american citizens and we have a legal right to be here. They do not

In those decades have this family Tapia invested in improving a family farm in Chiautla? Have they built barns, warehouses or factory shells? No it seems that their entire plans despite the illegal status of their members is to have us bend over for them and give into their demands. This also shows what happens with giving one illegal amnesty the number of illegals doubles. As for what cost the Tapias have been their education, health care and incarceration thus far has probably exceded their taxes paid.

Tapia's daughter is in one of the most congested categories. She filed paperwork to change her illegal status in April 2001. The government this month is processing applications that were filed in July 1992.

Unless Congress reforms immigration law, Yuridia likely will be waiting another five to seven years, Hogan said.

"This is the dysfunctional part of immigration," Hogan said. "Everybody says, well, they should get in line like the rest of us did. But the line is so far out the door and down the street that to tell a person, OK, you have to put in your application and then you just have to be patient. ... Patience means decades."
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As Ismith1338 says, they all have a story, so do the rest of us American citizens.
In the mean time these people have been living in this country illegally, going to school at no cost, and having babies with the boyfriend, and they are complaining?

Those who want to come here playing by the rules have to wait in their countries 10-15 years and longer, because these ilegals get priority because they are here braking the law.[/quote]