Thread: Living with fear of deportation (ALIPAC)

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  Samuel Hoffman | The Journal Gazette
  Immigration attorney Paul Gresk chats with an undocumented man and his wife at the Holiday Inn Express.
  
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  Ramirez

November 22, 2015 1:03 AM

Living with fear of deportation

Immigration lawyer says up to 40% of county Hispanics undocumented

Jamie Duffy | The Journal Gazette

A year ago, there was hope in the immigrant community.
People saw a glimmer when President Barack Obama signed an executive order on Nov. 20, 2014, protecting from deportation more than 4.5 million undocumented parents of American-born, naturalized or children with permanent residency.
Known as DAPA or Deferred Action for Parent Arrivals, it followed DACA or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama executive order in June 2012 that protected about 1 million children from deportation.
The order would allow undocumented residents three years of employment authorization, triggering acquisition of a driver’s license and a Social Security number. Those two items have been beyond reach of undocumented people since the end of the Clinton era when a four-month window allowed 2 million people to pay a $1,000 penalty to become permanent residents.
“It kind of brought hope to a lot of families,” said Janette Patino Ramirez, 20, a Fort Wayne pre-med sophomore at Indiana University in Bloomington. “I do believe it gave you some sense of hope.”
Although hopes have been frustrated by two legal challenges to his executive order that has delayed the application process, Obama is persisting. The status of the executive order is expected to be decided by the Supreme Court in June.
Ramirez was born in California and came to Fort Wayne when she was 4 years old. She has two younger American-born sisters she would have to care for were her parents to be deported.
Although she thinks it’s unlikely, she lives with that fear. They do, too, which is why she drives the family vehicle as much as she can when she is in town.
A routine traffic stop or a broken tail light can lead to the breakup of a family. Driving without a license and no papers could lead to a court date and possible detention, once law enforcement processes a person. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, has 72 hours to put a hold on someone for possible deportation, said Paul Gresk, an immigration attorney in Indianapolis, whose firm has clients in Fort Wayne, Goshen, Ligonier and Bluffton.
“I think it’s something definitely prevalent for a lot of immigrant families,” said Ramirez, who graduated third in her class at Wayne High School. “There are a lot of situations like mine where your parents do have to acknowledge that that is a possible thing that might happen.”
One member of Amistad Cristiana, a bilingual church in Fort Wayne, was stopped for not wearing his seat belt, Pastor Leo Pech said. Immigration enforcement officials grabbed him at the 56th hour. The church supported the member emotionally and financially through the process, but he eventually self-deported, leaving a discouraged family behind, Pech said.
Gresk has seen all kinds of situations. Of the 70,000 Hispanics living in northeast Indiana, 20,000 to 25,000 are in Allen County, Gresk estimates. Of those, about one-third to 40 percent are undocumented, Gresk said.
He sees clients every Saturday afternoon at the Holiday Inn Express off Interstate 69 in Fort Wayne and then makes his way to Goshen where he has a satellite office. That office is manned by immigration attorney Catherine Singleton, a Fort Wayne native and graduate of Bishop Luers School, and Gresk’s paralegal, Salvador Guerrero.
Through an interpreter, Gresk also dispenses advice on immigration problems on La Unica, 102.3 FM, a Spanish-language radio station on Parnell Avenue, from noon to 12:20 p.m. four days a week. The call-in simulcast is heard here and in Bloomington, Goshen, South Bend and Indianapolis and is a service he has been providing for 17 years.
Gresk said when the initial executive order was signed his firm gave a lot of application packets and told potential applicants to wait. His law firm held off sending in applications for the program and new immigration status. Sure enough, two judicial challenges in lower U.S. courts have held up the application process.
Neither of the decisions to the court challenges was surprising, Gresk said. The first came in Brownsville, Texas, in February, an injunction by a conservative judge finding that the president exceeded his executive authority by creating DAPA and DACA 2, a companion executive order that moves up the allowed date for undocumented children by three years.
The injunction was upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Gresk said, a 2-1 decision that went along party lines.
However, Gresk believes Obama will prevail in the Supreme Court.


William Gheen, director of Americans for Legal Immigration, a political action committee from Raleigh, North Carolina, said the executive order would pass muster with the U.S. Supreme Court “only if (Chief Justice John) Roberts votes with the Democrats. We’re not sure what dirty laundry the Department of Homeland Security has on Roberts.”



His group has its largest bases in California, Arizona, Texas and Florida, but Gheen counts supporters in all 50 states. “Our activists recently helped in getting your governor take a stance against the Obama-Syrian refugee resettlement plans,” Gheen said.



In 2011, Indiana’s Republican-dominated General Assembly voted to charge children of undocumented immigrants out-of-state college tuition, but then restored in-state tuition in an effort to boost the number of in-state college graduates.

That same year, the Republican majority passed a bill written by Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel, to empower police to ask for proof of legal residency at traffic stops for traffic violations and to require English-only in public meetings, on websites and in documents. That law was declared unconstitutional by a federal court in Indianapolis in March 2013.
Should the Supreme Court find in Obama’s favor, the floodgates would open for applicants.
“That’s going to be even more urgent,” Gresk said. “By June, we’re going to know who the (presidential) nominees are. If, in fact, the Obama administration is correct, they are preparing to process applications and the candidates – Democrat and Republican – will have to endorse or deny the program.”
That is huge for the elections, he says. Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012.
One of those who will be voting this year is Ramirez, who has already done some of her homework.
“Donald Trump (a Republican presidential contender) is not a dumb man, but he’s ignorant,” said Ramirez, the IU sophomore. “He doesn’t really think of the cause and effect. He’s not a dictator, so he technically can’t do everything he wishes.”
Another Republican presidential candidate, Marco Rubio, is a U.S. senator from Florida whose parents are from Cuba. But Ramirez said Rubio “is not an accurate representation of a Hispanic Republican. He tends to speak for just certain categories.”
As for Jeb Bush, whose wife is from Mexico, “I’m researching all of that,” she said.
Ramirez’s mother is from Guatemala; her father, Mexico. She has one living grandparent, a grandmother who lives in the Michoacan province of Mexico.
Ramirez and one of her sisters went to visit the grandmother, but her parents could not accompany them because of their undocumented status here. The trip made her realize how different two countries can be.
“It was kind of shocking,” Ramirez recalled. “It was harder to understand how one government is different than another. Going to a whole different country, you don’t know much except it’s less developed than where you live. It’s a different culture that needs to be kept in mind.”
“All the families have children who were born in the U.S.,” Pech, the local Hispanic pastor,said, referring to those still waiting for DAPA to take effect. “It’s a bit different from families who just arrived. They just want to work hard and provide for their children. That’s how I see it.”

Please take a close look at what I said about Obama's eagerness to take these immigration fights to the Supreme Court.

W

A year ago, there was hope in the immigrant community.

That was false hope perpetrated by a President more devoted to aliens in our country in violation of US immigration law instead of to the citizens of the United States to whom these laws belong.

We need hope and results for the American citizens in this country. American citizens are the ones who are being hurt, harmed, impoverished, taxed, killed and indebted because of the failure of our government to enforce US immigration law to prevent illegal immigration, to remove illegal aliens from the country, and prohibit excess immigration that causes the same dire results of more people than jobs and money to sustain them.