Thread: Arellano, son will live separately

Arellano, son will live separately
BACK IN MEXICO | Activist vows 'to continue fighting'

August 21, 2007

TIJUANA, Mexico -- Elvira Arellano was reunited here with her 8-year-old son Monday, but the illegal immigrant and activist said the boy will return to Chicago to live with his godmother and begin third grade.

''We've all been living together. He knows his mom is OK. He's going to be sad sometimes,'' said Emma Lozano, the godmother and an activist in her own right.

Lozano drove 8-year-old Saul from Los Angeles to Tijuana, where Elvira Arellano is staying with a friend after being deported from the United States to Mexico.

Elvira Arellano, 32, took refuge for a year in a church in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood to avoid being separated from her U.S.-born son.

In that time, she became an activist and a national symbol for illegal immigrant parents as she defied her deportation order and spoke out from her sanctuary. She left the Adalberto United Methodist Church last week. Arellano had just spoken at a Los Angeles rally when she was arrested Sunday and deported, said the Rev. Walter Coleman, pastor of Adalberto United Methodist.

''They were in a hurry to deport me because they saw that I was threatening to mobilize and organize the people to fight for legalization,'' Arellano said in Spanish outside the Tijuana apartment building where she was staying. ''I have a fighting spirit and I'm going to continue fighting.''

Saul may tour U.S.

Arellano said she may return to her home in the Mexican state of Michoacan and then return to Tijuana in September for a demonstration coinciding with planned immigration protests in the United States.
Lozano said Arellano's son may tour the U.S. to promote immigrant rights. The boy declined to talk to a reporter.

Chris Bergin, Arellano's immigration attorney, said Arellano had signed a power of attorney document giving Lozano authority to make legal decisions for Saul.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services said it did not foresee any intervention because there was no record of prior contact with the Arellano family.

"Private custody arrangements happen every day," said a spokesman. "There's always an understanding with those kinds of things."

Mexican authorities did not know the identity or whereabouts of the boy's father, said Luis Cabrera, Mexico's consul general in San Diego.

Opponents of illegal immigration said Arellano's arrest was overdue, and a U.S. immigration official said she had been a criminal fugitive.

Mexican authorities said the deportation highlighted a need to overhaul U.S. immigration laws.

''It's tragic when a mother is separated from her son,'' Cabrera said.

She's no martyr: feds

Jim Hayes, director of ICE in Los Angeles, said ''proper perspective'' should be placed on the woman's case. Using a false identity -- as in the case of Arellano, who was convicted of using someone else's Social Security number -- can be a threat to national security, he said.
''We don't think she's a martyr,'' Hayes said. ''She was a criminal fugitive who is in violation of the law.''

Arellano arrived in Washington state illegally in 1997. She soon was deported to Mexico, but returned and moved to Illinois in 2000, taking a job cleaning planes at O'Hare Airport.

She was arrested in 2002 at O'Hare and convicted of working under a false Social Security number. She was to surrender to authorities a year ago but instead sought refuge at the church.

Immigration activists said they will continue Arellano's plan to go to Washington, D.C., and take part in a prayer meeting and rally for immigration reform on Sept. 12. They also called for a national boycott on that date.

The sentiment was echoed outside an ICE office in Chicago on Monday.

''Her voice will not be silenced,'' activist Jacobita Alonzo told a crowd of about 50 supporters.

AP, with Esther J. Cepeda contributing from Chicago

http://www.suntimes.com/news/518336,CST ... 21.article

I wonder whose Social Security number Elvira Arelano presented at O'Hare it would not surprise me if it was Emma Lozano's she was using.

Elvira has made some choices, and I have mixed feelings. I am stubborn myself and have been known to embrace causes, but at the same time, when I was a kid back in the 50s my mother chose not to live with me. In that case it was so that she could make a new start in a new city, as my grandfather would not stop taunting her about her divorce and 'failure' (my dad had an affair and was impatient with me, and so she took me and left him before it got any worse). I was a toddler when this happened, quite a bit younger than Saul, but the aftermath would cast a shadow on our lives for decades.

As I was growing up in her parents' home, her visits were heaven to me, and I was so sad as the time came for us to take her to the bus station. I would hang on to her like velcro (not invented yet) and drink in every last minute. I was sadder than I have ever been since, knowing that she was about to leave.

So, now everybody's saying that Saul's ok. No he's not. It may not become apparent till later, and it will be interesting to follow his life and read his memoir. And a big part of this will be due to choices his mother made, choices that seemed like the best or only way at the time.

This doesn't surprise me. We will pay to raise and educate him while his brain is being twisted where he will turn out to be another Osama (an American hater) for being seperated from his mother. He will then become a serial killer or terrorist. At any rate you can bet we will have to deal with him later in a much more serious light.

And, there are people who will cheer Elvira for having made the right choice. There was a child custory case here where the Mexican family wanted to take a baby girl back to her ancestral village, but the American family argued as if it were an act of negligence to raise a child in Mexico because of the relative poverty. There may be some truth to this, but what is the answer?

The Reconquista folks claim the land, but who conceived, designed, planned, and organized the building of the infrastructure that makes that land so desirable to 'immigrants' now? And who paid for it, and keeps paying for the maintenance of it, by and large? Yes, we've got a great setup here for raising kids, and sometimes it seems like the whole world wants to come here (not true of course, but with relative population differences it seems like we would be swamped if we just let everyone come who wants to, and America would not be America any more). India, for example, has (according to some estimates) 1.2 billion people, and if you do a search on YouTube you'll see that a lot of them planned to come here. How many can we accomodate and still be America? Somewhere between 1 and 1.2 billion (because nobody outside of certain other boards is saying no Indians should be allowed to immigrate), but how many and who decides? If we are a sovereign nation, our government should be deciding in a way that keeps things nice for those of us who have no homeland to return to. I actually encountered a gentleman from India who insisted that his country was a sovereign nation whereas we had no right to regulate immigration - because we hadn't been in existance for thousands of years. I'm not aware of a seniority requirement for national sovereignty, and I am certainly not going to let an Asian job seeker set the time for us to wait.

So, as long as we have this open border, as I see it, Mexico has absolutely no incentive to fix their infrastructure, stop their crime (especially kidnapping for ransom, which often targets children), or improve their food chain. It is so much easier for them to cash the remittances and let the good times keep rolling for their oligarchy. As has been pointed out elsewhere, there is absolutely no reason for Mexico to be the basket case that it is. They have lots of farmland, and fewer people, than we do. So, I'm wondering, what incentives would work to make the government of Mexico wake up and take care of its own?

The answer to the world's problems simply cannot be to emmigrate to the US, like we were some pressure valve.

She is such a loser, I swear! What kind of mother would want to be apart from her child? If anything, this just shows what a selfish uncaring parent she is. I would love it if someone can prove that her kid is Mexican and not American.

She needs to take her son with her in Mexico. No child should be separated from both of its parents. The child does not appear to have a father so the child should go to Mexico. We need to pass a law that forces parents to take children with them when they are deported. That will decrease the number of anchor babies born to illegals.

The Reconquista folks claim the land, but who conceived, designed, planned, and organized the building of the infrastructure that makes that land so desirable to 'immigrants' now? And who paid for it, and keeps paying for the maintenance of it, by and large?

We have, for good cause, a statute of limitations. And this issue has long since been barred by that statute.

I cannot quickly find his quote for proper attribution, but I have read in S.C. opinions a quote by Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that said (paraphrased) 'litigation cannot be immortal while man is mortal.' That certainly applies here.

That's a beautiful quote and very apt in this case. Back when the Southwest was part of Mexico, it could not support the population and standard of living that it does now. When people from the south 'immigrate' here, it is not to admire the saguaros or traverse the grasslands, it's to sign their kids up for school, get a cleaner and better paying job than they could back home, and to have an emergency room or clinic near at hand. Nor are they shy about enjoying the malls and rec centers, driving cars on our wide paved roads, or anything else that we enjoy. None of which was here when Mexico owned the land.

We have to realize that Mexico gave California, Arizona, and other land to the US in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (184. So if they have a problem with the US owning this property they need to take it up with the Mexican government. Texas declared independence from Mexico and was annexed into the US.