Thread: Asheville,NC: Teen faces deportation

Local case highlights national immigration problems
by Alsy Acevedo and Jon Ostendorff
published January 23, 2007 12:15 am


Asheville – Seventeen-year-old Rubidia Carballo will leave Roberson High School Wednesday not sure if she will ever see her friends again.

If a court hearing in Atlanta doesn’t go her way, Carballo fears also she might not return to the home she has known since age 8, when she fled her family’s native El Salvador.

The Carballos traveled, mostly by foot, through Central America and across the U.S.-Mexico border to find work and a future in the United States.

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Protection status given the family has allowed them to stay, though the Carballos said they have been unable to learn from government officials and immigration lawyers why Rubidia recently lost that designation, an issue to come up in the court hearing.

When President Bush delivers his ideas for reforming immigration laws tonight, he will be talking in part about people like Carballo, whose tangled case for citizenship shows the complexities of debate on the issue.

Carballo has lived here longer than she did in El Salvador. She did not choose to come. Her family brought her across the border to escape a country overcome by poverty and crime.

She has since grown into a teenager who earns good grades, hopes to become an artist one day and has put down roots with her family.

The Carballos will drive to federal court Thursday for the second hearing in a legal process that could result in her being sent back to a remote mountain town in El Salvador to live with her 80-year-old grandparents in a house with no electricity.

“Here, I have a future,” Carballo said. “I can study, and that’s what I want to do.”

In Atlanta, court officials could decide only to schedule more court appearances, though the Carballos said they do not know what to expect.

Reform advocates expect Bush in his State of the Union address will support an amnesty program that would put an estimated 15 million illegal immigrants on a path to U.S. citizenship.

For now, Rubidia’s family will rely on an attorney they hired a week before the hearing — the only one who would take their case — to help them negotiate a court system that would confound most people born in the United States.
‘She can’t go back there’

Rubidia Carballo is the youngest in her family. Her parents and siblings all have Temporary Protected Status, a special documentation the U.S. government grants to people from countries destroyed by war and natural disasters.

Her mother worries about what will happen if Rubidia is sent alone to Central America.

“One of my husband’s brothers was a soldier, and the ‘guerrilla’ was chasing us. They wanted to kill us because we were part of his family,” said María Guzmán, 42. “You don’t know what it is to be beaten by ‘guerrillerros’ (insurgent rebels). She can’t go back there.”

When Guzmán left El Salvador in the early 1990s with her husband, Juan Carballo, 50, and their oldest daughter, the country was smoldering from a civil war that left thousands dead and thousands of children missing.

Rubidia, another sister and a brother followed later. The family has not left the country since the parents arrived in the early ’90s — not even to attend the funeral of their son Ronald, 10, who drowned in El Salvador in 1998.

Juan Carballo, who works in an Asheville factory, fears Rubidia will become one of the missing if she is sent back. He says kidnappers know which children have family in the United States. “They kidnap them to get money from the family,” he said.
A national debate

Carballo’s story is playing out across the United States. Many people here illegally own houses and have children who were born here.

Congress last year, before Democrats swept to power in the midterm elections, failed to reach a compromise that would have changed immigration policy.

But the government did take steps to toughen policy, including approving a plan to build 700 miles of fence along the border with Mexico and adding 1,500 Border Patrol agents.

At the same time, the number of people being deported has been rising.

Bob Danes, press secretary for the Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that opposes an amnesty program, said his organization wants the government to continue to deport illegal immigrants using existing laws, crack down on companies that hire illegal immigrants and eliminate laws that allow women who have children born in the United States to stay.

Danes said the measures might sound harsh. But the courts are so clogged they can’t take the time to rule in the gray areas, he said.

“At this point, it is so out of control that there are some pretty drastic measures,” Danes said.

Bush might call tonight for some type of legalization program, said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute, a bipartisan policy think tank.

Meissner, who was commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1993 to 2000, supports enforcement and border control but says there also is room for a guest worker program and amnesty once those other polices are in place.

“I think the stage is set for a bill that is much more like what the Senate was debating last year than what the House was debating,” she said. “And that would mean that it would include a legalization program of some kind. But I think that there will be a lot of debate about issues like a guest worker program, and issues like the scope of a legalization program.”
Confusion and frustration

While the government debates, the Carballo family will continue their quest for help in navigating the court system. It’s a problem civil rights and immigration advocates say confronts most people facing deportation.

The family said they have met with lawyers in Asheville, Hendersonville, Atlanta, Virginia and Charlotte. They have paid about $5,000 in appointments and paperwork but said no one has explained why Rubidia Carballo lost her protection status.

She went in November to the immigration court in Atlanta accompanied by her parents, who don’t speak English. She asked the judge for time to find an attorney.

Until last week, Guzmán said, lawyers refused to take her daughter’s case because of lack of time and the heavy workload they already have.

“I’m confused and sad,” said Rubidia, while looking to the stacks of immigration correspondence spread on top of the coffee table.

Theresa Gibbs, 17, who has been best friends with Rubidia since freshman year, said Rubidia has lost her high-spirited self.

“She is like sad and cries a lot,” Gibbs said. “She is really upset.”

According to Lisa Fazio, 38, who has known the family for the past five years, Rubidia and the Carballos are hardworking people pursuing the American Dream — to educate their children, work and buy a house.

“She is an American girl,” Fazio said.
Contact Alsy Acevedo at 828-232-5964, via e-mail at aacevedo@gannett.com

http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs. ... 0770122097

She went in November to the immigration court in Atlanta accompanied by her parents, who don’t speak English.

9 years and still can't speak English. Guess they see no need to learn since everything is provided for them in their native language. I would bet that they NEVER learn! Millions like these people will turn this into a Spanish speaking nation.

The parents have been here for 13-15 years, according to the article. They weren't very specific, saying only that they arrived here 'in the early 90's'.

That they STILL don't speak English is a SURE sign that becoming 'American' is not very high on their priority list.

I really don't believe 15 MILLION all have the same hard luck story

Their gang kids can protect them back home in some cases.