Crackdown separates moms, kids
Raids targeting illegal workers pull in more women
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/690263.html


Kristin Collins, Staff Writer
RED SPRINGS - Two-year-old Rashell Rubert was asleep beside her mother when immigration agents burst into their singlewide trailer. Less than an hour later, agents were pushing the handcuffed mother out the door as the little girl clung to her leg, her family says.
Rashell's mother, Damasia Valencia, was one of 29 people arrested Aug. 22 in a raid targeting employees of a Bladen County pork slaughterhouse.

Rashell is now one of thousands of U.S. citizen children whose parents have been arrested in recent immigration raids around the country. Those children face long-term separation from their parents or exile to the countries their parents fled.

With the federal government promising tougher immigration enforcement, the number of children caught in the legal and political crossfire could rise sharply. Many estimate that about half of North Carolina's more than 500,000 Hispanics are undocumented. In 2004, the most recent year for which numbers are available, the Centers for Disease Control reported nearly 120,000 babies born to Hispanic mothers in North Carolina.

Advocates for immigrants say the effects of enforcement on children are worsening as agents employ new tactics, such as rounding up people at home rather than at work, charging them with criminal offenses such as identity theft and arresting more women.

They point to raids, including the most recent one in North Carolina, in which nursing mothers were separated from infants and children of single parents were hastily left with baby sitters or extended family who had few resources to care for them.

Federal officials say they alert social service agencies when a child's caregiver is arrested. And they say that the sole caregivers for children are sometimes released on bond before trial.

But Richard Rocha, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said parents are ultimately responsible. "Parents who choose to break the law, unfortunately, place their children in these types of situations," he said.

Seeking a better life

Valencia, 28, left Veracruz, Mexico, nine years ago, said her ex-husband, Juan Pablo Rubert, a U.S. citizen from Puerto Rico. Nine of her siblings also crossed the border illegally and settled in Robeson County, where they found work on farms and in meat-packing plants.

"Just like everyone else, she wanted a better life for her family," Rubert said last week.

She first worked in a chicken processing plant, then found a job five years ago at Smithfield Foods' Bladen County pork plant, the largest pork slaughterhouse in the world.

Rubert refused to say how Valencia got the false documents she used to get a job.

She is charged with using the name and Social Security number of a U.S. citizen, a crime that carries a minimum of two years in prison. She was arrested after the person whose identity she used complained to the Federal Trade Commission, prosecutors say.

In seven years together, Rubert and Valencia had two daughters. Shayla, 5, was with an aunt the night of her mother's arrest.

Rubert said Valencia was always frightened of being caught, but she saw no future for her children in Mexico. She stayed on at Smithfield even after 21 people were arrested in a January raid.

When she called Rubert at 4:30 a.m. Aug. 22, he said she told him, "Please take care of the baby. Immigration came and got me."

Valencia refused to sign documents that federal agents handed her designating her brother, who was at the house, as their caregiver, Rubert said. The agents left before he arrived, without designating any legal guardian for Rashell, he said.
Workers advocates with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union say several children were left in questionable circumstances.
One woman gave custody to a baby sitter because she was afraid agents would deport her family members, said organizer Stan Chavira.

Sherry Bradsher, director of the state Division of Social Services, said social workers get involved only when parents do not designate a caregiver.

Bradsher said recent raids have not caused a spike in the number of Hispanic children needing foster care or other state services. But she said it's possible that illegal immigrants are afraid to claim benefits such as Medicaid and, in some cases, monthly payments, which are available to their U.S. citizen children.

'Anchor babies' debate

Among those who favor a crackdown on illegal immigration, the American-born children of illegal immigrants are referred to as "anchor babies," said William Green of Raleigh, head of the pro-enforcement group Americans for Legal Immigration. The term alludes to their parents' hope that citizen children will give them the right to stay in the country.

Green is one of many activists who favor denying citizenship to children of illegal immigrants.

He said those children should be deported with their parents, regardless of citizenship.

"It is in the long-term interest of this nation to send them back, and to send people who break our laws to jail," Gheen said.

Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington D.C., which also favors an immigration crackdown, said children are paying, in part, for lax law enforcement in the past.

"This is what happens when you let your immigration law go unenforced for so long," Krikorian said. "There's no clean, easy way of resolving it."

Advocates for immigrants say they don't support sending U.S. citizen children to countries where they could lack adequate food, education or medical care.

"They're saying that these kids deserve to be sent back to abject poverty," said Rich Stolz, director of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement in Washington D.C. "They're literally trying to throw people, and their kids, away."

Tony Asion, deputy director of the Raleigh advocacy group El Pueblo, questioned whether at least there was a way to spare children the sight of their parents in handcuffs.

"We're not talking about armed felons here," Asion said. "They knew who these people were. They knew where they worked. It certainly could have been handled without a SWAT-type operation."

How children suffer

Even in workplace raids, some say there are serious consequences for children.

Shuya Ohno, of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, said that many of the 350 immigrants arrested at a New Bedford factory in March were mothers. Some were breast-feeding, and their infants became sick after being suddenly weaned. Many of the children struggled in school and showed symptoms typical of post-traumatic stress, he said. One kindergartner refused to eat.

Nearly six months later, Ohno said, some of the mothers have been released to care for their children. Others are still imprisoned, and some have been deported.

Of those deported, he said, some opted to leave their children with relatives in the United States because they feared poverty or violence at home.

Rubert, the father of Rashell Rubert, 2, says he's not sure what he'll do if his ex-wife is deported. For now, he is caring for his girls and contacting lawyers, hoping at least to spare Valencia a prison term.

"It's like a dream," he said. "I still can't believe it."

Shayla, who is staying with her father, missed her first day of kindergarten because, the night before, she and her father drove to Charlotte to visit her mother in jail.

Rubert said the family will be together again someday, whether in North Carolina or in Mexico.