Thread: Deportation of Salvadorans complicated by injunction

http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/ts_mor ... 0_10_0_M36

In Limbo

Deportation of Salvadorans complicated by injunction

BY SARA INÉS CALDERÓN
The Brownsville Herald

HIDALGO — Rosa Aguilar was exhausted and defeated under the scorching Texas sun.

Sitting in the back of a Border Patrol truck, the 35-year-old spoke of her grueling 25-day journey from El Salvador through Central America and Mexico and then to Hidalgo, about 50 miles upriver from Brownsville.

Aguilar sat with four other women and six men, all of whom had been detained. Aguilar showed her identification card from El Salvador to a federal agent, hoping that somehow she would eventually get to New York and be able to support the two children, 8 and 10, she left at home.

“It’s hard in El Salvador,” she said. “I came for work.”
Aguilar’s story is one of 24,373, or the number of Salvadorans who have been detained in the Rio Grande Valley since October, according to the Border Patrol. The number of Salvadoran immigrants detained here has exploded and is now larger than any other non-Mexican immigrant group, according to the federal agency.

The same is true nationwide, but dealing with Salvadoran immigrants is a different game.

What distinguishes Salvadoran immigrants from other groups is a legal injunction first issued in 1988 that the Border Patrol claims prevents them from deporting Salvadorans through the expedited removal program.

Expedited removal was implemented in the Valley in 2005 and applies to immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Peru. The immigrants need to be detained within 100 miles from the border and within a timeframe of two weeks or less. Border Patrol officials hail the program as a way of cutting down on illegal immigration.

The Orantes injunction was the result of a case first filed in 1982 that challenged the treatment of Salvadoran immigrants by what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which has since been weaved into the Department of Homeland Security.

At the time, civil war in El Salvador was a primary cause of migration. The case alleged that agents were actively discouraging Salvadorans from seeking asylum in the United States or not informing them of their right to do so in their preliminary interviews, according to Linton Joaquin, one of the original attorneys involved in the case.

In 1988, the court issued a nationwide permanent injunction stating that the INS was prohibited from coercing or encouraging Salvadorans to abandon their rights and establishing regulations for access detained immigrants had to information and due process, Joaquin said.

In December 2005, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) filed a motion in federal district court requesting to dissolve the injunction, specifically mentioning the expedited removal program.

“We are a major force in pushing that Orantes decision to be revised,” said María Valencia, a Border Patrol spokeswoman.

Salvadorans are currently exempt from participating in the program, she said.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, who carry out the expedited removal deportation process, would not comment on the Orantes case because it is a pending matter.

The Salvadoran ambassador, Rene Antonio León Rodríguez, said that the decision whether to reverse the Orantes injunction is completely up to the United States, and his government would respect that decision.

Joaquin said the Orantes injunction does not prevent the Border Patrol from applying expedited removal to Salvadoran nationals, but that does not mean the injunction should be removed.

“What the injunction does is prohibit the agency from coercing or otherwise encouraging Salvadorans to wave their rights, but that’s not what expedited removal is about,” he said.

The government has a three-pronged rationale for attempting to overturn the Orantes injunction, Joaquin said. First off, they claim that expedited removal means the injunction is no longer warranted, secondly the implementation of national detention standards assuages potential abuses and third, the injunc-tion is now obsolete since El Salvador is no longer in a civil war.

“We oppose dissolving the injunction on all or any of those three grounds,” Joaquin said. The purpose of Orantes is to protect peoples’ ability to exercise their rights, he said, and so it is necessary, regardless of El Salvador’s political climate.

Back in Hidalgo, six men sitting in the back of a Border Patrol truck pull out pieces of paper with U.S. addresses on them. One man was joining a cousin in Pennsylvania, another seeking work in North Carolina, a third was about to work with a brother-in-law in New Jersey.

Sitting in the back of the truck wearing jeans, T-shirts and tennis shoes, the men said they were single and came here to find work. Once they are processed at the nearest Border Patrol station, they will be released on their own recognizance and given notices to appear in immigration court.

Time will tell if they show up.

sicalderon@brownsvilleherald.com



Posted on Jul 21, 06 | 12:00 am

Sitting in the back of the truck wearing jeans, T-shirts and tennis shoes, the men said they were single and came here to find work. Once they are processed at the nearest Border Patrol station, they will be released on their own recognizance and given notices to appear in immigration court.

I am really getting angry now! President Bush promised, during his national address, there would be no more catch & release! I heard him with my own ears.

Aguilar sat with four other women and six men, all of whom had been detained. Aguilar showed her identification card from El Salvador to a federal agent, hoping that somehow she would eventually get to New York and be able to support the two children, 8 and 10, she left at home.

Funny how they don't mind breaking up the family to come to the US, but it's a sob story about breaking up the family when they are deported back to where they came from.