Thread: Deported Woman Returns to family in Virginia

ON WHAT GROUNDS WAS SHE ALLOWED TO RETURN?
Deported Woman Returns Home to Family
Last Edited: Sunday, 01 Feb 2009, 9:55 PM EST
Created: Sunday, 01 Feb 2009, 9:55 PM EST

Carolina Sulecio-Hernandez (right), returned to Virginia Sunday to be reunited with her husband and son, Samuel and Sammy Osorio (left).
Roby Chavez
FOX 5 Reporter


Richmond, Va. -- A Virginia family is now on the backside of an immigration nightmare. One woman lost her family after coming clean about her illegal immigration status.

Today, Carolina Sulecio-Hernandez returned from exile after being jailed and deported to Guatemala. Anxiously waiting, the family spotted her.

"There she is," they whispered as she emerged from a crowd of passengers at Reagan National Airport. Seconds later, a young boy ran into his father's arms.

"Papi! Papi! Papi!" young Sammy Osorio yelled.

The tearful reunion marks the end of a painful journey for this Virginia family as a group of well wishers huged the woman and said "welcome back."

The husband and wife are high school sweethearts, married with a young son. However, three years ago she made national headlines and was deported to Guatemala because she was here illegally.

Sunday, the fight came to an emotional end as Carolina was allowed to return.

"Wow! I feel so happy, you have no idea," said Sulecio-Hernandez. "I'm so happy to have her back. It's been so long that you don't know how excited we are. We're very, very happy," said her husband Samuel Osorio of Richmond.

The woman's mother was at the airport too and sobbed as she hugged her. As a child, Carolina's mother never told her she was here illegally. As an adult, Carolina learned the hard way. After trying to make things right, she was cuffed on the spot, jailed for months and then sent back to Guatemala.

In a tearful interview she did back then for an immigrants' rights group, Carolina wept as she said, "I pray every night. I pray that I get out of here because of my son, because my son needs me. He's too little."

Despite it all, she has no regrets. Sunday she said, "I knew something bad was going to happen but I had to do it. I wasn't going to hide from immigration all the time. I couldn't work. I couldn't do anything. I did so because I thought it was the right thing to do."

1,800 miles away from home and back in Guatemala, the young mother didn't know anyone and barely spoke the language. Her life was turned upside down because of her parent's mistake.

She remembers, "I really got depressed; really, really depressed. It was hard the first year I was in Guatemala. It was painful for me to be away from my family."

Lawyers with Hunton and Williams stepped in and took on the case for free and got her back. They were in tears Sunday, too.

"I think the worst thing is the law. The law should be changed. The law should not punish people like Carolina. She was here as a child. She grew up here. She's just as American as you and me," said Suzan Kern of the law firm Hunton & Williams.

Now with this battle over, it's time for this young family to start all over. Her husband said, "I love her a lot and everything. I told her I'd bring her back one way or another. I'm just glad it's over."

A recent human rights watch report showed an estimated 1.6 million children and spouses have been separated from family members and forced to leave the country.
http://www.myfoxdc.com/myfox/pages/News ... geId=3.2.1

These people are barred for 10 years after deportation... call I.C.E. and demand she be IMMEADIATLY ARRESTED

Are the grandparents here on Green Cards? Or have they become citizens? Is the husband a citizen?

And how exactly did they bypass the law that says you a barred from applying for legal status or legal entry for ten years once you are deported?

W

"I think the worst thing is the law. The law should be changed. The law should not punish people like Carolina. She was here as a child. She grew up here. She's just as American as you and me," said Suzan Kern of the law firm Hunton & Williams.

At the moment, the law is the law, period. Why should she be allowed to circumvent the law? No speakedy Espanol? Neither do I and am an American citizen with citizen parents.
And so why is mama there at the airport to welcome her home, when she clearly seems to be an illegal alien?

I want to know more too.

By Brian Friel, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, July 14, 2006

Side Bar on this article

Friends In High Places

Theoretically, someone on the wrong side of immigration rules can avoid deportation by finding a sympathetic ear on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers can introduce a "private bill" instructing the Homeland Security Department to let the immigrant stay.

Congress used to pass hundreds -- even thousands -- of private bills each year for a variety of purposes, such as helping a military widow with a pension problem or correcting a veteran's military record. Private bills have long been controversial because at times they have been tied to bribery or have been sought by people who didn't deserve the benefits they were seeking. In the 1940s, private bills involving pensions and military records were largely banned, while immigration-related measures were not. In the late 1960s, more than 3,000 such bills were introduced in an average year.

The number of private immigration bills began to decline in the 1970s, in part because of scandals such as Abscam, a sting in which the FBI caught lawmakers willing to take bribes from supposed Arab businessmen seeking such help. In the last Congress, private laws were enacted on behalf of only eight immigrants: Three had come to the United States through adoption; the others were the widow and daughters of a Pakistani killed by a white supremacist in a 9/11-inspired hate crime. In this Congress, about 110 such bills have been introduced, but none has been passed. "Back in the day, it was not at all uncommon," said Emile Milne, a spokesman for Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y. "Under this current leadership, it's virtually impossible."

Richard Boylan, an economics professor at Rice University, found that the public's opinion of private bills fell as its approval of Congress dropped. "Voters used to view private immigration bills as good constituency services, but later viewed [them] as evidence of Congress being for sale," Boylan said.

Nonetheless, it still helps to have a lawmaker on your side. Supporters of Marie Gonzalez, a 20-year-old Missouri college student who was 5 when her family came to America, generated enough public outcry that Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., managed to persuade Homeland Security officials to let her continue her schooling despite a deportation order. Similarly, Rangel and other lawmakers have helped the parents and other relatives of Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant killed by New York City police in 1999, remain in the U.S. by getting Homeland Security to defer deportation.

Carolina Sulecio-Hernandez, a 23-year-old Guatemalan who came here at the age of 3 and now has a husband and a son who are U.S. citizens, has no such friends in high places. She was deported in April. And no private bill has been introduced on her behalf.
-- Brian Friel

During her first three months in exile, Carolina Sulecio-Hernandez cried almost every day. Sometimes she cried at night, lying homesick in the room she shares with her cousin in her aunt's Guatemalan home. Sometimes, thinking of her son, Sammy, she cried in the middle of the day.

"They took me away from my son," Sulecio-Hernandez said by phone from Guatemala City, 1,800 miles away from her husband and son in Richmond, Va. "Every day I cry because I can't see my son."

Sammy turned 3 on June 12, the day before the two-month anniversary of his mother's deportation by U.S. immigration officials. He talked to her by phone on his birthday. He's too young to understand why they are separated. Sometimes he refuses to speak to her.

Whose fault is it that a 23-year-old Guatemala-born woman is separated from her little boy? Her advocates contend that U.S. enforcement polices are too aggressive and show too little compassion for the problems of real families. Millions of families living in America are a mix of legal immigrants and illegal aliens. Kicking out illegal residents can separate husbands from wives and parents from children, so immigration-rights advocates say that a more reasonable, more humane approach would be to create a path to legal residency for them.

By contrast, immigration-control advocates blame Sulecio-Hernandez's situation on generations of lawbreaking, compounded by what they deem irresponsible decisions by the woman and her husband -- to have a child in a country where she couldn't live legally and then to separate, rather than to relocate together in a place where their entire family could reside legally. Sulecio-Hernandez undeniably broke the law, as did her own mother when she brought Carolina, who was 3 at the time, to the United States from Guatemala. And, in the view of proponents of getting tough on illegal immigration, Sulecio-Hernandez shouldn't be immune from deportation just because she has a husband who is a naturalized U.S. citizen and a young child who is a U.S. citizen by virtue of his being born on American soil -- what some call an "anchor baby."

"Their babies are also Mexican citizens," asserted Phyllis Schlafly, president of the conservative Eagle Forum, when asked about illegal immigrants whose children are U.S. citizens. "They're quite free to take their babies back with them to Mexico."

The questions of blame expose one of the chief fault lines in the contentious debate over immigration and border control: Should family reunification remain the highest priority of U.S. policy, as it is now, accounting for three-quarters of legal immigration? Should compassion rule the day? Or is it time to stop letting an endless chain of foreigners become lawful U.S. residents merely because some family member -- sometimes a distant one -- managed to get legalized or was born in the United States? Should the U.S. start sending the tough-love message that transnational families who wish to be "reunified" should feel free to do so in some other country?

Family-Friendly Policies
While Sulecio-Hernandez spent her 76th day in Guatemala City on June 29, Liana Farrell raised her right hand and took the oath of citizenship at the U.S. immigration office in Fairfax, Va. She came to America from Indonesia six years ago to be with her husband, a U.S. citizen. Dawit Kassa came from Ethiopia in 2000 to go to school, and he became a U.S. citizen along with Farrell. Kassa came to the United States thanks to a diversity visa lottery available to citizens of countries that send fewer than 50,000 legal immigrants here per year -- although his three sisters also live in the U.S. He hopes to bring his wife and daughter to the United States now that he's a citizen.

Jose Segovia took the oath that day too, becoming a citizen just as his wife, Susuana, did five years ago. Both are from El Salvador. They are raising two sons, ages 6 and 10, who were born in the United States and are, by birthright, U.S. citizens. Because the boys are still minors, if they had been born in El Salvador, they would still have been granted automatic citizenship when their parents were naturalized. "We would rather raise them here," Susuana said. "This is a country that gives you good opportunities."

Most of the freshly minted citizens interviewed by National Journal at the naturalization ceremony cite family connections as the key to their migration to the United States. Many also say that they expect to take advantage of the benefit of U.S. citizenship that will allow them to sponsor relatives who want to follow in their path.

In 2005, the Homeland Security Department granted 1.1 million immigrants legal permanent resident status, according to DHS statistics. Of those, 650,000 came to the United States by virtue of family sponsorships. That means that 58 percent of legal immigrants benefited from family-friendly policies, compared with 22 percent who qualified on the basis of work skills and 13 percent who were refugees or asylum seekers. The other 7 percent became legal residents through a variety of special programs, such as the ones providing the "diversity" visas.

Nearly half of the immigrants who came here under the employment, refugee, diversity, or other programs were spouses or children of the immigrants who qualified for admission because of their work skills, refugee status, or other characteristics. Thus, all told, nearly 78 percent of new legal residents in 2005 were admitted because of their family connections.

The family-preference policies -- favoring spouses, children, parents, and siblings of U.S. citizens, and spouses and children of legal permanent residents -- were established by a 1965 immigration law. But legal immigrants aren't the only ones with extensive family networks in their adopted homeland. A recent Pew Hispanic Center survey [PDF] of migrant Mexican workers -- most of them presumed to be illegal -- found that "the vast majority of migrants have relatives other than a spouse or child in the U.S., many of whom live in the same town or in the same household." Pew also estimated that in March 2005, 1.8 million children were in the United States illegally; another 3.1 million were citizens with at least one parent who was an illegal immigrant. Furthermore, two University of Pennsylvania researchers, who conducted a 2003 survey of new legal immigrants, found that roughly one-third of those who had become legal residents had previously lived illegally in the United States, often waiting for a family member's sponsorship to "adjust their status" to legal residency.

To proponents of Senate-passed legislation that would provide a legal pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal aliens already living in the United States, illegal residents' family ties to legal residents render the enforcement-only approach favored by the House an inhumane way of trying to get better control over immigration.

"Would we be willing to break up families?" Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., asked on the Senate floor earlier this year. "Would we deport mothers and fathers, but allow their U.S. citizen children to remain here? Would we deport an undocumented immigrant who is here, married, has children? Would she or he take the children with them, or leave them here? What is going to happen to all these people? How do you deal with this humanely?"

Not our problem, say control advocates. Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform, said that prosecution of every criminal, from bank robbers to drunk drivers, has unfortunate consequences for their relatives. "No one wants to see innocent family members hurt, but it was the conscious decision of someone to break the law," Mehlman said. "There are always consequences for family members of people who want to break the law. There's no reason this law should be the exception."

Separation Anxiety
But to immigrant-rights advocates, there are good illegal immigrants and bad illegal immigrants. Sulecio-Hernandez qualifies as a good illegal immigrant, in their assessment. Other than being in the country illegally, she has a clean record. In fact, she didn't choose to come to the United States in the first place. Her mother brought her. They lived in California for a few years, moved to Canada for a while, and then went to Virginia when Carolina was 12. She attended high school there and began dating her future husband, Samuel Osorio, as a freshman. Osorio was a legal immigrant who had come from El Salvador in 1993. He became a U.S. citizen at age 15.

They married a few months after graduation and had their son, Sammy, the following year. Osorio worked two jobs, framing houses in the morning and painting in the afternoon, while Sulecio-Hernandez was a stay-at-home mother. She decided she wanted to become a legal U.S. resident so that she would no longer be in danger of being deported to a country she hadn't even visited since she left at the age of 3. So she and her husband hired an immigration lawyer, who helped them submit the paperwork necessary to adjust her status to legal permanent resident. Many illegal immigrants are allowed to remain while becoming legalized, although the rules are complex. Many others are required to leave before becoming legal residents. Sulecio-Hernandez thought she would be allowed to stay here, so when U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services called her in for an interview at its Norfolk, Va., office in January, she and her husband were eager to go.

Immigration enforcement agents met them there, took Sulecio-Hernandez into custody, and locked her up in a jail in Hampton, Va. It turned out that she had an outstanding deportation order against her. When she was 12 and her mother brought her back from Canada, U.S. immigration officials flagged them as illegal immigrants on their way across the border. Rather than detain the mother and daughter, however, the officials gave them a "notice to appear" in immigration court. But they never showed up, and so the two were issued in absentia deportation orders. Eleven years later, Sulecio-Hernandez's mother is still in the United States.

Sulecio-Hernandez spent three months in jail as DHS processed her for deportation. On April 13, agents took her from her jail cell, drove her to Dulles International Airport, and put her on a commercial flight back to Guatemala. "I didn't get to see a judge, nobody," Sulecio-Hernandez said. "I didn't even know what was happening to me."

To immigration-rights groups, Homeland Security wasted its time and taxpayer money deporting Sulecio-Hernandez. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants with criminal records are not deported, because there aren't enough agents or the right tracking systems to ensure that criminals are sent home, say current and former department officials. Sulecio-Hernandez's detention and deportation cost thousands of dollars. "The ultimate issue here is why the government is so heartless and acts so stupidly against its own interests," said Michael Maggio, a Washington-based attorney who has become involved in Sulecio-Hernandez's case. "The consequences to this family are extreme."

"And for what purpose? To advance what public policy goal? The mentality that this case illustrates costs [Homeland Security] limited resources that should be spent on grabbing serious criminal aliens and others who really pose a threat to our country."

Rather than encourage the mass deportation of people living illegally in the United States, immigration-control advocates want to render this country so inhospitable to illegal workers that they and their families will simply leave. "Parents make decisions for their children all the time, some good, some bad," said Rosemary Jenks, a lobbyist for a Washington-based immigration-control group, NumbersUSA Action. "They can choose to go home together."

Opponents of providing illegal immigrants a path to legal residency are unswayed by arguments that stress that many of the illegal adults are the parents of U.S. citizens. Rep. Nathan Deal, R-Ga., is the lead sponsor of legislation that would stop the U.S. from granting automatic citizenship to anyone born in this country whose parents are both illegal aliens. The legislation has 87 co-sponsors, but it failed to get included in the House immigration bill. Two Republican lawmakers -- Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and Rep. Mark Foley of Florida -- have proposed constitutional amendments that would achieve the same result; each of their plans has fewer than five co-sponsors. "Birthright citizenship" is one reason that many advocates oppose guest-worker programs, which would allow millions of foreigners to work in this country illegally for several years. "That's plenty of time to have an anchor baby and start a family chain reaction," Schlafly said.

Crimes Of The Parents
Marie Gonzalez came to the United States from Costa Rica with her parents when she was 5. Her family arrived legally on a six-month tourist visa but never left. An anonymous tip alerted authorities in 2002 to her father's illegal status while he was working as a courier for then-Gov. Bob Holden of Missouri. Holden fired him, and the federal government began deportation proceedings. Gonzalez's parents were deported last year.

But so far, at the urging of Sen. Durbin, Homeland Security has allowed Gonzalez, now 20, to continue attending Westminster College in Missouri. "We are not a country that punishes children for the mistakes of their parents," Durbin said in a June 14 letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, asking that an exception continue to be made for the young woman.

The Senate-passed immigration bill includes a provision that would create a special legalization process for illegal immigrants who have lived in the United States since childhood and have graduated from high school. The provision would allow them to go on to college at in-state tuition rates or join the military -- and, either way, eventually become citizens. "If we allow these roadblocks to higher education to persist, we will deprive ourselves of future leaders, and the talents they would bring to our nation," Durbin said in a June 22 statement. "It is ironic that we tell these talented young people to leave and then search the world over for nurses, doctors, scientists, and engineers to boost our economy."

The problem with Durbin's proposal, immigration-control advocates say, is that it rewards illegal behavior. Many immigrants, when asked why they came to this country, responded that they want to create a better life for their families. Granting illegal immigrants who grew up here special paths to citizenship simply encourages illegal immigration, Mehlman said. "If you're sending the message that if you come here and break the law, you can achieve what you set out to achieve, then we ought not be surprised when people come here and do it."

Indeed, some such advocates further argue that rules about legal immigration should not make family reunification a higher priority than the acquisition of foreign workers with needed skills. "The nation should act in its legitimate self-interest," Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said at a June 15 news conference. And Mehlman said, "Just because someone happens to be related to you doesn't mean they are the best person to have in this country."

Mehlman and like-minded activists contend that U.S. authorities' first consideration should be a would-be immigrant's potential contributions to American society and that someone with relatives in the U.S. should be given preference only over people with the same skills who have no legal relatives here. These critics of the Senate bill say it would encourage low-skilled immigration through family networks -- both legal and illegal. Because of family preferences, the Senate bill's paths to citizenship wouldn't just grant citizenship to the estimated millions of immigrants in the country, it could also open doors to eventual citizenship for their children, spouses, parents, and siblings living abroad. Many of them could come illegally. "High levels of legal immigration from particular countries also lead to high levels of illegal immigration," Mehlman said. "If you're coming here from Mexico, you probably have family members here, people from your village here. You can have a place to stay, someone to help you find a job."

But immigration-rights advocates say that the nation benefits economically from a family-focused immigration policy. Harry Holzer, a visiting scholar at the Urban Institute, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in April that families are part of natural informal networks that connect employers to workers they need. "There are benefits to the American economy that even some of these less educated immigrants provide. And I think what we're calling 'nepotism' is really, in many cases, employers having hired one or two immigrants and being very, very pleased with their performance and their work ethic, then encouraging them to bring in their relatives, their friends, their cousins, because they're so pleased," he said.

Immigration-rights advocates also say that providing an easier path to legalization of relatives will cut down on illegal immigration. "If you have to wait 20 years to be reunited with a family member, it's kind of an absurd number," said David Leopold, an immigration lawyer in Cleveland.

There is also a highly emotional argument: that parents come to the United States to give their children better lives. Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made that argument on July 10 at a Senate Armed Services Committee field hearing in Miami. Tearing up, he described how his father immigrated to the United States from Italy and worked up to three jobs at a time to provide opportunities for his children. "There is no other country on the planet that affords that kind of opportunity to those who come," Pace said, pausing several times to regain his composure.

American Dreams
Many families, however, are separated now. Amina Silmi, a Venezuelan of Palestinian descent who is pictured on this magazine's cover, lived in the U.S. illegally for more than a decade until she was deported two years ago. After overstaying a visitor visa and getting married, she had had three children in the United States and divorced twice. Once, she was ordered to leave the country but didn't. Her second husband's legal troubles brought her back to the attention of immigration officials in 2003. Despite widespread media coverage in Ohio, where she lived, and the intervention of Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, Silmi was deported and barred from re-entering the U.S. for 10 years. Her efforts to return have failed. She remains in Venezuela while her sister raises her children in Ohio. She hasn't seen her kids since the deportation, said immigration activist and family friend Don Bryant.

Sulecio-Hernandez hopes to avoid such a fate, but she faces a similar 10-year ban because she didn't leave the country at age 12 when the deportation order was issued to her mother and her. Still, her lawyers say she has a strong case for returning to the United States within a year. Her husband is saving money to take their son to visit her later this year; Sulecio-Hernandez says that Guatemala City is too dirty and dangerous a place for Sammy to stay in for long.

Keeping Sulecio-Hernandez out of this country is cruel and unjust, her defenders say. Others call it overdue punishment. If Sulecio-Hernandez becomes a legal permanent U.S. resident, she will, three to five years later, be eligible to become a citizen. For now, she is biding her time at the home of her stepfather's sister, whom she had never met before, dreaming of returning to Virginia.


http://www.nationaljournal.com/about/nj ... 714nj1.htm