Thread: Four siblings face deportation

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Four siblings face deportation

Mother caught in dilemma of whether to risk her legal status by going with them

Matt McClain © News

Nancy Figueroa, 22, sits in the kitchen of her family's Denver home Wednesday evening. Figueroa, who is pregnant, is scheduled to be deported to Mexico with brother Miguel, 17, and sisters Rosa, 16, and Blanca, 21. Their parents, however, have legal status to remain in the U.S.
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By Laura Frank, Rocky Mountain News
December 14, 2006
As most of her classmates at South High School start their final exams Monday, 16-year-old sophomore Rosa Figueroa will face the toughest question of her young life.
How does she plan to comply with an order by the U.S. government to return to her native Mexico, even though her parents have been granted legal status?

Rosa and three older siblings were told to show up Monday at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, and their lawyer expects them to be deported.

The teen will have to leave her parents' home in Denver a week before Christmas. She will go back to the Mexican state of Michoacan where she was born, a place she does not remember and where she has no relatives to take her in.

It is also a place so overcome with violence that the Mexican president sent troops there this week trying to stop a wave of beheadings and other murders.

"I'm afraid," Rosa said, nestled on the couch in her family's cozy living room. "I feel as if they are kicking me out of my own house to somewhere I don't know. I feel safe here. I can't imagine living in a place so violent and with so much poverty."

Rosa's mother will be tested next week, too.

U.S. immigration authorities granted legal status to Rosa's parents in 2003. Five of their older children are either U.S. citizens by birth or legal residents. But the same authorities declined to drop deportation proceedings against Rosa and three of her siblings for reasons that remain unclear.

"This is an unfortunate situation," said ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok. ICE "is required to enforce the immigration judge's order of removal."

The family's lawyer says ICE officials will deport Rosa, along with her 17-year-old brother, Miguel, 21-year-old sister Blanca and 22-year- old sister Nancy, who is married and expecting her first child.

Rosa's mother, Alicia, now faces a choice. She can return permanently to Mexico with her youngest children and forfeit her legal status - and life with the rest of her family. Or she can stay with her deported children in Mexico for six months at a time, then return to Colorado without them so she can meet the regulations for remaining a legal U.S. resident.

ICE says legal permanent residents can stay outside the country for two years if they qualify for a re-entry permit. But the Figueroas' attorney says that isn't guaranteed and authorities often begin questioning immigrants' status after six months.

The entire family could return to Mexico, but that carries risks, too. Michoacan has fallen into chaos, and even if the troops sent there this week succeed in quelling the violence, the Figueroa parents remember why they left Michoacan - at times, they couldn't earn enough to feed their children.

They say they don't know where else in Mexico they would go.

If her youngest children are deported Monday, their mother, Alicia, will gather as big a supply of her own diabetes medications as she can and head more than 1,500 miles to Michoacan in southern Mexico.

Alicia worries that no one in their hometown of Los Reyes will take in her children. Nancy, the pregnant 22-year-old, will live with her husband's relatives, but they are too elderly and poor to help the other three siblings. Alicia's parents are dead; so are her husband's. The family has only distant relatives in Mexico, and no relationship with any of them.

"It would be like, 'Hi, nice to meet you. You don't know me and I don't know you, but here I am,' " Blanca said.

It will be up to 21-year-old Blanca to watch over her siblings when their mother isn't there - an idea that disturbs her younger sister, Rosa.

"It's not the same having an older sister with us rather than our parents," Rosa said.

Blanca, for her part, is optimistic. The former South High School class vice president and community volunteer is studying at the Community College of Denver to become a social worker. She hopes to continue her studies in Mexico and care for her siblings.

But her mother, who knows their hometown very well, says Blanca's plan is unrealistic given the situation there. Mexico's attorney general says the area is controlled by a "criminal structure," with routine beheadings and drug wars.

The family's attorney, Juliet Gilbert, is working with U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Denver, to find a way to keep the family together.

Immigration authorities could use their discretion and allow the siblings to wait in the U.S. for their visas, which have been approved but are in a backlog created by immigration quotas, experts say.

"This sounds on the surface very much like a candidate for discretion," said Doris Meissner, former commissioner for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which preceded ICE.

Gilbert sees other potential options. She believes the family was a victim of fraud when they paid for legal advice from a non-attorney. Crime victims can qualify for special visas.

But this case is in the 11th hour, said Jeff Joseph, a Denver attorney who chairs the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

"The government has to do its job. It has to enforce the law," Joseph said. "But absent some immigration official who has a heart and can fix it, they're sending these kids back to be orphans."

Gilbert dreads Monday. "They'll be taken into custody and go behind a locked door and that will be it."

I don't understand how they say Mexicans are all about family. If these parents truly were parents, they would go back to Mexico with their children. Greedy. (Looks like the lady has been hit in the head one too many times by the pot above her head, doesn't it? She is kind of slumped over in her chair, looking a little cross eyed).

Come on ICE, hurry and get her out before she gives birth to her anchor baby.

Mother caught in dilemma of whether to risk her legal status by going with them.

Where's the dilemma? If even one of my children were being deported, you can bet the rest of the family would follow! IMHO, this should be a non-issue. No child of mine is going to be deported to a third world toilet without me going along as his or her protector!

Exactly MW, I see no dilemma...seems pretty cut and dried to me......family need to exit together.