Immigration crackdown nets laborers, not terrorists (NJ)
http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qst ... VFRXl5Mg==
Immigration crackdown nets laborers, not terrorists
Sunday, March 6, 2005
By ELIZABETH LLORENTE and MIGUEL PEREZ
STAFF WRITERS
[b]Federal agents assigned to pursue terrorists in the United States have instead arrested and deported thousands of Latin American laborers, only to have some of the laborers sneak back into this country, sometimes even brazenly returning to the jobs they left behind.
One advocate in Central Jersey says almost all of the 100-odd deportees he tracked have returned to the state.
The immigration crackdown known as Operation Compliance, launched [in December 2001, was directed at 6,000 foreign nationals from countries considered al-Qaida hubs. All had ignored court orders to leave the United States.
The priority, federal officials stressed, was to expel foreigners who had ties to terrorism or otherwise threatened citizens' safety.
But by early 2003, none of the 1,139 people arrested had been linked to terrorism, according to the 9/11 commission. In ensuing months, Operation Compliance ended up netting mostly Latin Americans, who were also "fugitive absconders" with deportation orders.
In a dramatic departure from past sweeps, which focused primarily on work sites likely to hire illegals, "fugitive absconder teams" are rousting undocumented men in pre-dawn raids on their homes, identifying themselves as police rather than immigration agents. The teams are not only arresting their targeted absconders but also hauling away other illegal immigrants they happen to find, calling these "collateral arrests.''
Such arrests are entirely legal, says Amy Gottlieb, an attorney who heads the American Friends Service Committee in Newark, which provides assistance to immigrants.
She acknowledges that many of those already ordered out of the country have exhausted their legal remedies. She is concerned that some of those caught up in "collateral arrests" are being pressured by immigration officials to give up their rights to legal representation and court hearings.
Human rights groups and local activists say that the enforcement teams are going after people least likely to pose a national security threat - immigrants who have built lives here and have come forward to legalize their status.
"This is how their money is being used - picking up pizza deliverymen and nannies and deli workers," said Maria Juega, a Princeton resident and chairwoman of the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a group that has been monitoring the raids in Central Jersey.
Dubious enforcement
About 11 million illegal immigrants are believed to be living in the United States, with 300,000 to 500,000 in New Jersey. The database of fugitive absconders has almost 400,000 names. Homeland Security officials defend the raids as crucial to national security and say that immigration enforcement, so maligned after the 2001 attacks, is entering a new era that will keep Americans safer.
But how well is the program working?
Last summer, federal agents staged an early-morning raid on a Central Jersey house, snatching up a Guatemalan landscaper whose name was in their database, along with several friends and relatives, also illegals.
Six months later, the landscaper was wading across the Rio Grande, then trudging through a rattlesnake-infested desert. Nothing was going to stop him from going home - to New Jersey. That was where his life was waiting: his job, his wife, his American-born children.
Today, he is back with his family and working for the same employer. All but two of those arrested with him are also back in New Jersey.
"They are not solving the problem because these people are still coming back," says Juan Martinez, a Puerto Rican businessman in Trenton who has become one of the most vocal opponents of the raids. "What they are doing is creating a world of false documents, of people who are forced to live underground."
That is precisely what has happened to the landscaper, who until the raid had been living a relatively normal American life, even paying income taxes. During his weeks of detention, he was eager for deportation - knowing how easy it would be to sneak back over the porous U.S. border.
"If they catch me and they deport me, I'm happy," he says. "What worries me is being kept in prison. But as long as they let me go, I can always return."Most of the immigrants who have been arrested have neither criminal records nor ties to terrorism, immigration data show. Many Guatemalans, for instance, filed papers for asylum in the 1990s, seeking to escape the civil war that roiled their country. But rejection and an order to leave the United States earned each one a place in the database.
Immigrant advocates complain that the continuous pursuit of people with no known links to crime or terrorist groups is a waste of federal resources that should be spent on more urgent threats.
"We are treating these people as if they were our enemies," Martinez says, "but they are not our enemies, they are our neighbors."
He describes the landscaper as a family man who coached his children's sports teams. According to Martinez, the landscaper was a gifted worker whose boss wanted to sponsor him for legal U.S. residency.
Because he returned illegally and fears another raid, the landscaper does not want his name used, or his town or employer identified. But other immigrants are eager to tell their stories publicly.
Early-morning visitors
At Edy Davila's home in Ewing, the pounding on the door came at 6 o'clock one August morning. Davila, a Guatemalan who worked for a Princeton caterer, was in the shower. His Puerto Rican wife, Jay, and their three U.S.-born children, all under age 8, were still sleeping.
Jay Davila says the visitors identified themselves as police. She opened the door.
"I thought, what did he do that the police are looking for him?" she says. "They never said they were from immigration."
She says the agents pushed past her, woke the children by shining flashlights in their faces and handcuffed her husband. His brother, a "collateral arrest," agreed to return to Guatemala. Davila was taken to the 300-bed Elizabeth Detention Center, where he remained for five months. He was deported Feb. 25.
Davila's former co-workers have rallied around him. They pitch in with baby sitting and visited him in detention. They have scraped together thousands of dollars toward his legal fees.
Jay Davila, a dental assistant, cannot fathom uprooting the family to follow her husband.
Today, Guatemalans are coming to the United States in droves because they see no future in their homeland, she says.
"What are we going to do with three kids in Guatemala?"
A faster arrest rate
The Immigration and Naturalization Service was dissolved in March 2003. Three new agencies within the Department of Homeland Security took over its functions, among them Operation Compliance. From March 2003 to September 2004, immigration agents in New Jersey arrested 1,327 foreign nationals - 942 fugitive absconders and 385 collateral detainees. Of the total in both categories, 276 detainees had criminal histories.
The pace of arrests is quickening. In New Jersey, from March 1 to Sept. 30 of 2003, immigration officials arrested 133 fugitive absconders, an average of 19 a month. From Oct. 1, 2003, to Sept. 30, 2004, arrests soared to 856, an average of 71 a month.
The overwhelming number of detainees were Latin American - 902 of the total, with the most from Guatemala, 202. Arrests of nationals from Muslim or Arab countries believed to have an al-Qaida presence totaled only 143 in the same time period.
Homeland Security officials bristle at the idea they are picking off easy targets rather than pursuing potential terrorists and criminals. They note that 80 percent of the more than 20,000 foreign nationals now detained by immigration authorities have criminal records. At the same time, they concede that relatively few of the people arrested under Operation Compliance are criminals.
"Our first concern is going after criminals," says Manny Van Pelt, a Homeland Security spokesman in Washington, D.C.
Van Pelt maintains that all illegal immigrants - whether they are baking doughnuts or assembling dirty bombs - compromise security.
"There's no way that I can look at an individual and know what's in their heart. There are cases where people turned out to be terrorists," Van Pelt says. "These are not indiscriminate arrests. These are targeted enforcement actions against people who are refusing to comply with a judge's order."
Determined to return
But if Operation Compliance was meant to get illegals out of this country permanently, the landscaper's odyssey suggests the program may be failing.
The landscaper felt his only option was to come back to New Jersey and start over. He wouldn't even consider moving his family to Guatemala.
"My kids were born here," he says. "I want them to be raised here."
He also recalled the suffering of children in his homeland.
"I saw the kids, like mine, working, selling gum, begging for money, rummaging through garbage," he says.
So six months after he was deported, he paid $6,500 to a smuggler to guide him back across the river and through the desert. The smuggler told him he regularly bribed U.S. Border Patrol agents to let his groups walk right into the country.
The landscaper says that unless authorities incarcerate millions of people, they will never be able to control illegal immigration.
Martinez says that of the more than 100 deportees whom he tracks in Central Jersey, he knows of only half a dozen who have not returned. And once they are back, they are determined to move deeper into the shadow world. They change addresses every few months. They work off the books and pay no income taxes. They buy phony identification.
Proponents of strict immigration policies say the federal government needs to forcefully prosecute deportees who illegally return to the United States.
Reentry after deportation is a felony, punishable by up to 25 years in prison. But rather than pursue punishment, say advocates of tighter immigration, the United States too often opts to simply deport illegals again.
"They need to make an example of some people, put them in prison," says Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates stricter immigration controls. Otherwise, he says, the border becomes "a revolving door."
Breaking up families
Rights groups say deportation breaks up families, which forces women and children onto public assistance. But Mehlman says broken families are the price of entering the United States illegally.
"In any other situation, where someone violates the law and the family is split up, we don't say let's not enforce the law," Mehlman says. "Sending people to prison is breaking up families, and we do it every day of the week."
In the Davila home, Edy Jr.'s grades have dropped since his father was taken away. The boy still remembers the blinding glare of an immigration agent's flashlight.
"When I woke up, I saw Mommy crying and the other people crying," he says.
The landscaper's son is also traumatized.
Shortly after he returned, the landscaper was startled to find that his son had covered his face with white face cream.
The boy explained that he did it because "if immigration comes, I want to look white because they don't take white people."
In his new home, at an address he is not likely to reveal to authorities, the landscaper wonders: Why can't they see that people like me are not the enemy?
"If we knew of any terrorists, we would be the first to turn them in to authorities," he says. "We don't want anything bad to happen to this country. We live here, too."
E-mail: llorente@northjersey.com; perez@northjersey.com
Immigration crackdown nets laborers, not terrorists (NJ)
http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qst ... VFRXl5Mg==
Immigration crackdown nets laborers, not terrorists
Sunday, March 6, 2005
By ELIZABETH LLORENTE and MIGUEL PEREZ
STAFF WRITERS
[b]Federal agents assigned to pursue terrorists in the United States have instead arrested and deported thousands of Latin American laborers, only to have some of the laborers sneak back into this country, sometimes even brazenly returning to the jobs they left behind.
One advocate in Central Jersey says almost all of the 100-odd deportees he tracked have returned to the state.
The immigration crackdown known as Operation Compliance, launched [in December 2001, was directed at 6,000 foreign nationals from countries considered al-Qaida hubs. All had ignored court orders to leave the United States.
The priority, federal officials stressed, was to expel foreigners who had ties to terrorism or otherwise threatened citizens' safety.
But by early 2003, none of the 1,139 people arrested had been linked to terrorism, according to the 9/11 commission. In ensuing months, Operation Compliance ended up netting mostly Latin Americans, who were also "fugitive absconders" with deportation orders.
In a dramatic departure from past sweeps, which focused primarily on work sites likely to hire illegals, "fugitive absconder teams" are rousting undocumented men in pre-dawn raids on their homes, identifying themselves as police rather than immigration agents. The teams are not only arresting their targeted absconders but also hauling away other illegal immigrants they happen to find, calling these "collateral arrests.''
Such arrests are entirely legal, says Amy Gottlieb, an attorney who heads the American Friends Service Committee in Newark, which provides assistance to immigrants.
She acknowledges that many of those already ordered out of the country have exhausted their legal remedies. She is concerned that some of those caught up in "collateral arrests" are being pressured by immigration officials to give up their rights to legal representation and court hearings.
Human rights groups and local activists say that the enforcement teams are going after people least likely to pose a national security threat - immigrants who have built lives here and have come forward to legalize their status.
"This is how their money is being used - picking up pizza deliverymen and nannies and deli workers," said Maria Juega, a Princeton resident and chairwoman of the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a group that has been monitoring the raids in Central Jersey.
Dubious enforcement
About 11 million illegal immigrants are believed to be living in the United States, with 300,000 to 500,000 in New Jersey. The database of fugitive absconders has almost 400,000 names. Homeland Security officials defend the raids as crucial to national security and say that immigration enforcement, so maligned after the 2001 attacks, is entering a new era that will keep Americans safer.
But how well is the program working?
Last summer, federal agents staged an early-morning raid on a Central Jersey house, snatching up a Guatemalan landscaper whose name was in their database, along with several friends and relatives, also illegals.
Six months later, the landscaper was wading across the Rio Grande, then trudging through a rattlesnake-infested desert. Nothing was going to stop him from going home - to New Jersey. That was where his life was waiting: his job, his wife, his American-born children.
Today, he is back with his family and working for the same employer. All but two of those arrested with him are also back in New Jersey.
"They are not solving the problem because these people are still coming back," says Juan Martinez, a Puerto Rican businessman in Trenton who has become one of the most vocal opponents of the raids. "What they are doing is creating a world of false documents, of people who are forced to live underground."
That is precisely what has happened to the landscaper, who until the raid had been living a relatively normal American life, even paying income taxes. During his weeks of detention, he was eager for deportation - knowing how easy it would be to sneak back over the porous U.S. border.
"If they catch me and they deport me, I'm happy," he says. "What worries me is being kept in prison. But as long as they let me go, I can always return."Most of the immigrants who have been arrested have neither criminal records nor ties to terrorism, immigration data show. Many Guatemalans, for instance, filed papers for asylum in the 1990s, seeking to escape the civil war that roiled their country. But rejection and an order to leave the United States earned each one a place in the database.
Immigrant advocates complain that the continuous pursuit of people with no known links to crime or terrorist groups is a waste of federal resources that should be spent on more urgent threats.
"We are treating these people as if they were our enemies," Martinez says, "but they are not our enemies, they are our neighbors."
He describes the landscaper as a family man who coached his children's sports teams. According to Martinez, the landscaper was a gifted worker whose boss wanted to sponsor him for legal U.S. residency.
Because he returned illegally and fears another raid, the landscaper does not want his name used, or his town or employer identified. But other immigrants are eager to tell their stories publicly.
Early-morning visitors
At Edy Davila's home in Ewing, the pounding on the door came at 6 o'clock one August morning. Davila, a Guatemalan who worked for a Princeton caterer, was in the shower. His Puerto Rican wife, Jay, and their three U.S.-born children, all under age 8, were still sleeping.
Jay Davila says the visitors identified themselves as police. She opened the door.
"I thought, what did he do that the police are looking for him?" she says. "They never said they were from immigration."
She says the agents pushed past her, woke the children by shining flashlights in their faces and handcuffed her husband. His brother, a "collateral arrest," agreed to return to Guatemala. Davila was taken to the 300-bed Elizabeth Detention Center, where he remained for five months. He was deported Feb. 25.
Davila's former co-workers have rallied around him. They pitch in with baby sitting and visited him in detention. They have scraped together thousands of dollars toward his legal fees.
Jay Davila, a dental assistant, cannot fathom uprooting the family to follow her husband.
Today, Guatemalans are coming to the United States in droves because they see no future in their homeland, she says.
"What are we going to do with three kids in Guatemala?"
A faster arrest rate
The Immigration and Naturalization Service was dissolved in March 2003. Three new agencies within the Department of Homeland Security took over its functions, among them Operation Compliance. From March 2003 to September 2004, immigration agents in New Jersey arrested 1,327 foreign nationals - 942 fugitive absconders and 385 collateral detainees. Of the total in both categories, 276 detainees had criminal histories.
The pace of arrests is quickening. In New Jersey, from March 1 to Sept. 30 of 2003, immigration officials arrested 133 fugitive absconders, an average of 19 a month. From Oct. 1, 2003, to Sept. 30, 2004, arrests soared to 856, an average of 71 a month.
The overwhelming number of detainees were Latin American - 902 of the total, with the most from Guatemala, 202. Arrests of nationals from Muslim or Arab countries believed to have an al-Qaida presence totaled only 143 in the same time period.
Homeland Security officials bristle at the idea they are picking off easy targets rather than pursuing potential terrorists and criminals. They note that 80 percent of the more than 20,000 foreign nationals now detained by immigration authorities have criminal records. At the same time, they concede that relatively few of the people arrested under Operation Compliance are criminals.
"Our first concern is going after criminals," says Manny Van Pelt, a Homeland Security spokesman in Washington, D.C.
Van Pelt maintains that all illegal immigrants - whether they are baking doughnuts or assembling dirty bombs - compromise security.
"There's no way that I can look at an individual and know what's in their heart. There are cases where people turned out to be terrorists," Van Pelt says. "These are not indiscriminate arrests. These are targeted enforcement actions against people who are refusing to comply with a judge's order."
Determined to return
But if Operation Compliance was meant to get illegals out of this country permanently, the landscaper's odyssey suggests the program may be failing.
The landscaper felt his only option was to come back to New Jersey and start over. He wouldn't even consider moving his family to Guatemala.
"My kids were born here," he says. "I want them to be raised here."
He also recalled the suffering of children in his homeland.
"I saw the kids, like mine, working, selling gum, begging for money, rummaging through garbage," he says.
So six months after he was deported, he paid $6,500 to a smuggler to guide him back across the river and through the desert. The smuggler told him he regularly bribed U.S. Border Patrol agents to let his groups walk right into the country.
The landscaper says that unless authorities incarcerate millions of people, they will never be able to control illegal immigration.
Martinez says that of the more than 100 deportees whom he tracks in Central Jersey, he knows of only half a dozen who have not returned. And once they are back, they are determined to move deeper into the shadow world. They change addresses every few months. They work off the books and pay no income taxes. They buy phony identification.
Proponents of strict immigration policies say the federal government needs to forcefully prosecute deportees who illegally return to the United States.
Reentry after deportation is a felony, punishable by up to 25 years in prison. But rather than pursue punishment, say advocates of tighter immigration, the United States too often opts to simply deport illegals again.
"They need to make an example of some people, put them in prison," says Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates stricter immigration controls. Otherwise, he says, the border becomes "a revolving door."
Breaking up families
Rights groups say deportation breaks up families, which forces women and children onto public assistance. But Mehlman says broken families are the price of entering the United States illegally.
"In any other situation, where someone violates the law and the family is split up, we don't say let's not enforce the law," Mehlman says. "Sending people to prison is breaking up families, and we do it every day of the week."
In the Davila home, Edy Jr.'s grades have dropped since his father was taken away. The boy still remembers the blinding glare of an immigration agent's flashlight.
"When I woke up, I saw Mommy crying and the other people crying," he says.
The landscaper's son is also traumatized.
Shortly after he returned, the landscaper was startled to find that his son had covered his face with white face cream.
The boy explained that he did it because "if immigration comes, I want to look white because they don't take white people."
In his new home, at an address he is not likely to reveal to authorities, the landscaper wonders: Why can't they see that people like me are not the enemy?
"If we knew of any terrorists, we would be the first to turn them in to authorities," he says. "We don't want anything bad to happen to this country. We live here, too."
E-mail: llorente@northjersey.com; perez@northjersey.com
