Thread: Exclusive Sob Story: Fort Myers family in immigration limbo

For more than a year, 12-year-old Maria Miguel has been carrying fear in her heart.

She doesn’t talk about it with teachers. She doesn’t mention it to friends. She tries not to think about it, because the prospect of her mom being deported to Guatemala makes her cry.

“I just want everybody to be together,” said Maria, a soft-spoken sixth-grader with silky, dark hair.

On a recent evening, she read a book as her mother Isabel Tomas, 34, fried chicken on the stove in their humble east Fort Myers home. Her brother and sister watched TV with their father, a landscaper with a work permit. The youngest, Laria, a 3-year-old in socks printed with American flags, watched Tomas cook.

This is Tomas’ home. But the country beyond these walls is not legally hers. Around age 16, Tomas crossed the border to flee poverty in Guatemala. In the fall of 2010, she was arrested and set for deportation late last year until she was given an 11th-hour reprieve and allowed to stay at least one more year.

Fort Myers immigration attorney Ricardo Skerrett said he has found no permanent remedy for her to stay.
“My guess is that they’re not going to actively try to remove her anymore but the problem is not solved, which is the same thing that we have with immigration in this country,” he said. “This case is really a microcosm of what’s going on.”

The family’s future is in a limbo of policies and politics, where thousands of immigrant families exist.
The children are Americans. The parents are Guatemalans.

The hardest part for Maria is not knowing.

“I’m from here,” she said, “but I’d be lonely without my mom.”

'Painful' reality

Just down the street from the family’s home is Jesus the Worker, a Catholic church they attend that caters to Spanish-speakers. It draws a flock of 3,000 on an average weekend.

The Rev. Patrick O’Connor, the administrator, leads a visitor through the parish hall, where he envisions creating a soup kitchen. He could also really use a law office, he says. On average, O’Connor writes a handful of letters a week vouching for the moral character and community ties of a parishioner facing deportation. It has become so common recently that he works from a template.

“It’s a regular and painful part of our community,” O’Connor said. “The situation behooves everyone to ask, ‘What is it that God would want us to do?’ The scriptures tell us that we care for the needy, rejected and foreigners in our midst.”

Under President Barack Obama, deportations have peaked. The United States removed almost 400,000 people in 2011, including almost 16,600 people from Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Last summer, the administration announced immigration enforcers would focus resources on high-priority cases such as serious felons and gang members. John Morton, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, issued a memo stating ICE officials should consider factors such as whether a person is parent of an American child and the amount of time he or she has lived here in pursuing enforcement. It allows for discretion.

“We need to make sure that we’re utilizing our resources in a way that we’re making our biggest impact,” said Barbara Gonzalez, an ICE spokeswoman. She said all supervisors and attorneys had received training on priorities.

“They understand that their decision-making has an impact on the lives of human beings,” Gonzalez said.
The policy does not mean people can get a green card if existing law doesn’t allow for it.

Since the priorities were announced, more clients are being released with court dates instead of being detained and deported, said Christina Leddin, an immigration specialist for Amigos Center, a Southwest Florida organization.

“They’re definitely more willing to look at the factors in the family,” she said. “It’s just more humane.”

Tomas' arrest

Maria and sister Cristina, who is 13 and could pass as her twin, remember the day in September 2010 their father returned home without their mother. Later, she called home from jail.

“Don’t worry,” Maria recalls her mother telling them. “Just take care of your little sister.”

It is a night her mother regrets. Collier County sheriff’s reports say Tomas caused a scene and yelled when deputies questioning her nephew outside an Immokalee bar told her not to interfere.

She clutched the back of a pickup as one tried to guide her away. She feared deputies would find out she was in the country illegally. What would happen to the kids?

Tomas was booked into the Collier jail on three misdemeanor charges related to disorderly intoxication and resisting an officer without violence. In jail, authorities found her deportation order from 1998.

The Collier sheriff’s office has an agreement that gives some officers immigration enforcement powers and allows them to detain a person for ICE. Lt. Keith Harmon, supervisor of its criminal alien task force, said there is some discretion in the process for people with child care or medical issues but people with final deportation orders are mandatorily detained.

Harmon said agency officials are aware of the priorities announced last summer, but the agency is working from its original agreement with ICE.

A field worker

Isabel Tomas decided to leave the Guatemalan highlands as a teenager. She came speaking a Mayan dialect and with a second-grade education because her father, a farmer, couldn’t pay for school.

She settled in Southwest Florida and worked in its fields.

A few years after arriving, she had heard there was work out West cleaning houses but it did not materialize, so she decided to return. Her eldest, Cristina, was just a baby.

On the trip back, her truck ran out of gas one night in the desert. Law enforcers stopped; she was detained.
Tomas was released with a notice to appear in a Texas immigration court, said Skerrett, her lawyer. At the time, she said she didn’t understand what they told her. She returned to Fort Myers but not to Texas for her court date.

The court ordered her deported in abstentia, records show.

Once the order was discovered in 2010, ICE authorities in Tampa placed an electronic monitoring device around her ankle and gave her a new deportation date: Nov. 16, 2011.

She returned to working in the fields and, recently, has been earning about $80 a week scooping crab meat from shells.

Skerrett filed to reopen her case and stop the deportation due to length of time she had lived here, her four American children and her otherwise clean record. He said she didn’t receive adequate notice but an ICE lawyer opposed it.

After the priorities were announced, Skerrett believed Tomas could qualify to have her deportation halted. He contacted the ICE officer on her case and submitted a letter to the White House. Julie Contreras of Illinois heard about Tomas and her family through her work with the League of United Latin American Citizens. She wrote to ICE.

“This discretion that exists is for the most hardship of cases,” Contreras said. “I could not see a better case than hers.”

Weeks before she was set to be deported, an ICE officer called Tomas to Tampa to remove the monitoring device that she had concealed beneath jeans for the past year. The agency delayed her deportation for at least a year, but Skerrett does not see a permanent solution for Tomas unless the law changes.

What happens next for the family of six could depend on who is president next January.

Administration officials have pledged their commitment to fixing the fractured immigration system, but it’s not moving fast enough for some people. While some voters say all illegal immigrants should be deported, others would like to see a more nuanced approach from the existing president and the candidates.

“As in any election, they pander to their base and they think that most conservatives just want to send everyone back and I don’t think that’s the case,” said Kathy Jones, an organizer for the Lee County Tea Party. “We feel enough is enough and we need to close the borders and get rid of the people who aren’t contributing.”

Yet, she is not against allowing a path to citizenship for immigrants who meet certain criteria such as long-term ties to a community.

“You hate to see families broken up,” she said.

The options

Tomas’ husband, Jose Miguel, would likely care for their children in the United States if Tomas were deported. But he doesn’t drive or cook and is illiterate. Tomas doesn’t see a future for her children in Guatemala.

“If I take them with me, they’re going to lose their English and their education. Everything,” she said. “I can’t take my children to suffer in Guatemala. They’re Americans.”

Maria doesn’t want to choose between her mother and her country. She dreams of going to college.
“I want to be a doctor. They give you more money for that and you could pay the rent and water and all that,” she said.

The uncertainty gnaws at the family.

“Until I hear good news,” Tomas said, “I’ll keep on worrying.”

So will her children.

Exclusive: Fort Myers family in immigration limbo | The News-Press | news-press.com

Yet another story wanting our sympathy when millions of our own citizens are jobless and desperately need to care for their families. We have just as many sob stories about our poor citizens and their fears and concerns.

“I want to be a doctor. They give you more money for that and you could pay the rent and water and all that,” she said.

Yeah but will you pay back all the tax dollars your illegal alien parents have sucked up over the years?