Thread: Welcomed home (New Loophole?)

Welcomed home

A minor when factory was raided, now a legal resident
Eliseo Garcia, with his cousin Jason, 3, was swept up in the immigration raid in March on a New Bedford factory. Eliseo Garcia, with his cousin Jason, 3, was swept up in the immigration raid in March on a New Bedford factory. (Globe Staff / Mark Wilson)
Email|Print| Text size – + By Maria Sacchetti
Globe Staff / December 15, 2007

NEW BEDFORD - At first, he thought the factory was on fire.

'I have

so many opportunities. I'm not going to be afraid of anything.'

ELISEO

GARCIA
more stories like this

Eliseo Garcia was churning out military backpacks last March at the Michael Bianco Inc. leather-goods factory when panicked workers started racing for the exits. But instead of smoke, he saw federal immigration agents. He thought the odyssey that had delivered him from a tiny village in Guatemala to this historic seaport was over.

Then, in jail, he began to tell his story.

He was just a minor, only 17 years old. Federal agents were skeptical, believing that he was an illegal immigrant who had told the factory he was 21.

After months of waiting, Garcia finally persuaded a federal judge Dec. 6 that he was indeed 17, a day before he turned 18. He was awarded legal residency because he was a minor in the United States without a parent.

It is a rare success story from the New Bedford raid that detained 361 illegal immigrants, and for Garcia it has unfolded with a mix of joy and regret. Now he can legally get a driver's license, a job, and health insurance. But almost everyone he loves here is here illegally. His cousin Julio was caught in the raid and deported. An aunt is facing deportation.

"I have so many opportunities," he said in an interview in Spanish on Thursday, sitting at his kitchen table in a spare second-floor apartment he shares with his aunts and their families. "I'm not going to be afraid of anything."

A week after his hearing, he was still dazed by his fortune and unsure of the possibilities ahead. After months of unemployment, he is looking for a job. In January, he plans to enroll in an advanced English class. He is scouting for driving schools.

Someday, he hopes to earn a high school diploma, but for now, work comes first. His relatives, here and in Guatemala, need his help.

"I have more responsibility," he said.

His unexpected legal residency followed a harrowing journey from Guatemala to New Bedford that depended largely on luck.

Tall and strapping, Garcia is a Mayan Indian who came north alone when he was 16 because his mother fell ill with rheumatoid arthritis and needed money for medicine. He had lived with his grandparents near the municipality of Zacualpa, where he loved to watch soccer games and play with friends. His mother, Gregoria, was often away at work in the fields. He does not know his father.

In Guatemala, Garcia liked school but had to drop out halfway through seventh grade to work, making thatched roofs because his family could not afford tuition and books.

He said he left for the US-Mexico border in April 2006 on a journey that lasted two weeks and cost nearly $6,000 in payments to a smuggler, paid with money from relatives. In Mexico, authorities caught him, but he escaped. He said he hiked through the cold mountains into Arizona without a jacket. For days, he survived on a diet of water and potato chips. In the end, the smugglers dumped him in New York, instead of New Bedford, his planned destination.

A few days later, he arrived at his aunts' house. He rested for two days and went to work at Bianco, where his relatives worked, presenting a fake green card that said he was 21.

For nearly a year, his life was consumed with work and his dream of building his mother her own house in Guatemala.

For 48 hours a week, he assembled backpacks for $7.50 an hour, allowing him to send up to $300 a month to his mother. In Guatemala, he had earned $50 a week.

After the raid, Garcia expected to be deported. "I didn't have any hope," he said.

But his lawyer, Ondine Galvez Sniffin of Catholic Social Services of Fall River, said Garcia had options others did not have. She had relatives send his birth certificate from Guatemala to prove that he was a minor and got him out of jail. She helped him apply for a green card because he was a minor who had been abandoned.

That part was hard for Garcia. His mother's rights were legally terminated in court, Sniffin said. "He doesn't want people to think she was a bad mother," she said

On Dec. 6, Sniffin said, Garcia arrived at court in Boston sporting a short new haircut and a borrowed jacket. He spoke shyly in a small courtroom in the John F. Kennedy federal building. A judge signed off on his legal residency by checking a box on a sheet: approved. Everyone smiled and shook his hand. The government's lawyer said, "Welcome to the United States."

Garcia is still worried that his relatives will be deported and that he will be left alone. But, he said, he is certain he will stay.

The next day, he called his mother in Guatemala to tell her he was safe.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/mas...welcomed_home/

So now not only anchor babies are given citizenship, illegal aliens under the age of 18 are given legal residency.

Who is the jackass judge that did this?

Originally Posted by had_enuf

So now not only anchor babies are given citizenship, illegal aliens under the age of 18 are given legal residency.

Who is the jackass judge that did this?

I don't know. I woke up with my mind reeling with things like this.

Here in the U.S. they tricked us as children, saying there wasn't going to be enough room for the children we were about to have. They unleashed, Zero Population Growth, Family Planning and Birth Control Pills on us.

Now the same people are behind re-stoking population growth and saying they need the illegal invaders for the growing demand that is a result of the illegal invasion itself.

Quote;

"Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it."

-Mark Twain


Then I came across the article.