It's time to get out
Elvira Arellano has flouted the law long enough. She should leave the church and go back to Mexico.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary ... 5a.article
August 15, 2007

Elvira Arellano, it's time to get out and go home. To Mexico. Today marks a year since Arellano sought sanctuary in a Humboldt Park church to avoid deportation. She's been deported before, but she came back. She faces being kicked out again, except immigration officials haven't gotten their hands on her. Not that they can't.

Immigration officials have the right to break down the doors at Adalberto United Methodist Church, but the government has wisely averted a public relations nightmare by allowing Arellano to flout the law -- for a whole year.

Arellano has used the church as a refuge while she taunts Immigration and criticizes the U.S. Congress for its inability to create meaningful immigration reform. But the government has done its job and snared Arellano more than once. In 1997, she was stopped at the border and accused of carrying false ID. In 2003, she was arrested in a terrorist sting at O'Hare. She was convicted in federal court of Social Security fraud and ordered to leave the country.

Arellano intends to make a special announcement today. We hope she will graciously give up her protest and honor American law -- by following it.

Arellano isn't a murderer and her crimes are not threatening enough that federal officials should violate the principle of sanctuary. But Arellano should realize that the public is growing weary of her stunt. She should have the dignity to walk out -- spare a federal raid on her church -- and acknowledge that she's done what she could for her cause. In the year since she took refuge in the Rev. Walter "Slim" Coleman's storefront church, she has become the face of the illegal sanctuary movement. On a typical day, she fields more than a dozen media and activists' calls. She's personalized our nation's No. 1 debilitating problem: We don't know what to do with the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants who are hiding here.

But there are limits to having an agenda and Arellano's subjecting her elementary school son is beyond the pale.

"She can't take me to the store and can't take me to the school," Saul Arellano recently told the Sun-Times. "It makes me feel a little bad. My other friends, they have their moms and their dads. It's different for them."

Saul has traveled to Mexico and Washington D.C., seeking Congress' help. But how long can he last as her faithful ambassador?

Arellano argues she should be allowed to stay because her son is a U.S. citizen, and she doesn't want to have to leave him to the care of a guardian. But she also doesn't want to take him back to Mexico where he might lose his English-speaking skills. Her argument weakens when we see Saul, alone, on television pushing his mother's cause, while she's holed up in the church.

It's time Arellano stop using Saul as bait -- like the shrewd panhandlers on the L parading their young for change.

The game is over. Elvira Arellano: You've pulled out all the stops, breaking the law, while eloquently stating your case. Your by-any-means-necessary moment is over. Take your son, and start a new life in Mexico.