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History > 2014 > USA > Immigration (I)
Two men from Honduras,
who rode trains north through Mexico,
rested after they arrived at the Casa del Migrante.
Several migrants at the shelter
said they were heading to the
United States to seek “asilo.”
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Hoping for Asylum, Migrants Strain U.S. Border
NYT
10.4.2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/11/us/poverty-and-violence-push-new-wave-of-migrants-toward-us.html
Immigrant Mothers
Released From Holding Centers,
but With Ankle Monitors
JULY 29, 2014
The New York Times
By JULIE TURKEWITZ
Carmen Garcia recently recounted the events of her family’s
journey from El Salvador to the United States: assaults, robberies, abandonment
by smugglers.
And then she and her 12-year-old son were taken into custody by federal officers
in South Texas. After Ms. Garcia and her son spent a night on the floor of a
holding facility, the authorities released them and allowed them to reunite with
another son in New York as long as they showed up at a local immigration office.
The two reported as instructed this month to a building in Manhattan where a
tracking device was affixed to Ms. Garcia’s ankle, a measure meant to ensure
that she would not disappear as she and her son face deportation proceedings.
“I asked, ‘Why are you putting this on?’ ” said Ms. Garcia, 40. “We’re not
assassins. We’re not thieves. We’ve come to save our lives.”
Ms. Garcia is one of more than 55,000 adults traveling with minors, mostly
mothers with children, who have been picked up along the Southwest border from
October through June, up from 9,350 during the same period the year before. The
federal government, however, has fewer than 800 spaces to detain families.
Photo
Carmen Garcia wears her ankle bracelet, which must be charged every day by being
plugged into a wall. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
As a result, the White House has said that it will expand alternatives to
detention, including the use of electronic ankle monitors, a decision that has
set off a debate — part of a larger national discussion about whether these
immigrants should be treated as lawbreakers or refugees.
Both the government and advocates for immigrants generally agree that the
monitors save money, are a humane alternative to custody and in some cases are
necessary to compel an immigrant to appear in court.
But advocates and federal officials differ on how often the tracking monitors
should be used. Officials say they are necessary because it is often difficult
to determine whether a person is a flight risk or has a criminal history in
their native country. Advocates say they stigmatize many immigrants fleeing
violence, most of whom have a strong incentive to appear at immigration
proceedings because they are seeking asylum.
“In no way could you refer to this population as hardened criminal offenders,”
said Michelle Brané, director of the migrant rights and justice program at the
Women’s Refugee Commission, an advocacy group based in New York. “They are
mothers with very young children who are fleeing for their lives.”
Ankle monitors have been part of the government’s arsenal as far back as 2004 to
try to ensure that immigrants appear in court. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement oversees the ankle bracelet program, but contracts with a private
company, BI Inc., to administer it.
By early July, the company was tracking 7,440 immigrants wearing bracelets, a
slight increase from 7,297 the year before. A spokesman for Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, Vincent Picard, said that it was “reasonable to assume”
that the use of the devices would grow as more migrants are apprehended at the
border.
The monitors use global positioning technology and are applied to people 18 or
older, immigration officials said. Pregnant women are also excluded.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
The bracelets are part of a larger tracking program that also includes telephone
reporting and unannounced home visits. The program, which is aimed at people
facing deportation, currently monitors about 24,000 people.
The cost of enrolling a person in the program is about $4.50 a day, according to
immigration officials, compared with about $120 for detention. And nearly 100
percent of enrollees appeared for their court dates this fiscal year.
But the use of ankle bracelets has also been called uneven. A review of the
program published by the Rutgers-Newark School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic
and the American Friends Service Committee in 2012 concluded that it was plagued
by “overuse, and an inconsistent application,” leading to “a physical,
psychological, and an economic toll on the program participants.”
Immigration officials said the electronic monitors are applied only after
careful screening to assess if they are necessary to compel a person to appear
in court. In most cases, they said, migrants who prove that they will show up in
court will eventually have their bracelets removed.
While the surge of unaccompanied children entering the country has set off a
national debate, the soaring number of detained families is also posing a
challenge to the federal government.
Two centers, one in Pennsylvania and another in New Mexico, have space for fewer
than 800 detainees, though the government has plans to open a third center in
Texas with room for about 500 people.
Ms. Garcia said that she was not told why she had to wear the bracelet. She had
lived in the United States from 1989 to 1998, but had never been arrested or
deported, she said.
Her ankle monitor — about the size and shape of a generous half-sandwich — must
be plugged into the wall for at least two hours each day to be recharged.
If she crosses state lines it will emit a continuous beep and deliver a message
telling her to turn back to her allowed zone, a federal immigration official
said.
In a bedroom at a friend’s home in Queens, Ms. Garcia sat with her leg tethered
to a wall socket. She and her son Alexander fled El Salvador after she witnessed
the murder of her nephew, she said, adding that the killers had threatened their
lives.
Their journey lasted more than a year — Ms. Garcia worked along the way — and
the only item that remains from their trek is a coffee-colored brassiere, which
she called her “reliquia,” a sacred vestige from her past.
She said her bracelet was hot, itchy and unnecessary to ensure that she appears
in court.
But some immigrants choose instead to view the monitors as a small price to pay
to be allowed to remain free.
Patricia Meza, 31, said she had owned an Internet cafe in El Salvador. After a
gang demanded that she pay $500 a month as a form of tax, she closed the
business, traveling through Mexico on the top of a train with her two daughters,
one of them 10 years old and the other 10 months.
After being caught near the border, they spent two nights in federal custody in
Texas. Then they were allowed to stay with Ms. Meza’s mother in New York, as
long as they appeared at a Manhattan immigration office.
Leaving her appointment not long ago with a tracking device strapped to her leg,
Ms. Meza hugged her daughters and sipped a soda offered by a friend. “It’s just
part of the process,” she said. “My life begins from here.”
Jack Begg and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 2014,
on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline:
Facing Deportation, Mothers Get Monitors, Not Cells.
Immigrant Mothers Released From Holding
Centers, but With Ankle Monitors,
NYT, 29.7.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/nyregion/
immigrant-mothers-released-from-holding-centers-but-with-ankle-monitors.html
U.S. Religious Leaders
Embrace Cause of Immigrant Children
JULY 23, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL PAULSON
After protesters shouting “Go home” turned back busloads of
immigrant mothers and children in Murrieta, Calif., a furious Cardinal Timothy
M. Dolan, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, sat down at his notepad and
drafted a blog post detailing his shame at the episode, writing, “It was
un-American; it was unbiblical; it was inhumane.”
When the governor of Iowa, Terry E. Branstad, said he did not want the migrants
in his state, declaring, “We can’t accept every child in the world who has
problems,” clergy members in Des Moines held a prayer vigil at a United
Methodist Church to demonstrate their desire to make room for the refugees.
The United States’ response to the arrival of tens of thousands of migrant
children, many of them fleeing violence and exploitation in Central America, has
been symbolized by an angry pushback from citizens and local officials who have
channeled their outrage over illegal immigration into opposition to proposed
shelter sites. But around the nation, an array of religious leaders are trying
to mobilize support for the children, saying the nation can and should welcome
them.
“We’re talking about whether we’re going to stand at the border and tell
children who are fleeing a burning building to go back inside,” said Rabbi Asher
Knight of Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, who said leaders of more than 100 faith
organizations in his city had met last week to discuss how to help. He said that
in his own congregation, some were comparing the flow of immigrant children to
the Kindertransport, a rescue mission in the late 1930s that sent Jewish
children from Nazi Germany to Britain for safekeeping.
“The question for us is: How do we want to be remembered, as yelling and
screaming to go back, or as using the teachings of our traditions to have
compassion and love and grace for the lives of God’s children?” Rabbi Knight
said.
The backlash to the backlash is broad, from Unitarian Universalists and Quakers
to evangelical Protestants. Among the most agitated are Catholic bishops, who
have long allied with Republican politicians against abortion and same-sex
marriage, and leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, whose adherents tend
to lean right.
“This is a crisis, and not simply a political crisis, but a moral one,” said
Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the
Southern Baptist Convention. On Tuesday, Mr. Moore led a delegation of Southern
Baptist officials to visit refugee children at detention centers in San Antonio
and McAllen, Tex. In an interview after the visit, Mr. Moore said that “the
anger directed toward vulnerable children is deplorable and disgusting” and
added: “The first thing is to make sure we understand these are not issues,
these are persons. These children are made in the image of God, and we ought to
respond to them with compassion, not with fear.”
Also on Tuesday, a coalition of evangelical organizations sent a letter to
members of Congress, opposing proposals for expedited deportation of the
migrants. A similar letter is being prepared by a wide range of mainline
denominations, including the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the
Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.), the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of
Christ. Earlier this month, 20 national Jewish groups issued their own
statement.
The number of children crossing the U.S. border alone has doubled since last
year. Answers to key questions on the crisis.
“We have to put our money where our mouth is in this country,” said Kevin
Appleby, the director of migration policy for the United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops. “We tell other countries to protect human rights and accept
refugees, but when we get a crisis on our border, we don’t know how to respond.”
Republicans have rejected calls by Democrats for $2.7 billion in funds to
respond to the crisis, demanding changes in immigration law to make it easier to
send children back to Central America. And while President Obama says he is open
to some changes, many Democrats have opposed them, and Congress is now
deadlocked.
Various religious groups are trying to assist the migrants directly by offering
food, shelter and legal services. The Episcopal Church is providing hygiene and
nutrition packets; the United Methodist Church is offering showers and clothing;
the United Church of Christ has started a nationwide fund-raising appeal.
Catholic Charities U.S.A. has opened seven “welcome centers” along the border.
While thousands of child migrants from Central America have crossed the Rio
Grande to U.S. soil, thousands more don’t make it that far. Many end up detained
or broke in towns like Reynosa, Mexico.
“As a Christian organization, we feel like we have no choice — we are clearly
called by Scripture to respond to all children in need,” said Jesse Eaves, the
senior adviser for child protection at World Vision, a large evangelical
charity.
Attitudes among evangelicals are changing, particularly at the leadership level,
according to the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic
Christian Leadership Conference.
“I remember when my fellow evangelicals said, ‘Deport them all, they’re here
illegally, end of story,’ but the leadership now supports immigration reform,”
Mr. Rodriguez said. “There’s still angst in the pews, but if they listen more to
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John than to Rush Limbaugh, they’ll act with compassion
towards these children.”
The Rev. Larry Snyder, the president of Catholic Charities U.S.A., said the
charitable work had not been welcomed in every community.
“Some city authorities are intimidated by the hate talk that you hear, and I
even talk to some pastors who say they have to be careful because their
parishioners aren’t behind us,” Father Snyder said. “If Jesus said anything, it
was that your neighbor is everyone. I wish people would embrace that a little
more than they do.”
Asked about the concerns religious organizations are expressing about
unaccompanied minors, the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said,
“Generous acts from average citizens don’t routinely generate headlines, but
they accurately reflect the values of the vast majority of Americans.”
A spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner did not respond to a request for
comment.
Some political leaders have cited religious or moral arguments in offering
support for the migrants. On Friday, Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts
tearfully cited the Bible and declared, “I don’t know what good there is in
faith if we can’t, and won’t, turn to it in moments of human need,” as he
suggested that migrant children could be temporarily housed at military bases in
his state.
And on Monday, briefing reporters in Rome after meeting with a top Vatican
official, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York praised Pope Francis’ support for the
migrant children and said, “I emphasize that New York City agrees with the
position of the Holy See, that we have to embrace all immigrants.”
In Des Moines on Monday night, the mayor, Frank Cownie, attended the church
vigil held by supporters of the migrant children. About 200 people gathered,
from Catholic, Lutheran, United Methodist, Quaker and United Church of Christ
congregations, as they heard stories from immigrants and expressed a desire to
change the way their state’s posture toward the migrants might be perceived.
“I think for me the most important thing is to show that people in Iowa are
compassionate and welcoming,” said the Rev. Alejandro Alfaro-Santiz, the pastor
of Trinity United Methodist Church.
Ann Klein contributed reporting from Des Moines.
A version of this article appears in print on July 24, 2014,
on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline:
U.S. Religious Leaders Embrace Cause of Children Streaming Across Border.
U.S. Religious Leaders Embrace Cause of
Immigrant Children,
NYT, 23.7.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/us/
us-religious-leaders-embrace-cause-of-immigrant-children.html
Influx of South Americans
Drives Miami’s Reinvention
JULY 19, 2014
The New York Times
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
MIAMI — As the World Cup played out over the past month,
yellow-clad Colombians packed the Kukaramakara nightclub downtown, Aguila beers
in hand, shouting, “Colombia, Colombia!” Outside, Brazilians in car caravans
blasted samba music. Argentines, some in blue-and-white striped jerseys, jammed
into nearby steakhouses and empanada joints. Around town, children filed into
Sunday Mass, their jerseys ablaze with their futbol heroes from across Latin
America.
It was less a commentary on soccer than a tableau vivant of the new Miami, which
has gone from a place defined by Cuban-Americans to one increasingly
turbocharged by a surge of well-educated, well-off South Americans in the last
decade. Their growing numbers and influence, both as immigrants and as visitors,
have transformed Miami’s once recession-dampened downtown, enriched its culture
and magnified its allure for businesses around the world as a crossroads of the
Spanish-speaking world.
“It’s now the indisputable capital of Latin America,” said Marcelo Claure, a
Bolivian millionaire who founded Brightstar, a global wireless distribution
company based here. “The Latin economic boom in the last 10 years has led to the
creation of a huge middle class in countries like Brazil, Peru and Colombia, and
they look at Miami as the aspirational place to be.” The transformation, the
latest chapter in the city’s decades-long evolution, is especially apparent amid
the building cranes, street life and nightclubs downtown. But it is seen across
Miami-Dade County, where highly educated South American immigrants and
second-home owners have increasingly put down roots and played a major role in
jump-starting a region that not long ago was ravaged by recession.
Their relative wealth has allowed them to ramp up businesses like import-export
companies and banks, and to open restaurants that dish out arepas from
Venezuela, coxinhas from Brazil and alfajores from Argentina. Partly as a result
of that influx, the Miami-Fort Lauderdale region eclipsed Los Angeles in 2012 as
the major metropolitan area with the largest share — 45 percent — of immigrant
business owners, according to a report by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a
research group.
The South American presence has also reshaped politics and radio here. More
moderate than traditional Cuban-Americans, South Americans have nudged local
politics toward the center. Radio stations no longer cater exclusively to Cuban
audiences; they feature more news about Latin America and less anti-Castro
fulminating.
Last week, Charlie Crist, who is running for governor as a Democrat, named a
Colombian-American woman from Miami, Annette Taddeo-Goldstein, as his running
mate.
Colombians, who first began to settle here in the 1980s, are the largest group
of South Americans. They now make up nearly 5 percent of Miami-Dade’s
population. They are joined by Argentines, Peruvians and a growing number of
Venezuelans. Brazilians, relative newcomers to Miami’s Hispanic hodgepodge, are
now a distinct presence as well. The Venezuelan population jumped 117 percent
over 10 years, a number that does not capture the surge in recent arrivals. Over
half of Miami’s residents are foreign born, and 63 percent speak Spanish at
home.
The influx is expanding the borders of immigrant neighborhoods in places like
West Kendall, the Hammocks and Doral. Their numbers are growing across the
county line into Broward, where one city, Weston, has gained so many Venezuelans
that it is jokingly called Westonzuela.
Jorge Pérez, the wealthy real estate developer and founder of the new Pérez Art
Museum Miami, said the latest surge of South Americans was turning the city into
a year-round destination and luring more entrepreneurs and international
businesses. Latin American banks have proliferated as they follow their
customers here.
Most noticeably, they are snapping up real estate in Miami, Miami Beach and Key
Biscayne, a wealthy island two bridges away from Miami. Real estate developers
credit South Americans for spurring the current housing boom.
“South Americans are the game changers — they are the ones that allowed the
housing market to bounce back,” Mr. Pérez said.
Cubans still dominate Miami, making up just over half the number of Hispanics
and a third of the total population, and Central Americans have flocked here for
decades. But in an area where Hispanics have gone from 23 percent of the
population in 1970 to 65 percent now, what is most striking is the deepening
influence of South Americans.
Many came here to flee a political crisis, as the Venezuelans did after the
presidential election of Hugo Chávez in 1998 and then his protégé, Nicolás
Maduro, or to escape turbulent economies, as the Argentines and Colombians did
more than a decade ago.
But the latest wave of South Americans adds a new twist. It includes many
nonimmigrants — investors on the lookout for businesses and properties,
including second homes in Miami and Miami Beach. For them, Miami is an
increasingly alluring place to safely keep money and stay for extended periods.
Spanish, which has long been the common language in much of Miami, now dominates
even broader sections of the city. In stores, banks, gyms and even boardrooms in
much of Miami, Spanish is the default language.
“You can come here as a businessman, a professional, and make five phone calls,
all in Spanish, to set up the infrastructure for your business,” said Guillermo
J. Grenier, a sociology professor at Florida International University.
The effect on real estate is especially visible in the Brickell area, Miami’s
international banking center, and in once-bedraggled parts of downtown. The
South American infatuation with urban living has led to the explosion of lavish
new condominium towers, with more to come. There is even rooftop soccer, like
the kind offered in South America. Last year, David Beckham and Mr. Claure
announced that they would bring a Major League Soccer team to Miami, though they
are still in negotiations for a suitable stadium site.
Sit in a restaurant and you hear a range of accents — the lilt of Argentine
patter, the clarity of Colombian Spanish, the liveliness of Venezuelans and the
speedy rat-a-tat of Cubans. Brazilians have sprinkled Portuguese into the mix.
The flurry of condo construction now rivals the one before the 2008 crash,
raising the specter for some housing analysts of another risky housing bubble.
A Miami Downtown Development Authority study found that more than 90 percent of
the demand for new downtown and Brickell residential units came from foreign
buyers; 65 percent were from South America.
“Status is having a condo in Miami,” said Juan C. Zapata, the first Colombian to
serve as a Miami-Dade County commissioner and, before then, in the State
Legislature.
The suburbs, too, continue to swell as more South Americans move into areas
anchored by people from their countries. Doral, a middle-class city near the
airport, is now a panoply of South Americans, most of them Venezuelans. Eighty
percent of Doral is Hispanic, and in 2012, a Venezuelan, Luigi Boria, was
elected mayor.
“Every year, we get more and more Venezuelans,” said Lorenzo Di Stefano, the
owner of El Arepazo 2, a Venezuelan restaurant there. This year, with the
economy worsening in Venezuela, Mr. Di Stefano said he expected another large
wave.
But, Mr. Crist’s running mate and Mr. Boria aside, the South American influx has
not translated into widespread electoral success. South Americans lag far behind
Cuban-Americans in political power, in part because their citizenship rate is
lower. Many do not vote or run for office, a reality that Mr. Zapata said must
change.
“What you see in Miami is a change economically; it’s much more diverse than it
used to be,” Mr. Zapata said. “But the Cubans grew economically, and turned it
into political power.”
That transformation, Mr. Zapata said, will be Miami’s next chapter.
A version of this article appears in print on July 20, 2014, on page A12 of the
New York edition with the headline: Influx of South Americans Drives Miami’s
Reinvention.
Influx of South Americans Drives Miami’s
Reinvention, NYT, 19.7.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/us/20miami.html
On Southern Border,
Mexico Faces Crisis of Its Own
JULY 19, 2014
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
TENOSIQUE, Mexico — For years, Mexico’s most closely watched
border was its northern one, which generations of Mexican migrants have crossed
seeking employment and refuge in the United States.
But the sudden surge of child migrants from Central America, many of them
traveling alone, has cast scrutiny south, to the 600-mile border separating
Mexico and Guatemala.
Now Mexico finds itself whipsawing between compassion and crackdown as it
struggles with a migration crisis of its own. While the public is largely
sympathetic to migrants and deeply critical of the United States’ hard-line
immigration policies, officials are under pressure from their neighbors to the
north and south as they try to cope with the influx. As a result, they are
taking measures that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Mexico has quietly stepped up the pace of deportation of migrants, some of them
unaccompanied children. It announced plans to stop people from boarding freight
trains north and will open five new border control stations along routes favored
by migrants.
Mexico is trying to slow down the flow of migrants coming though its southern
border by detaining them, and sometimes deporting them back to its Central
American neighbors.
Video Credit By Randal Archibold on Publish Date July 19, 2014.
“Never before has Mexico announced a state policy on the border, and now it
has,” the interior secretary, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, said in an interview.
“It is absolute control of the southern border.”
The Mexican government and President Enrique Peña Nieto emphasized in a speech
at the border that Mexico and Guatemala are planning a new guest worker program
and a temporary, three-day transit visa. The program and visa — both free —
would allow access to four border states in an effort, the interior minister
said, to have an “orderly flow.” The program may be extended to Hondurans and
Salvadorans in the future, he said, adding that controlling the process would
make migration safer and outweigh any concern about attracting more people.
Although thousands of children, families and adults have made it to the United
States, often with the help of a smuggler paying off law enforcement officers
along the way, Mexican officials estimate that half of those who try do not,
instead getting stranded in the country when they run out of money or are
detained by immigration agents patrolling buses, checkpoints, hotels and places
they transit.
Last year, Mexico deported 89,000 Central Americans, including 9,000 children,
the bulk of the returnees coming from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador,
officials have said. In the fiscal year that ended last September, the United
States sent back 106,420 from those countries.
So far this year, Mexico has detained 53 child migrants a day, mostly Central
American, double the pace of the same period last year. It has deported more
than 30,000 Central Americans so far this year, including more than 14,000
Hondurans, driven home on packed buses at least three times a week.
Francisco Alba, a migration scholar at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City,
said the influx creates a conundrum: It is almost impossible to stop the flow,
yet the country cannot support a large population of refugees.
Continue reading the main story
“There is not really much the country can do about it,” Mr. Alba said. “It
cannot really stop these flows. Its tradition is to not have these tight
controls and to have a relatively accommodating attitude toward migration, to a
point.”
But now Mexico plans to bolster its border security, including a plan to stop
waves of people, some of them with babies and toddlers, from stowing away on a
northbound freight train known as “The Beast,” because of rampant accidents and
violent crime. Images of the train and the little done to stop it had appalled
American members of Congress and human rights advocates.
In a recent accident, a 2-year-old boy fell from the train and
suffered the partial amputation of his leg while traveling with his mother from
Honduras to reunite with her American father in Texas. The woman, a 23-year-old
aspiring graphic artist, severely injured the arm she uses to draw.
“They will not be able to get on the train,” Mr. Osorio Chong said, promising
details of how they will be stopped in the coming days. “They cannot use this
train because their lives are at risk, and they don’t have permission to be in
the country.”
Mexico is deporting migrants at a brisk clip as its shelters fill up with
families and children who are broke, exhausted and now daunted by the long,
often dangerous trek and spreading word that legal entry to the United States
would be nearly impossible.
Advocates worry that migrants may be pushed to take more dangerous routes or pay
larger bribes to immigration agents and the police, already a widespread
practice here.
“It is just going to make everything even more underground,” said Ruben
Figueroa, an activist who helps migrants at a shelter here.
Too little, advocates say, is being done for people who flee the violence in
their home country but cannot stomach the often treacherous 1,000-mile journey
across Mexico toward the United States.
Mexico revised its immigration law in 2010 after a criminal gang massacred 72
Central American migrants. The new law made it a civil offense rather than a
crime to be in the country without authorization and established procedures for
migrants to get temporary visas so they would not have to travel at the mercy of
criminal gangs.
But human rights advocates say that in practice, few qualify for the transit
visa, which requires travelers to have enough money for lodging during the trip.
Fewer still qualify for a humanitarian visa because, aside from those mutilated
on the train, they cannot prove they have been harmed during their transit.
While thousands of child migrants from Central America have crossed the Rio
Grande to U.S. soil, thousands more don’t make it that far. Many end up detained
or broke in towns like Reynosa, Mexico.
Even without official permission to stay, many migrants find an extensive system
of church and nonprofit shelters helping them and making the journey north
possible. La 72 shelter sits just down the road from an immigration checkpoint,
but officers do not bother the migrants staying there. Indeed, a state police
patrol guards the shelter.
On a recent day, several children, most traveling with a family member,
scampered about playing tag and board games while adolescents listened to music
and watched television.
The families seemed in no rush to continue; several of them stayed put when the
nearby freight train moved through, and several said they loathed to take it
given the dangers.
Ruth Maribel Flores, 28, carried her 2-month-old baby, Genesis, mostly by car
from Honduras after gang members demanded the family home in Tegucigalpa under
threat of death, accusing her 9-year-old son of being a lookout for a rival
faction.
“Little by little, we hope to get to my sister in Tennessee,” Ms. Flores said,
cradling Genesis and fretting over the child’s developing cold amid a growing
number of families and teenagers stalled here. “But for now we are staying here
and hoping. We hear Mexico may have a visa, and we will try that, too.”
Her husband, Carlos González, said the journey had exhausted the family’s meager
means.
“We are out of money,” he said. “They robbed us in Guatemala — the money
exchanger, the migration officer, everybody.”
Dunia Ruiz traveled with her 14-year-old daughter from Honduras mostly by
hitching rides, she said. She decided to leave with her daughter after gang
members raped a young cousin and she had heard, incorrectly, that the United
States was offering visas to women with children.
Now, she is staying in Tenosique with only a vague plan to head north. She plans
to ask Mexico for a visa to stay.
“If I can stay here and work even for a little while, I would do that,” she
said. “The most important thing was to just get out of Honduras.”
A version of this article appears in print on July 20, 2014,
on page A5 of the New York edition with the headline:
On Southern Border, Mexico Faces Crisis of Its Own.
On Southern Border, Mexico Faces Crisis of Its
Own, NYT, 19.7.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/world/
americas/on-southern-border-mexico-faces-crisis-of-its-own.htm
Amid Influx of Migrants,
Obama to Skip Border Visit
on Texas Trip
JULY 3, 2014
The New York Times
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS
and JULIA PRESTON
WASHINGTON — When President Obama travels to Texas next week, he
will come as close as he has been in weeks to the rapidly escalating border
crisis that has left thousands of unaccompanied children in shelters and spurred
angry protests throughout the country.
But despite being battered on all sides on the issue, a White House spokesman
said Thursday that the president had no intention of visiting the border for a
firsthand look at the scene of what he has called a humanitarian crisis.
“The reason that some people are suggesting the president should go to border
when he’s in Texas is because they’d rather play politics than actually trying
to address some of these challenges,” Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman,
said Thursday.
In politics, pictures are among the most powerful tools to dramatize policy
problems or drive a point home. But a border visit for Mr. Obama raises
difficult political questions when he is struggling to balance his message on
immigration. Mr. Obama is simultaneously trying to beat back the illegal influx
of Central American migrants and vowing to take unilateral action to move his
stalled immigration agenda, which includes allowing millions of people in the
country illegally to stay in the United States.
“The administration can look too nice or too mean, and finding the middle ground
is going to be very, very difficult,” said Ali Noorani, the executive director
of the National Immigration Forum.
A picture of the president surveying a fortified border could inflame the
passions of his allies pressing for an immigration overhaul, who have criticized
him for stepping up deportations and enforcement without doing enough to address
the plight of those in the country illegally.
But Mr. Obama and his team are determined to maintain a hard-line message —
first delivered by the president in a television interview last week — that
migrant children who cross the border illegally will not be able to stay in the
United States, so their parents should not send them.
“He doesn’t want to go and sort of stand there with his hands on his hips
saying, ‘Don’t come in,’ ” said Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorksUSA,
an employer group advocating an immigration overhaul. “At the same time, most of
the public thinks that we should have a reasonable immigration policy, but it
can’t be everybody who shows up gets to come in.”
Mr. Obama’s trip to Texas, she added, is “a little snapshot of the corner he’s
in” on the issue.
On Thursday, more than 200 immigrant advocacy groups urged Mr. Obama to
reconsider any proposal to limit existing special protections for unaccompanied
minors apprehended at the border. “The administration’s recent statements have
placed far greater emphasis on deterrence of migration than on the importance of
protection of children seeking safety,” the organizations wrote in a letter to
Mr. Obama.
But House Republican leaders who participated in a tour of the South Texas
border by members of the House Judiciary Committee said the president was not
doing nearly enough to deter families and children from risking the dangers of
the journey across Mexico. “Clearly there is little if any consequence right now
for illegal immigration and that needs to change,” said Representative Robert W.
Goodlatte of Virginia, the Republican chairman of the committee, speaking by
telephone from Harlingen, Tex., at the end of the tour. He said the president
should apply fast-track deportations to many more people crossing the border
illegally and step up deportations from inside the country.
Another Republican on the tour, Representative Darrell Issa of
California, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee,
said the president should cancel a two-year-old program that gives protection
from deportation to young immigrants living illegally in this country since
childhood. He and 29 other House lawmakers sent a letter to Mr. Obama on
Wednesday demanding an end to the program.
But in an unusual glimmer of possible accord between the White House and
Republican lawmakers, Mr. Goodlatte said the House would be willing to “take a
very close look” if Mr. Obama sent over narrowly tailored proposals to toughen
enforcement and “make it easier for the Border Patrol to do their jobs.”
Policy makers on all sides were focusing increasingly on a mesh of laws
mandating special treatment of unaccompanied migrant children, most of which
were passed under President George W. Bush.
Under an anti-trafficking statute adopted — with bipartisan support — in 2008,
minors caught traveling without their parents, if they are not from Mexico,
cannot be rapidly deported. Youths from Central America must be transferred
within 72 hours from the Border Patrol to the Department of Health and Human
Services, which detains them in shelters and works to release them to parents or
other responsible adults in the United States.
The president will seek a legal change that would allow the border authorities
to treat minors from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — the home countries of
most recent migrants — the way they now treat unaccompanied minors from Mexico,
a country that has a different procedure because it shares a border with the
United States. Under the 2008 law, youths from contiguous countries are
questioned by border agents immediately after they are caught. If they do not
express fear of returning home or say they have been victims of trafficking,
agents can secure their consent to be deported and they are rapidly returned
home.
“It’s a fair way to deal with people in the immigration system,” Mr. Earnest
said of the expedited procedures. In addition, he said, “It sends a clear and
unmistakable signal to parents who might be considering putting their children
in the hands of a stranger, in some cases a criminal, to transport them to the
southwest border, with the expectation that if they get to the border that
they’ll be allowed to remain in the country: That is simply not the case.”
Mr. Goodlatte said he might support the White House proposal, but he would also
seek measures to detain and deport more parents in the United States illegally
who encourage children to make the dangerous journey.
Federal officials in South Texas have told lawmakers that more than 85 percent
of the unaccompanied minors from Central America have been released to close
relatives living in this country, including about half released to at least one
parent. Many youths reported they were fleeing criminal violence by increasingly
aggressive street gangs in their home countries.
Next week Mr. Obama is expected to formally send a request for funds and legal
changes allowing him to expand detention and to deport more migrants, including
children, more quickly, part of a broad effort to dissuade others from coming.
Mr. Obama announced this week that he would seek the funding, expected to top $2
billion.
Julie Hirschfeld Davis reported from Washington, and Julia Preston from New
York.
A version of this article appears in print on July 4, 2014, on page A12 of the
New York edition with the headline: Amid Influx of Migrants, Obama to Skip
Border Visit on Texas Trip.
Amid Influx of Migrants, Obama to Skip Border
Visit on Texas Trip,
NYT, 3.7.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/us/
amid-influx-of-migrants-obama-to-skip-border-visit-on-texas-trip.html
Mr. Obama, Go Big on Immigration
JULY 3, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
This week, President Obama finally declared his independence from
a suffocating debate over immigration reform that Republicans in Congress had
never seriously joined. After waiting too long for the obstructionists to move,
Mr. Obama has freed himself to do what he can to fix the broken-down system.
His powers are limited, of course. Only Congress can give immigration the
long-term, comprehensive overhaul it so badly needs. A bipartisan bill passed by
the Senate a year ago — and strangled in the House — was the best hope for that.
But Mr. Obama should do his utmost, within the law, to limit the damage done by
an obsolete, unjust system that is deporting the wrong people, stifling
businesses, damaging families and hurting the economy.
It starts with giving millions of immigrants permission to stay, to work and to
live without fear.
Mr. Obama needs to scale back the deportation machinery, which he greatly
expanded. His decision two years ago to halt deportations of young immigrants
called Dreamers was a good first step. Now he should protect Dreamers’ parents,
and, if possible, parents of citizen children. His emphasis should be on
protecting families and those with strong ties to this country, and on freeing
up resources to fight human traffickers, drug smugglers, violent gangs and other
serious criminals.
He should end programs that recklessly delegate immigration enforcement to local
police. He should make it easier for family members of citizens to seek green
cards without having to leave the country for three or 10 years. Through
common-sense fixes to onerous visa restrictions, wise use of prosecutorial
discretion and new programs to allow groups of immigrants to apply to stay and
work legally, Mr. Obama should move the system away from its deportation
fixation, and closer toward balance.
Mr. Obama wants to shift resources away from the interior to the border, where
tens of thousands of children have recently been detained after fleeing violence
in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. He hopes to stem the influx through
swifter deportations, but his most urgent priority should be giving these
children lawyers and caregivers. While many will probably be sent back, many
others will likely qualify for humanitarian protection.
Republicans will howl over Mr. Obama’s solo actions. Let them. Let the party pay
a heavy price among Latino and Asian voters for failing to tame its nativist
wing, whose only idea for immigration is a fantasy of an airtight border and
mass expulsions.
Most Americans find the Republicans’ enforcement obsession unconvincing; polls
support the moderation and legalization that Mr. Obama and Democrats have fought
for. But fear and panic do respond to stoking, as in places like Murrieta,
Calif., where protesters this week blocked buses carrying recent migrants to a
Border Patrol center. In a farcical reaction to a concocted emergency,
Murrieta’s mayor announced that the city had set up an “incident action plan,”
so police and emergency officials could keep a few dozen women and children from
destroying his town.
Nobody was even being released in Murrieta. But the mayor urged residents to
complain, and in a pageant of ugliness, dozens took action: They waved flags,
screamed “U.S.A.!” and turned three buses back.
As the border crisis plays out, public support for legalization will be tested.
But Mr. Obama can ease fears if he acts on the belief that millions who are here
are a benefit to the country and deserve a chance to stay. Through cynical
abdication, Republicans wasted a precious chance to fix immigration for the 21st
century. That game is over. The president has moved on. It’s about time.
A version of this editorial appears in print on July 4, 2014,
on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Mr. Obama, Go Big on
Immigration.
Mr. Obama, Go Big on Immigration, NYT,
3.7.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/opinion/mr-obama-go-big-on-immigration.html
The Town Where Immigrants
Hit a Human Wall
Influx of Central American Migrants
Roils Murrieta, Calif.
JULY 3, 2014
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA
MURRIETA, Calif. — Suddenly, this city in the desert has become
the place that turned away the immigrants.
When the three busloads of immigrant mothers and children rolled into town for
processing at a Border Patrol station this week, they were met by protesters
carrying American flags and signs proclaiming “return to sender” as they
screamed “go home” and chanted “U.S.A.” Fearing for the safety of the migrants
and federal officers, immigration officials decided to reroute the buses to San
Diego, an hour south.
And a day after many here celebrated what they saw as a temporary victory, more
than a thousand residents packed a high school auditorium on Wednesday night for
a town-hall-style meeting that lasted more than four hours, voicing fears about
an influx of migrants.
“What happens when they come here with diseases and can overrun our schools? How
much is this costing us?” one resident, Jodie Howard, asked the mayor.
“How do you know they are really families and aren’t some kind of gang or drug
cartel?” another person asked federal officials.
After a Border Patrol official explained that more buses would probably arrive
in Murrieta in the coming weeks as part of an attempt to relieve processing
centers near the Texas border, one man took to the microphone and demanded to
know: “Why do we have to put them on a bus to Murrieta? Why can’t we just
transport them on a bus to Tijuana?” The crowd responded with thunderous
applause.
As federal officials have begun to send the expected 240,000 migrants and 52,000
unaccompanied minors who have crossed the border illegally in recent months in
the Rio Grande Valley to cities around the county, Murrieta so far is the only
place that has managed to turn them away.
The reactions have been mixed: Officials in Dallas have said they will welcome
thousands of migrant children and have helped to coordinate donations from local
residents, but residents of Artesia, N.M., expressed frustration at a meeting
this week that immigrants were being placed at a temporary detention center
there. They stopped short, however, of blocking the buses.
Nowhere have the Central American immigrants been met with such tremendous anger
as they have here, in this middle-class conservative community about 90 miles
southeast of Los Angeles.
“We didn’t ask for this problem — it was just dumped at our doorstep,” said
Mayor Alan Long, who has lived here most of his life and told residents he
planned to send a “fat bill” to President Obama. “This is a nationwide problem,
and little Murrieta has taken the lead.”
A generation ago, Murrieta was not much more than a rural desert outpost, but in
the past decade the population has exploded to more than 100,000, with suburban
developments taking over large plots of scrub brush. For the most part,
residents were attracted to the promise of a quieter life and housing that was
much less expensive than in the coastal cities where they once lived.
The recent tensions have exposed a deep divide in the city: Although Latinos
make up more than 25 percent of the population and have opened up several small
businesses as the area has grown, Murrieta has not been as transformed by
immigration as many other communities in Southern California have.
The city’s motto calls Murrieta “the future of Southern California.” Its
official song, which was created for the city’s 21st anniversary, is called “Gem
of the Valley” and boasts that “she’s a safe place, where we can live, laugh,
learn and play.” Many residents say they came here to escape the kind of crime
and urban problems they now fear the immigrants could bring.
During Wednesday night’s meeting, dozens of residents vented at the Obama
administration for what they saw as a failure to secure the borders. And they
vowed to continue to fight back, promising to show up at the local Border Patrol
station every time they know a new bus of immigrants is scheduled to arrive.
Dozens of pro-immigrant residents wearing Mexican soccer jerseys also showed up
at the meeting on Wednesday, but mostly sat in silence. Many more waited
outside, having arrived too late to be let into the auditorium, which quickly
filled to capacity. They held up signs proclaiming, “We are not illegal, we are
humans,” as they faced opposing signs that read, “Bus them to the White House.”
In California, where Latinos are now the state’s largest ethnic
group and much of the anti-immigrant sentiment of the 1990s has mostly faded
away, many residents here say they have been stunned by their neighbors’
reactions.
“We came here because they are attacking our people, people just like us,” said
Ana Larios, 42, a Mexican immigrant who moved to Murrieta with her children from
Los Angeles nearly a decade ago. “I never knew people felt this way until now.
It’s shocking and embarrassing.”
On Wednesday night, the crowd jeered at federal officials who sat through the
lengthy meeting but offered few concrete details about what the city could
expect. Paul A. Beeson, the chief officer in San Diego for Customs and Border
Protection, said the agency still expected one plane from Texas to arrive every
72 hours, but did not know where the passengers would be sent for processing.
The migrants will then be turned over to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement
and probably released to find relatives already living in the United States and
told to appear later in front of an immigration judge.
“When you have a noncriminal mother, they are going to be released,” said David
Jennings, the Southern California field director for the immigration agency.
“The most humane way to deal with this is to find out where they are going and
get them there.”
Jeff Stone, the chairman of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, told the
audience that he was concerned about communicable diseases that the migrants
could be carrying, such as whooping cough, swine flu or tuberculosis. Mr. Beeson
said four children had been sent to local hospitals this week, two with a fever
and two with scabies.
“Obama needs to enforce the border and stop this action of exploiting
traumatized women and children for his own political gain,” Mr. Stone told the
crowd. “We need the message to get to Guatemala not to come here because if you
do you will be sent back as fast as you came.”
Mayor Long said he resented accusations of racism, telling the crowd that both
his mother and wife are Hispanic. Mr. Long asked his 86-year-old father-in-law
to stand, then praised him for immigrating legally.
The mayor promised to notify people when he knew another bus would arrive,
perhaps on the Fourth of July. Some residents seemed certain that their
Independence Day plans would include a protest at the Border Patrol station.
A version of this article appears in print on July 4, 2014, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: The Town Where Immigrants Hit a Human Wall.
The Town Where Immigrants Hit a Human Wall,
NYT, 3.7.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/us/
influx-of-central-american-migrants-roils-murrieta-calif.html
Snakes and Thorny Brush,
and Children at the Border Alone
JUNE 25, 2014
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
HIDALGO, Tex. — Border agents drove their patrol vehicles one
recent day at dusk through this spit of land on the bank of the Rio Grande.
Here, in a place known as the Devil’s Corner, smugglers on the Mexican side have
chosen to bring thousands of women and children to American soil.
After only a few minutes scouting the dirt roads, the agents came upon a cluster
of illegal migrants, huddled in tall grass under palm trees, seeking respite
from the baking heat. They made no effort to flee as the Border Patrol drove up.
Questioned by the agents, a boy from Honduras said his name was Alejandro and
that he was 8 years old.
“Who are you with?” asked Raul L. Ortiz, deputy chief of the Border Patrol for
the Rio Grande Valley, speaking in Spanish.
“By myself,” Alejandro said, looking up at the man in the olive uniform and
pulling a birth certificate, carefully folded, from his jeans — the only item he
carried.
“Where are your parents, Alex?” Chief Ortiz asked, using a nickname to put the
boy at ease.
“In San Antonio,” he said.
But the child had no address for his family in the Texas city 250 miles to the
north, or for an aunt in Maryland, which he thought was just as close. The
agents gave him water and the boy smiled gratefully, not knowing that his
journey, already three weeks long, would likely be a lot longer.
Families and children have become a high-profit, low-risk business for Mexican
narcotics cartel bosses who, Chief Ortiz said, have taken control of human
smuggling across the Rio Grande. They now offer family packages, migrants said,
charging up to $7,500 to bring a minor alone or a mother with children from
Central America to the American side of the river.
Smugglers like to use this snake-infested, thorn-ridden brushland for their
crossings. A federal wildlife refuge, the site is downstream from the Anzalduas
Dam, where the river slows and narrows, making it easy to paddle across. The
bank is strewn with worn-out sneakers, broken baby bottles and rotting life
preservers, the refuse of migrants who made it across and moved on. In less than
two hours one evening last week, Border Patrol agents encountered 37 migrants
walking the dusty roads here.
Alejandro said he had been brought by “Santiago the smuggler.” Another migrant
in the group was probably traveling with the boy, a neighbor or a cousin, Chief
Ortiz said. Once they were back at the Border Patrol station, agents would have
to figure out who that was.
More than 52,000 minors traveling without their parents have been caught
crossing the southwest border illegally since October, including 9,000 in May
alone, a record.
The migration surge also includes 39,000 adults with children detained since
October, also an unprecedented figure. Authorities anticipate they will
apprehend more than 240,000 illegal migrants, about three-quarters from Central
America, in the Rio Grande Valley during this fiscal year.
Many migrants say they are fleeing poverty and vicious gang violence at home,
and some were drawn by rumors the United States was giving entry permits for
women and children. But many, especially the youngest, are coming to reconnect
with families, hoping to join parents or close relatives who live in this
country, often without papers.
“There’s obviously a host of reasons that motivates the individuals to cross,”
Chief Ortiz said. “But trying to reunite with a family member who may already be
here is probably one of the ones that comes at the top.”
Chief Ortiz watched as agents coaxed information from the new detainees. The
migrants answered, some apprehensively, others seemed relieved, none attempted
to resist.
A 14-year-old boy from Honduras said, “My parents are dead.” There was an aunt
in New Orleans he wanted to find.
A 19-year-old Guatemalan woman was tugging her 2-year-old child, whose father
she said was in Indiana. Having lost her way at high noon, she was reeling from
dehydration. She gulped water the agents offered.
Increasing numbers of women and children caught crossing illegally have been
able to stay in the United States. Border authorities are required to turn over
unaccompanied minors within 72 hours to the Department of Health and Human
Services, which oversees detention shelters and works to find parents or
guardians in this country. After President Obama declared a humanitarian crisis
this month, new shelters for minors were opened at three military bases.
Officials had been releasing most women apprehended with children, but White
House officials announced last week they would begin detaining or monitoring
more of those families in an effort to discourage others from coming.
Most days, the crossings here come at dawn and at dusk. The smugglers pull up in
vans on the Mexican bank, and send loads of migrants across the river on
inflatable rafts, sometimes three or four trips in an hour. Guides know there is
little chance the Border Patrol will stop them at the international boundary
midstream.
“A lot of the times it’s in our best interests and the best interests of the
people on the raft to not attempt to necessarily grab them from the raft,” said
Enrique Romero, a Border Patrol agent, as he stood by the river eyeing the
smuggler scouts who eyed him from the far bank. “You put their lives at risk.”
While men are told to run, women and children are instructed by smugglers to
look for the Border Patrol and turn themselves in. They are told, falsely, that
is the way to get a permit.
The agents were initially cautious with the migrants, checking for gang members
or drug couriers. But soon Chief Ortiz was fist-bumping with the children. A
boy, 4, pulled on his ears to clown for the agents.
This week Secretary Jeh C. Johnson of Homeland Security sent an open letter
warning Central American parents who are considering sending their children. “In
the hands of smugglers, many children are traumatized and psychologically abused
by their journey or worse, beaten, starved, sexually assaulted or sold into the
sex trade,” he wrote. “There are no ‘permits’ or free passes at the end.”
At the border, agents trained to stop drug traffickers and adult crossers are
adjusting to the new migrants.
“We’re law enforcement officers, but a lot of us are parents or we have young
siblings,” Chief Ortiz said. “We try to make sure they recognize that, you know
what, it’s going to be O.K. You’ve got some safety and security here.”
A version of this article appears in print on June 26, 2014, on
page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Snakes and Thorny Brush, and
Children at the Border Alone.
Snakes and Thorny Brush, and Children at the
Border Alone,
NYT, 25.6.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/us/snakes-
and-thorny-brush-and-children-at-the-border-alone.html
U.S. Moves to Stop Surge
in Illegal Immigration
JUNE 20, 2014
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
and RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
McALLEN, Tex. — White House officials, saying that
misinformation about administration policies helped drive a surge of illegal
migrants from Central America across the South Texas border, on Friday announced
plans to detain more of them and to accelerate their court cases so as to deport
them more quickly.
In tandem with those measures, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met in
Guatemala on Friday with senior leaders of the three countries where most of the
migrants come from — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — to secure their help
in conveying the message that there are no new legal channels to come to the
United States and that those crossing illegally will be deported.
Department of Homeland Security officials are rushing to open more detention
centers intended for families with children caught coming illegally to this
country and will also expand the use of monitoring devices, such as electronic
ankle bracelets, to keep track of migrants after they are released, the
officials said.
Immigration officers and judges will be reassigned on an emergency basis to
speed cases in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where most of the migrants are
entering illegally.
The administration is trying to quell rampant rumors reaching Central America
that American border authorities are offering entry permits to parents traveling
with young children after they are caught. Officials hope that by increasing the
numbers of migrants who are detained and then deported, others considering the
trek will be dissuaded from doing so.
Mr. Biden announced $255 million for Central America to assist repatriation
programs for deportees, improve prosecution of criminal street gang members, and
expand youth programs to reduce gang recruitment.
Until now, White House officials have insisted that extreme poverty and an
epidemic of gang violence in those Central American countries were the main
causes of the unanticipated spike in illegal migration.
But many migrants told Border Patrol agents they decided to set out for the
United States after hearing that it was offering some kind of entry permit. Many
other migrants who asked for asylum after being apprehended have been allowed to
stay temporarily, further fueling hopes that Central American women and children
were receiving special treatment.
On a conference call with reporters, Cecilia Muñoz, director of the White House
Domestic Policy Council, said the administration was moving to “push back” on
“misinformation that is being deliberately planted by criminal organizations, by
smuggling networks, about what people can expect if they come to the United
States.”
In Guatemala, Mr. Biden met with that country’s president, Otto Pérez Molina;
the president of El Salvador, Salvador Sánchez Cerén; and senior officials from
Honduras and Mexico. But Mr. Biden got a taste of the disconnect the United
States often has with regional leaders, who fault the failure of American
immigration policy for driving children to join their parents in the United
States no matter the cost. In his public remarks, Mr. Pérez Molina, while
recognizing that the American Congress has to act, reiterated a request for a
temporary worker program and a way for Guatemalans living in the United States
illegally to be able to stay.
Mr. Biden ignored those points in his comments and emphasized the social causes
of the migration.
“The United States recognizes that a key part of the solution to this problem is
to address the root causes of this immigration in the first place,” he said,
turning to address Mr. Pérez Molina directly several times. “Especially poverty,
insecurity and the lack of the rule of law, so the people can stay and thrive in
their own communities, so a parent doesn’t feel so desperate that they put their
child in the hands of a criminal network and say take him, and take her to the
United States.”
The Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, sent a top aide to the meeting
but skipped it himself in order to watch Honduras play in the World Cup in
Brazil. Tension with Honduras has been growing over public complaints by Mr.
Hernández regarding what he sees as a lack of American will to help stem the
violence from a drug war he believes American consumption habits have caused.
Mr. Hernández’s absence drew an unusually blunt rebuke from the American
ambassador on a Honduran radio program. “I know he is in Brazil, and today there
is a very important game, but the country has priorities for which the top
leader should be present,” said the ambassador, Lisa J. Kubiske.
The new American funding includes $40 million over five years for Guatemala to
improve neighborhood security programs, $25 million over five years for El
Salvador to open 77 youth centers offering alternatives to joining gangs for
teenagers and $18.5 million for Honduras for police training.
Since 2008, the administration has designated $642 million for anticrime aid to
the region, but congressional watchdogs have complained that a lack of
transparency on the spending has made measuring results difficult.
In Washington, the House speaker, John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, sent a
letter to President Obama on Friday urging him to send the National Guard to
reinforce the Southwest border and help protect migrant children, saying their
safety was “a matter of paramount importance.”
Mr. Boehner blamed the administration for the surge. “The policies of your
administration have directly resulted in the belief by these immigrants that
once they reach U.S. soil, they will be able to stay here indefinitely,” he
wrote.
The sharp increase of illegal migrants includes more than 52,000 minors caught
at the border since October without their parents. Mr. Obama, saying the surge
is a humanitarian crisis, has ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to
coordinate an effort to maintain detention shelters for them and help reunite
them with relatives in this country.
Border authorities have also apprehended more than 39,000 adults with children
since October, a record number.
Since there are no detention facilities for families in the Rio Grande Valley,
the Border Patrol has been releasing them without bond, giving them only an
order to appear in immigration court for deportation hearings and allowing them
to travel to relatives living in the United States.
Migrants have been confusing the notice to appear in court — the immigration
equivalent of an indictment — with a permit to stay and have sent word to
Central America that they received permits to remain here, prompting more to
embark on the journey across Mexico.
Officials said they would open more detention centers as soon as they could find
buildings that met federal requirements for detaining children.
The administration is also sending more immigration officers who specialize in
asylum cases to the Rio Grande Valley to make quicker initial determinations on
whether migrants are fleeing persecution and might be eligible for protection
here. Immigration judges will be reassigned on an emergency basis to hear asylum
petitions and other cases of migrants in detention, Justice Department officials
said.
Correction: June 20, 2014
An earlier version of this article misstated the location
of the Department of Homeland Security’s
immigration detention facility for families with children.
It is in Berks County, Pa., not Bucks, Pa.
Julia Preston reported from McAllen,
and Randal C. Archibold from Mexico City.
Benjamin Patrick Reeves contributed reporting
from Guatemala City.
A version of this article appears in print on June 21, 2014,
on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:
U.S. Moves to Stop Surge in Illegal Immigration.
U.S. Moves to Stop Surge in Illegal
Immigration, NYT, 20.6.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/us/
us-plans-to-step-up-detention-and-deportation-of-migrants.html
Surge in Child Migrants
Reaches New York,
Overwhelming Advocates
JUNE 17, 2014
The New York Times
By KIRK SEMPLE
For more than a month, 16-year-old Cristian threaded his way
from his home in rural Guatemala to the United States, hoping to reunite with
his father, whom he had not seen in nearly four years. Guided by smugglers, he
rode in cars, buses and trains, walked countless miles, dodged the authorities
in three countries, hid out in dreary safe houses and went days at a time
without food.
But Cristian’s trip came to an abrupt halt in March, when he was corralled on a
patch of Texas ranchland by American law enforcements agents.
Now the daunting trials of his migration have been replaced by a new set of
difficulties. Though he was released to his father, a kitchen worker in a
restaurant in Ulster County, N.Y., Cristian has been ordered to appear in
immigration court for a deportation hearing and is trying to find a low-cost
lawyer to take his case while he also struggles to learn English, fit into a new
high school and reacquaint himself with his father.
Cristian is one of the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors who have
illegally crossed the border with Mexico in recent months, in a wave that has
overwhelmed immigration officials and prompted the Obama administration to
declare a humanitarian crisis and open three emergency shelters, on military
bases in California, Oklahoma and Texas.
But while the government’s response has been largely focused on the Southwest,
the surge of child migrants is quickly becoming a crisis around the country. The
fallout is being felt most acutely in places with large immigrant populations,
like New York, where newly arrived children and their relatives are flooding
community groups, seeking help in fighting deportation orders, getting health
care, dealing with the psychological traumas of migration, managing the
challenges of family reunification and enrolling in school.
“It’s almost like a refugee crisis,” said Steven Choi, executive director of the
New York Immigration Coalition, an advocacy group.
Federal officials will not reveal how many children they are holding, how many
are being released or where they are being sent. But in the New York region,
immigrant advocacy organizations say they have seen a stunning rise in the
number of unaccompanied minors seeking help in the past several months.
“All of a sudden it went from a trickle to more like a river,” said Anne
Pilsbury, director of Central American Legal Assistance in Brooklyn.
At the Worker Justice Center of New York, a group based in Kingston, N.Y., that
helps farmworkers and other low-wage workers, employees were caught off guard by
a similarly sharp increase.
“We are trying to triage,” said Emma Kreyche, organizing and advocacy
coordinator for the group. “I don’t think anyone really knows what the scope of
this is and how to see what’s coming down the pike and figure out how to
respond.”
Many of the unaccompanied minors say they have been driven to leave their home
countries because of violence and the threat of gang recruitment. Others have
been motivated by economic necessity, a desire to rejoin parents who came to the
United States years ago or by a perceived change in American policy that would
favor child immigrants. (The Obama administration has emphasized that there has
been no such policy change.)
Most of the children who have been detained at the southwest border have been
channeled into deportation proceedings and, within several days, handed over to
the Department of Health and Human Services, which cares for them until they can
be released to relatives or legal guardians in the United States.
The majority of the department’s 100 or so shelters are near the border, but
others are scattered around the country, said Kenneth J. Wolfe, spokesman for
the Administration for Children and Families, the division that oversees them.
At least two are in the New York metropolitan area, housing a total of about 300
children; they have been at capacity for months, advocacy groups said.
Mr. Wolfe would not comment on the department’s current capacity or whether the
agency was planning to expand regional shelter capacity.
Leo, who also asked that his full name not be used because he remains
undocumented, spent about two months at a shelter in the New York area waiting
to be reunited with his brother, who was living in Brooklyn. Leo had left his
home in Guatemala at the end of 2012, when he was 16, fleeing gangs in his
hometown and hoping to find work in the United States. After traveling for three
months he had been detained in Houston.
“I wanted to better myself,” Leo, now 18, said during an interview at Atlas:
DIY, a center for immigrant youths in Brooklyn, where he takes English classes
and gets legal guidance.
Many of the children who have been released from detention and wind up in New
York are funneled onto special monthly court dockets for minors. Those who
arrive at court without a lawyer have the option of being screened by pro bono
lawyers who will try to identify possible grounds for relief from deportation,
such as political asylum, or for special visas for children who have been
victims of crime or abuse.
On a recent Thursday morning, several dozen children clustered with their
parents and other relatives in a hallway outside an immigration courtroom in
downtown Manhattan. Several immigrant advocacy groups share responsibility for
handling the special dockets, and in June the job fell to Safe Passage Project,
a nonprofit based at New York Law School that provides free legal counsel to
immigrant children facing deportation.
“Do you have an attorney?” asked Lenni Benson, the founder and director of Safe
Passage, as she went from family to family introducing herself. “Do you want a
free attorney?” Those without representation were led to a room where they were
interviewed by a team of lawyers and paralegals.
It is unclear how many of the recently arrived minors will be allowed to stay
permanently in the United States. But Ms. Benson said that nearly 90 percent of
the unaccompanied minors her group encountered appeared to qualify for some form
of immigration relief. Lawyers at the Door, another New York City group that
provides free legal services to young immigrants, said that more than half of
the children it screened during a special immigration court docket in May
appeared to qualify for some form of relief.
Other groups who principally represent child immigrants also said the soaring
demand, combined with limited resources, was prompting them to pick their cases
carefully, focusing on those that had the best chance of success.
Beyond legal help, the immigrants have other urgent needs that are not
necessarily being met, including health care, psychological counseling and
educational support, advocates said.
Mario Russell, director of the Immigrant and Refugee Services Division for
Catholic Charities Community Services in New York, said a lot of the children
had suffered trauma, either in their home countries or en route to the United
States.
“Over time, how do these kids receive the care that they need?” Mr. Russell
asked. “How many will be lost into their communities? How many are going to be
sent to work? How many will not go to school? How many are going to be sick?”
Service providers have begun discussing among themselves how to deal with the
surge at this end of the pipeline, and wondering where they might get
much-needed funding to provide additional help for the growing population of
distressed immigrant children.
As he considered the challenge, Mr. Russell remembered a case he had several
years ago. He had been working with a girl, an unauthorized immigrant, to
legalize her status. Her deportation was dismissed and she was finally approved
to receive a green card. But before she received it, she dropped off Mr.
Russell’s radar.
“She just disappeared,” he recalled. “She could’ve been trafficked, working in
an apple orchard. I have no idea.”
Mr. Russell was never able to locate her.
“Her card is still in my desk,” he said.
Correction: June 17, 2014
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article
misidentified the school where Safe Passage Project is based.
It is New York Law School,
not New York University Law School.
The error was repeated in a photo caption.
A version of this article appears in print on June 18, 2014,
on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline:
New York Strains to Handle Surge in Child Migrants.
Surge in Child Migrants Reaches New York,
Overwhelming Advocates,
NYT, 17.6.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/nyregion/
immigration-child-migrant-surge-in-New-York-City.html
Innocents at the Border
Immigrant Children
Need Safety, Shelter and Lawyers
JUNE 16, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The surge of desperate young migrants across the southwest
border has the Obama administration scrambling to respond. It was clearly
ill-prepared for a problem that grew steadily for years before exploding this
year, with more than 47,000 unaccompanied children caught at the border since
October.
It is past time for excuses, and too soon for the post-mortem. The
administration needs to mount a sustained surge of its own, of humanitarian
care, shelter and legal assistance for children who have faced horrific traumas
in fleeing violence in their home countries, mainly Honduras, Guatemala and El
Salvador. As Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. meets this week with officials in
those countries, they should all commit to making it safe for would-be migrants
to stay home, by reducing the murders and gang crimes that feed the exodus.
Congress should meanwhile approve the administration’s $1.4 billion request to
handle the emergency on this side of the border, though more will surely be
needed to assure health, safety and due process for these young migrants.
The administration’s job has been made harder by an atmosphere of histrionics
and wild accusation, as Republican officials, far more interested in blame than
solutions, have spent weeks braying about a besieged border and laying the
crisis entirely at President Obama’s feet. More justified, and vexing, are the
complaints from those witnessing the chaos close-up.
State officials in Arizona were furious that immigration officials, apparently
without better ideas, had dumped hundreds of migrants at a bus station in
Phoenix, with no resources, to find their way. Civil-liberties groups have
reported that children have told of being beaten, harassed, threatened and
sexually abused in detention. Some children, interviewed by groups including the
American Civil Liberties Union and National Immigrant Justice Center, said they
had no food or medical care and had been held in icebox-cold cells — nicknamed
hieleras, Spanish for freezers. The administration, which has been racing to set
up emergency shelters on military bases in California, Texas and Oklahoma and a
converted warehouse in Arizona, needs to investigate and immediately correct
conditions that threaten any child’s safety and health.
Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency responsible
for taking custody of the unaccompanied Central American children, badly needs
to increase its ability to shelter thousands properly as they wait to reunite
with their parents and be seen in immigration courts.
The good news is that the Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, and the head
of the Border Patrol, Gil Kerlikowske, who took office promising more openness
and accountability, have ordered an inquiry into the reported abuse. The
administration has also started a program to provide about 100 lawyers and
paralegals for unaccompanied minors.
That is a welcome response, but it needs to be bigger. The Dickensian absurdity
often seen in immigration courts — little children propped up before judges and
government lawyers with no idea of what is going on — must not be tolerated.
Concerns about the cost of providing lawyers should by eased by a recent study
from the New York City Bar Association showing that free legal representation
for indigent migrants pays for itself, mainly by reducing the costs of
unnecessary detention.
Despite what Republicans are saying, there are reasonable responses to the
crisis at the border. None requires ignoring the law or granting mass amnesty to
migrants who may have no legal claim to entering the United States. (Though many
surely do, as refugees.) Nor is it necessary to pile on more harsh and panicked
border enforcement, or abandon the administration’s promise to enforce
deportations more humanely, with a priority on criminals, not minor offenders.
The administration needs to keep its eye on the larger goal: a more rational,
lawful immigration system. Nothing about the current crisis changes that.
It’s infuriating to see the long-term reform that would ease the problem — by
opening more routes to legal immigration, and restoring mobility to a population
trapped on this side of the border — being sent to its doom by the short-term
political scheming of Congress’s hard-core anti-immigrant, anti-Obama caucus.
A version of this editorial appears in print on June 17, 2014,
on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline:
Innocents at the Border.
Innocents at the Border, NYT, 16.6.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/opinion/
immigrant-children-need-safety-shelter-and-lawyers.html
Life Sentences for 2 Sex Traffickers
Who Preyed on Mexican Immigrants
JUNE 15, 2014
The New York Times
By BENJAMIN WEISER
It was a sprawling family business, employing drivers,
dispatchers and doormen. There were “steerers” who passed out “chica” cards on
the street to solicit customers. There was even a mechanic who swept vehicles
for tracking devices that might have been surreptitiously placed by federal
agents, prosecutors said.
And, of course, there were the women — smuggled into the United States from
Mexico and forced to work in a network of brothels in and around New York City,
or shuttled to farms in New Jersey, where they had sex with up to 25 migrant
workers a day in sheds in the fields, with men paying about $30 for 15 minutes
of sex, the government said.
The ringleaders, Isaias Flores-Mendez, who is about 42, and his brother,
Bonifacio, 35, both natives of Mexico, are among 16 people who have now pleaded
guilty to charges in connection with the sex-trafficking ring, which was broken
up in April 2013.
Life sentences are not unprecedented in federal sex-trafficking cases; there
have been at least 11 imposed nationally in cases since 2009, according to
research by Alexandra F. Levy, a lawyer with the Human Trafficking Pro Bono
Legal Center, a group that arranges free legal help for victims.
James T. Hayes Jr., the special agent in charge of Homeland Security
investigations in New York, said the life terms imposed in the state and
elsewhere were “a sign of how seriously” judges were taking such cases.
The New York case also highlights how structured such an operation can be; Judge
Forrest, of Federal District Court, called it a “vertically integrated
enterprise,” as she sentenced the younger brother on May 30.
“Your criminal enterprise,” the judge said, “was, for these women, not a chosen
way of life but living in a daily hell.”
A prosecutor, Rebecca Mermelstein, told the judge that the “entire enterprise is
only workable because it is staffed, so to speak, by women who do so under
duress, because the conditions are so horrific that it’s not the kind of thing
that anyone could really choose.”
The office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, has said
in court papers that the Flores-Mendez ring was part of a larger network of sex
traffickers operating between Tenancingo, Mexico, New York and elsewhere. Women
were typically lured through the promise of romantic relationships and a better
life, and were forced into prostitution after they arrived, the office said. The
judge noted that women who refused to submit were beaten, isolated and starved.
“Because money drives these crimes — as it does so many others — we have pursued
forfeiture of the traffickers’ illegal profits and restitution, seeking some
recovery for the victims,” Mr. Bharara said in a statement. He added that the
victims, mostly poor, without legal status and traumatized and terrorized by the
traffickers, were “some of the most vulnerable and powerless in our society.”
Continue reading the main story
Government filings show that brothels were operated at 350 First Street in
Newburgh, N.Y.; in a second-floor apartment at 613 Seneca Avenue in Queens; on
the second floor of a two-story yellow house at 20 Rose Street in Poughkeepsie;
and in an apartment at 121 Elm Street in Yonkers — the busiest of the brothels,
with two women working weeklong shifts and each seeing about eight to 10
customers a day.
Prosecutors have estimated that more than 400 women were victims of the
trafficking conspiracy, including some who were minors. On one intercepted phone
call, a defendant was heard discussing a “new girl who is only 17,” prosecutors
said.
The government said it had been unable to locate or identify the vast majority
of the victims, and that of the few who were interviewed by the authorities,
most would not cooperate largely out of fear of retaliation. One woman who did
cooperate, cited in court records as Victim 1, entered the United States at age
17 with her baby, after the brothers arranged to have her smuggled across the
border, prosecutors said.
She was flown from California to New York in September 2006, where the younger
Flores-Mendez brother took her to a house on 112th Street in Queens; there she
was forced to sleep with her baby under a kitchen table and charged $200 in
monthly rent and $50 weekly for food, prosecutors said.
Over much of the next year, the government said, the woman was forced to have
sex against her will. In statements she submitted at the brothers’ sentencings,
she said she had been forced to have sex with 15 to 35 men a day, in brothels
and through delivery to “sex buyers.”
“I was forced to prostitute myself in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Long Island
City, Philadelphia and the Bronx,” she wrote.
Isaias Flores-Mendez’s “dehumanization of Victim 1 in the interest of profit was
without bounds,” prosecutors wrote. He forced her to take birth control pills,
and when he mistakenly believed that she was pregnant, “he grabbed me by the
neck, slammed me against the wall, beat me repeatedly, and forced me to swallow
more pills so that I would have an abortion,” the woman wrote.
She finally escaped, but was almost killed when the brothers saw her crossing
the street one day in Queens and accelerated their car toward her, forcing her
to jump out of the way, she added.
Such callousness toward the women seemed to be typical of the operation, court
records suggest. Another defendant, Alejandro Degante-Galeno, who worked as a
driver, was overheard on a court-ordered wiretap telling his son, Sergio, who
was also charged in the case, that one woman “should be punished for wanting to
rest and for not wanting to sexually service more customers.”
When the older brother, Isaias Flores-Mendez, was sentenced on May 14, Judge
Forrest said he had run “a depraved and deplorable sex mill.” The judge noted
that he had apologized briefly to his family in court. “But he owes an apology
to so many more people,” she said. “He is, in my view, remorseless.”
When, two weeks later, the younger brother, Bonifacio, was sentenced, he
apologized profusely to the victims, saying through an interpreter that he had
acted out of greed, for money, and asked for their forgiveness. “I’ve realized
that what I’ve done was the worst thing that you can do to a woman,” he said. “I
feel like the worst man on earth.”
Judge Forrest showed no leniency. “We know there were mornings when you woke up
in your bed surrounded by your family, and a woman who had been trafficked woke
up in a locked, windowless room in a basement, unable to go out unless she was
let out,” the judge said.
The brothers were each ordered to forfeit about $1.7 million and pay $84,000 in
restitution to Victim 1.
Lori L. Cohen, a lawyer with Sanctuary for Families, an agency that worked with
Victim 1 and several other trafficking victims in the case, said the woman was
“extremely grateful” for the life sentences but she remained fearful that her
family in Mexico “could be at risk” because she had reported the abuse.
At each sentencing, one of the prosecutors, Amanda Kramer and Ms. Mermelstein,
read aloud a translation of Victim 1’s statement, in which the woman had
explained why she was not appearing in person.
“I am scared for me, my family, and for my family in Mexico,” the woman wrote.
“I want to forget all of this and just have peace in my life.”
A version of this article appears in print on June 16, 2014,
on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline:
Life Sentences for 2 Sex Traffickers Who Preyed
on Mexican Immigrants.
Life Sentences for 2 Sex Traffickers Who
Preyed on Mexican Immigrants,
NYT, 15.6.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/nyregion/
life-sentences-for-two-sex-traffickers-who-preyed-on-mexican-immigrants.html
The Immigrant Advantage
MAY 24, 2014
The New York Times
SundayReview | Opinion
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
IF you want to die a successful American, especially in the
heartland, it helps to be born abroad.
Statistics show that if you are born elsewhere and later acquire American
citizenship, you will, on average, earn more than us native-borns, study
further, marry at higher rates and divorce at lower rates, fall out of the work
force less frequently and more easily dodge poverty.
What’s curious is where this immigrant advantage is most pronounced. In
left-leaning, coastal, cosmopolitan America, native-borns seem well groomed by
their families, schools and communities to keep up with foreign-borns. It’s in
the right-leaning “Walmart America” where foreigners have the greatest
advantage.
From Mississippi to West Virginia to Oklahoma, native-borns are struggling to
flourish on a par with foreign-born Americans. In the 10 poorest states (just
one on the East or West Coast: South Carolina), the median household of
native-borns earns 84 cents for every $1 earned by a household of naturalized
citizens, compared with 97 cents for native-borns in the richest (and mostly
coastal) states, according to Census Bureau data. In the poorest states,
foreign-borns are 24 percent less likely than native-borns to report themselves
as divorced or separated, but just 3 percent less likely in the richest states.
In the poorest states, foreign-borns are 36 percent less likely than
native-borns to live in poverty; the disparity collapses to about half that in
wealthier states like New Jersey and Connecticut.
This phenomenon came vividly to life for me while I was reporting a book about
the brutal collision of a striving immigrant and a hurting native. One was
Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh, working in a Dallas
minimart in 2001 to save for a wedding and an education; the other, Mark
Stroman, shot him in a twisted post-9/11 revenge attack, blinding him in one
eye, during a rampage that killed two other immigrant clerks. Mr. Bhuiyan
eventually learned more about Mr. Stroman and the world that formed him. What he
found astonished him, then inspired him to forgive his attacker and battle to
rescue him from death row.
Mr. Bhuiyan realized that he was among the lucky Americans. Even after the
attack, he was able to pick up and remake himself, climbing from that minimart
to waiting tables at an Olive Garden to six-figure I.T. jobs. But Mr. Bhuiyan
also saw the America that created Mr. Stroman, in which a battered working class
was suffering from a dearth of work, community and hope, with many people
failing to form strong bonds and filling the void with escapist chemicals,
looping endlessly between prison and freedom.
Eventually, Mr. Bhuiyan petitioned a Texas court to spare his attacker’s life
because he had lacked his victim’s advantages: a loving and sober family,
pressure to strive and virtuous habits. The naturalized citizen claimed the
native Texan hadn’t had the same shot at the American dream as the “foreigner”
he’d tried to kill.
At a time when even the American middle class is struggling, a difficult
question arises: Are you better off being born in some of the poorest parts of
the world and moving here than being raised in the poorer parts of the United
States?
Continue reading the main story
There’s no easy answer. But let’s first acknowledge the obvious: Most
naturalized citizens — nearly half of America’s roughly 40 million immigrants —
arrived by choice, found employer sponsors, navigated visas and green cards.
(We’re not talking here of immigrants who never reach citizenship and generally
have harder lives than American citizens, native- or foreign-born.) It’s no
accident that our freshest citizens have pluck and wits that favor them later.
BUT I also think there’s something more complicated going on: In those places
where mobility’s engine is groaning and the social fabric is fraying, many
immigrants may have an added edge because of their ability to straddle the
seemingly contradictory values of their birthplaces and their adopted land, to
balance individualism with community-mindedness and self-reliance with usage of
the system.
American scholars have long warned of declining “social capital”: simply put,
people lacking the support of others. In Texas, I encountered the wasteland
described by writers from Robert D. Putnam on the left to Charles Murray on the
right. In mostly white, exurban communities that often see themselves as above
the woes of inner cities, I found household after household where country music
songs about family and church play but country-music values have fled: places
where a rising generation is often being reared by grandparents because parents
are addicted, imprisoned, broke or all three.
In places bedeviled by anomie, immigrants from more family-centered and
collectivist societies — Mexico, India, Colombia, Vietnam, Haiti, China — often
arrive with an advantageous blend of individualist and communitarian traits.
I say a blend, because while they come from communal societies, they were
deserters. They may have been raised with family-first values, but often they
were the ones to leave aging parents. It can be a powerful cocktail: a
self-willed drive for success and, leavening it somewhat, a sacrificial devotion
to family and tribe. Many, even as their lives grow more independent, serve
their family oceans away by sending remittances.
Mr. Bhuiyan seemed to embody this dualism. By back-home standards, he was a
rugged individualist. But in America it was his takes-a-village embeddedness
that enabled his revival: Immigrant friends gave him medicine, sofas to sleep
on, free I.T. training and job referrals.
Working at Olive Garden, Mr. Bhuiyan couldn’t believe how his colleagues lacked
for support. Young women walked home alone, sometimes in 100-plus degree heat on
highways, having no one to give them rides. Many colleagues lacked cars not
because they couldn’t afford the lease but because nobody would cosign it. “I
feel that, how come they have no one in their family — their dad, their uncle?”
he said. They told stories of chaotic childhoods that made them seek refuge in
drugs and gangs.
Mr. Bhuiyan concluded that the autonomy for which he’d come to America, while
serving him well, failed others who had lacked his support since birth. His
republic of self-making was their republic of self-destruction. “Here we think
freedom means whatever I wanna do, whatever I wanna say — that is freedom,” he
said. “But that’s the wrong definition.”
A second dimension of this in-between-ness involves the role of government. In
this era of gridlock and austerity, many immigrants have the advantage of coming
from places where bankrupt, do-nothing governments are no surprise. They often
find themselves among Americans who are opposite-minded: leaning on the state
for economic survival but socially lonesome, without community backup when that
state fails.
All this has nothing to do with the superiority of values. If distrust of
government made for the most successful societies, Nigeria and Argentina would
be leaders of the pack. What’s interesting about so many of America’s immigrants
is how they manage to plug instincts cultivated in other places into the system
here. Many are trained in their homelands to behave as though the state will do
nothing for them, and in America they reap the advantages of being
self-starters.
But they also benefit from the systems and support that America does offer,
which are inadequate as substitutes for initiative but are useful complements to
it.
Like many immigrants, Mr. Bhuiyan operated from the start like an economic
loner, never expecting to get much from the government. He was willing to work
at a gas station to save money. Recovering in his boss’s home, he ordered I.T.
textbooks online to improve his employability. Plunged into debt, he negotiated
with doctors and hospitals to trim his bills.
But the system also worked for him. Robust laws prevented employers from
exploiting a wide-eyed newcomer. He sued the Texas governor, in pursuit of
leniency for his attacker, and was heard. Through a fund for crime victims,
Texas eventually paid his medical bills.
In an age of inequality and shaky faith in the American promise of mobility
through merit, we can learn from these experiences. Forget the overused idea
popularized in self-help guides that native-borns must “think like an immigrant”
to prosper, an exhortation that ignores much history. Rather, the success of
immigrants in the nation’s hurting places reminds us that the American dream can
still work, but it helps to have people to lean on. Many immigrants get that,
because where they come from, people are all you have. They recognize that
solitude is an extravagance.
American poverty is darkened by loneliness; poverty in so many poor countries
I’ve visited is brightened only by community. Helping people gain other people
to lean on — not just offering cheaper health care and food stamps, tax cuts and
charter schools — seems essential to making this American dream work as well for
its perennial flowers as its freshest seeds.
Anand Giridharadas is a regular contributor
to The International New York Times
and the author of “The True American:
Murder and Mercy in Texas.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 25, 2014,
on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Immigrant Advantage.
The Immigrant Advantage, NYT, 24.5.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/opinion/sunday/the-immigrant-advantage.html
Using Jailed Migrants
as a Pool of Cheap Labor
MAY 24, 2014
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA
HOUSTON — The kitchen of the detention center here was
bustling as a dozen immigrants boiled beans and grilled hot dogs, preparing
lunch for about 900 other detainees. Elsewhere, guards stood sentry and managers
took head counts, but the detainees were doing most of the work — mopping
bathroom stalls, folding linens, stocking commissary shelves.
As the federal government cracks down on immigrants in the country illegally and
forbids businesses to hire them, it is relying on tens of thousands of those
immigrants each year to provide essential labor — usually for $1 a day or less —
at the detention centers where they are held when caught by the authorities.
This work program is facing increasing resistance from detainees and criticism
from immigrant advocates. In April, a lawsuit accused immigration authorities in
Tacoma, Wash., of putting detainees in solitary confinement after they staged a
work stoppage and hunger strike. In Houston, guards pressed other immigrants to
cover shifts left vacant by detainees who refused to work in the kitchen,
according to immigrants interviewed here.
The federal authorities say the program is voluntary, legal and a cost-saver for
taxpayers. But immigrant advocates question whether it is truly voluntary or
lawful, and argue that the government and the private prison companies that run
many of the detention centers are bending the rules to convert a captive
population into a self-contained labor force.
Last year, at least 60,000 immigrants worked in the federal government’s
nationwide patchwork of detention centers — more than worked for any other
single employer in the country, according to data from United States Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. The cheap labor, 13 cents an hour, saves
the government and the private companies $40 million or more a year by allowing
them to avoid paying outside contractors the $7.25 federal minimum wage. Some
immigrants held at county jails work for free, or are paid with sodas or candy
bars, while also providing services like meal preparation for other government
institutions.
Unlike inmates convicted of crimes, who often participate in prison work
programs and forfeit their rights to many wage protections, these immigrants are
civil detainees placed in holding centers, most of them awaiting hearings to
determine their legal status. Roughly half of the people who appear before
immigration courts are ultimately permitted to stay in the United States — often
because they were here legally, because they made a compelling humanitarian
argument to a judge or because federal authorities decided not to pursue the
case.
“I went from making $15 an hour as a chef to $1 a day in the kitchen in lockup,”
said Pedro Guzmán, 34, who had worked for restaurants in California, Minnesota
and North Carolina before he was picked up and held for about 19 months, mostly
at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga. “And I was in the country legally.”
Mr. Guzmán said that he had been required to work even when he was running a
fever, that guards had threatened him with solitary confinement if he was late
for his 2 a.m. shift, and that his family had incurred more than $75,000 in debt
from legal fees and lost income during his detention. A Guatemalan native, he
was released in 2011 after the courts renewed his visa, which had mistakenly
been revoked, in part because of a clerical error. He has since been granted
permanent residency.
Claims of Exploitation
Officials at private prison companies declined to speak about their use of
immigrant detainees, except to say that it was legal. Federal officials said the
work helped with morale and discipline and cut expenses in a detention system
that costs more than $2 billion a year.
“The program allows detainees to feel productive and contribute to the orderly
operation of detention facilities,” said Gillian M. Christensen, a spokeswoman
for the immigration agency. Detainees in the program are not officially
employees, she said, and their payments are stipends, not wages. No one is
forced to participate, she added, and there are usually more volunteers than
jobs.
Marian Martins, 49, who was picked up by ICE officers in 2009 for overstaying
her visa and sent to Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, Ala., said work
had been her only ticket out of lockdown, where she was placed when she arrived
without ever being told why.
Ms. Martins said she had worked most days cooking meals, scrubbing showers and
buffing hallways. Her only compensation was extra free time outside or in a
recreational room, where she could mingle with other detainees, watch television
or read, she said.
“People fight for that work,” said Ms. Martins, who has no criminal history. “I
was always nervous about being fired, because I needed the free time.”
Ms. Martins fled Liberia during the civil war there and entered the United
States on a visitor visa in 1990. She stayed and raised three children, all of
whom are American citizens, including two sons in the Air Force. Because of her
deteriorating health, she was released from detention in August 2010 with an
electronic ankle bracelet while awaiting a final determination of her legal
status.
Natalie Barton, a spokeswoman for the Etowah detention center, declined to
comment on Ms. Martins’s claims but said that all work done on site by detained
immigrants was unpaid, and that the center complied with all local and federal
rules.
The compensation rules at detention facilities are remnants of a bygone era. A
1950 law created the federal Voluntary Work Program and set the pay rate at a
time when $1 went much further. (The equivalent would be about $9.80 today.)
Congress last reviewed the rate in 1979 and opted not to raise it. It was later
challenged in a lawsuit under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets workplace
rules, but in 1990 an appellate court upheld the rate, saying that “alien
detainees are not government ‘employees.’ ”
Immigrants in holding centers may be in the country illegally, but they may also
be asylum seekers, permanent residents or American citizens whose documentation
is questioned by the authorities. On any given day, about 5,500 detainees out of
the 30,000-plus average daily population work for $1, in 55 of the roughly 250
detention facilities used by ICE. Local governments operate 21 of the programs,
and private companies run the rest, agency officials said.
These detainees are typically compensated with credits toward food, toiletries
and phone calls that they say are sold at inflated prices. (They can collect
cash when they leave if they have not used all their credits.) “They’re making
money on us while we work for them,” said Jose Moreno Olmedo, 25, a Mexican
immigrant who participated in the hunger strike at the Tacoma holding center and
was released on bond from the center in March. “Then they’re making even more
money on us when we buy from them at the commissary.”
A Legal Gray Area
Some advocates for immigrants express doubts about the legality of the work
program, saying the government and contractors are exploiting a legal gray area.
Photo
Immigrants in the laundry room at a detention center in Houston. Credit Michael
Stravato for The New York Times
Continue reading the main story
“This in essence makes the government, which forbids everyone else from hiring
people without documents, the single largest employer of undocumented immigrants
in the country,” said Carl Takei, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties
Union’s National Prison Project.
Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern University,
said she believed the program violated the 13th Amendment, which abolished
slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime. “By law, firms
contracting with the federal government are supposed to match or increase local
wages, not commit wage theft,” she said.
Immigration officials underestimate the number of immigrants involved and the
hours they work, Professor Stevens added. Based on extrapolations from ICE
contracts she has reviewed, she said, more than 135,000 immigrants a year may be
involved, and private prison companies and the government may be avoiding paying
more than $200 million in wages that outside employers would collect.
A 2012 report by the A.C.L.U. Foundation of Georgia described immigrants’ being
threatened with solitary confinement if they refused certain work. Also,
detainees said instructions about the program’s voluntary nature were sometimes
given in English even though most of the immigrants do not speak the language.
Eduardo Zuñiga, 36, spent about six months in 2011 at the Stewart Detention
Center in Georgia, awaiting deportation to Mexico. He had been detained after
being stopped at a roadblock in the Atlanta area because he did not have a
driver’s license and because his record showed a decade-old drug conviction for
which he had received probation.
At Stewart, Mr. Zuñiga worked in the kitchen and tore ligaments in one of his
knees after slipping on a newly mopped floor, leaving him unable to walk without
crutches. Despite doctors’ orders to stay off the leg, Mr. Zuñiga said, the
guards threatened him with solitary confinement if he did not cover his shifts.
Now back in Mexico, he said in a phone interview that he must walk with a leg
brace.
Gary Mead, who was a top ICE administrator until last year, said the agency
scrutinized contract bids from private companies to ensure that they did not
overestimate how much they could depend on detainees to run the centers.
Detainees cannot work more than 40 hours a week or eight hours a day, according
to the agency. They are limited to work that directly contributes to the
operation of their detention facility, said Ms. Christensen, the agency
spokeswoman, and are not supposed to provide services or make goods for the
outside market.
But that rule does not appear to be strictly enforced.
At the Joe Corley Detention Facility north of Houston, about 140 immigrant
detainees prepare about 7,000 meals a day, half of which are shipped to the
nearby Montgomery County jail. Pablo E. Paez, a spokesman for the GEO Group,
which runs the center, said his company had taken it over from the county in
2013 and was working to end the outside meal program.
Near San Francisco, at the Contra Costa West County Detention Facility,
immigrants work alongside criminal inmates to cook about 900 meals a day that
are packaged and trucked to a county homeless shelter and nearby jails.
A Booming Business
While President Obama has called for an overhaul of immigration law, his
administration has deported people — roughly two million in the last five years
— at a faster pace than any of his predecessors. The administration says the
sharp rise in the number of detainees has been partly driven by a requirement
from Congress that ICE fill a daily quota of more than 30,000 beds in detention
facilities. The typical stay is about a month, though some detainees are held
much longer, sometimes for years.
Detention centers are low-margin businesses, where every cent counts, said
Clayton J. Mosher, a professor of sociology at Washington State University,
Vancouver, who specializes in the economics of prisons. Two private prison
companies, the Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, control
most of the immigrant detention market. Many such companies struggled in the
late 1990s amid a glut of private prison construction, with more facilities
built than could be filled, but a spike in immigrant detention after Sept. 11
helped revitalize the industry.
The Corrections Corporation of America’s revenue, for example, rose more than 60
percent over the last decade, and its stock price climbed to more than $30 from
less than $3. Last year, the company made $301 million in net income and the GEO
Group made $115 million, according to earnings reports.
Prison companies are not the only beneficiaries of immigrant labor. About 5
percent of immigrants who work are unpaid, ICE data show. Sheriff Richard K.
Jones of Butler County, Ohio, said his county saved at least $200,000 to
$300,000 a year by relying on about 40 detainees each month for janitorial work.
“All I know is it’s a lot of money saved,” he said.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an
advocacy group that promotes greater controls on immigration, said that with
proper monitoring, the program had its advantages, and that the criticisms of it
were part of a larger effort to delegitimize immigration detention.
Some immigrants said they appreciated the chance to work. Minsu Jeon, 23, a
South Korean native who was freed in January after a monthlong stay at an
immigration detention center in Ocilla, Ga., said that while he thought the pay
was unfair, working as a cook helped pass the time.
“They don’t feed you that much,” he added, “but you could eat food if you worked
in the kitchen.”
Kristina Rebelo contributed reporting from San Diego,
and Kitty Bennett contributed research
from St. Petersburg, Fla.
A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Using Jailed Migrants As a Pool of Cheap Labor.
Using Jailed Migrants as a Pool of Cheap
Labor, NYT, 24.5.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/
using-jailed-migrants-as-a-pool-of-cheap-labor.html
Still a Nation of Immigrants
MAY 21, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist
The American melting pot appears to be heating up again, and
its ingredients have grown ever more varied.
In 1908, when a play called “The Melting Pot” was first staged in New York City,
helping to popularize the term, New York had a foreign-born population of over
40 percent, but the city was 98 percent white (which could include people of
Hispanic origins). The foreign-born population of the country as a whole was
around 15 percent, and nearly nine out of 10 Americans were white. This was a
few years after these words were mounted on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your
tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Few people at that time could have imagined how dramatically the composition of
those huddled masses would change.
A century later, according to the 2010 census, 37 percent of residents in New
York City were foreign born, but only 44 percent were white, and if you exclude
people of Hispanic origins, the percentage of white residents drops to just 33
percent. In the country as a whole, the foreign-born population in 2010 was 13
percent, and the white population was over 75 percent, and about 15 points lower
when Hispanics are excluded.
But as a Pew Research report issued last week makes clear, there has been a
“sharp rise in the number of immigrants living in the U.S. in recent decades,”
and many of the states with the largest foreign-born populations have seen the
percentages of those citizens increase.
According to the report, in 1990 the 10 states with the largest foreign-born
populations had between 21.7 percent foreign-born residents, in California, and
8.5 percent, in Connecticut. In 2012, the range was from 27 percent foreign born
in California to 13.8 percent in Illinois.
The report further points out:
“In 1990, the U.S. had 19.8 million immigrants. That number rose to a record
40.7 million immigrants in 2012, among them 11.7 million unauthorized. Over this
period, the number of immigrants in the U.S. increased more than five times as
much as the U.S.-born population (106.1 percent versus 19.3 percent), according
to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data.”
It continues:
“Today there are four states in which about one-in-five or more people are
foreign born — California, New York, New Jersey and Florida. By contrast, in
1990, California was the only state to have more than a fifth of its population
born outside the U.S.”
According to a September report from the Immigration Policy Center:
“In the 2014 elections, there will be approximately 9.3 million newly eligible
voters. These include both people who were 16 or 17 years old at the time of the
2012 elections, as well as immigrants who become naturalized U.S. citizens
between 2012 and 2014. Of these 9.3 million newly eligible voters, 1.8 million
will be Asian or Latino. Another 1.4 million will be new U.S. citizens through
naturalization. Together, these 3.2 million people will comprise 34 percent of
the new electorate.”
And that is to say nothing of the surge in African-born immigrants. According to
a 2011 article in the United Nations Dispatch:
“Over the last 30 years, the African born population has grown from just 200,000
people to 1.5 million. And while Africans still make up just 3.9 percent of the
total foreign-born population, that share is growing fast. In 2010, for example,
nearly 10 percent of new green card recipients were born in Africa.”
And yet, as Pew pointed out in April, voter turnout among Asians and Hispanics
has fallen in midterm elections in recent years.
There is a fundamental disconnect here: Many of the groups that are driving the
diversification of the country aren’t seizing the electoral power that comes
with being here.
And all the while, politicians in Washington — particularly Republicans — drag
their feet on immigration reform, and those in statehouses, hoping to slam the
lid on the melting pot and suppress the flavor within, pull every lever
available, from strict anti-immigrant policies to voter-ID laws.
This is still a country of immigrants, but the profile of the immigrant
population is changing dramatically. Now lady liberty waits for the masses to
stop huddling and stand, to turn yearning into power, to make American politics
a reflection of the country’s internal transformation.
The first step on that path is for more immigrants to vote.
Still a Nation of Immigrants, NYT,
21.5.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/opinion/blow-still-a-nation-of-immigrants.html
U.S. Setting Up Emergency Shelter in Texas
as Youths Cross Border Alone
MAY 16, 2014
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
With border authorities in South Texas overwhelmed by a surge
of young illegal migrants traveling by themselves, the Department of Homeland
Security declared a crisis this week and moved to set up an emergency shelter
for the youths at an Air Force base in San Antonio, officials said Friday.
After seeing children packed in a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Tex., during
a visit last Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Monday declared
“a level-four condition of readiness” in the Rio Grande Valley. The alert was an
official recognition that federal agencies overseeing borders, immigration
enforcement and child welfare had been outstripped by a sudden increase in
unaccompanied minors in recent weeks.
On Sunday, Department of Health and Human Services officials will open a shelter
for up to 1,000 minors at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, authorities said,
and will begin transferring youths there by land and air. The level-four alert
is the highest for agencies handling children crossing the border illegally, and
allows Homeland Security officials to call on emergency resources from other
agencies, officials said.
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Johnson said the influx of unaccompanied youths
had “zoomed to the top of my agenda” after his encounters at the McAllen Border
Patrol station with small children, one of whom was 3.
The children are coming primarily from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,
making the perilous journey north through Mexico to Texas without parents or
close adult relatives. Last weekend alone, more than 1,000 unaccompanied youths
were being held at overflowing border stations in South Texas, officials said.
The flow of child migrants has been building since 2011, when 4,059
unaccompanied youths were apprehended by border agents. Last year more than
21,000 minors were caught, and Border Patrol officials had said they were
expecting more than 60,000 this year. But that projection has already been
exceeded.
By law, unaccompanied children caught crossing illegally from countries other
than Mexico are treated differently from other migrants. After being apprehended
by the Border Patrol, they must be turned over within 72 hours to a refugee
resettlement office that is part of the Health Department. Health officials must
try to find relatives or other adults in the United States who can care for them
while their immigration cases move through the courts, a search that can take
several weeks or more.
The Health Department maintains shelters for the youths, most run by private
contractors, in the border region. Health officials had begun several months ago
to add beds in the shelters anticipating a seasonal increase. But the plans
proved insufficient to handle a drastic increase of youths in recent weeks, a
senior administration official said.
Mr. Johnson said Pentagon officials agreed this week to lend the space at
Lackland, where health officials will run a shelter for up to four months. The
base was also used as a temporary shelter for unaccompanied migrant youths in
2012. It became the focus of controversy when Gov. Rick Perry of Texas objected,
accusing President Obama of encouraging illegal migration by sheltering the
young people there.
Mr. Johnson said the young migrants became a more “vivid” issue for him after he
persuaded his wife to spend Mother’s Day with him at the station in McAllen. He
said he asked a 12-year-old girl where her mother was. She responded tearfully
that she did not have a mother, and was hoping to find her father, who was
living somewhere in the United States, Mr. Johnson said.
Mr. Johnson said he had spoken on Monday with the ambassadors from Mexico and
the three Central American countries to seek their cooperation, and had begun a
publicity campaign to dissuade youths from embarking for the United States.
“We have to discourage parents from sending or sending for their children to
cross the Southwest border because of the risks involved,” Mr. Johnson said. “A
South Texas processing center is no place for a child.”
Officials said many youths are fleeing gang violence at home, while some are
seeking to reunite with parents in the United States. A majority of
unaccompanied minors are not eligible to remain legally in the United States and
are eventually returned home.
A version of this article appears in print on May 17, 2014,
on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline:
U.S. Setting Up Emergency Shelter in Texas
as Youths Cross Border Alone.
U.S. Setting Up Emergency Shelter in Texas
as Youths Cross Border Alone,
NYT, 16.5.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/us/
us-sets-up-crisis-shelter-as-children-flow-across-border-alone.html
A 12-Year-Old’s Trek of Despair
Ends in a Noose at the Border
APRIL 19, 2014
The New York Times
Noemi Álvarez Quillay took the first steps of the 6,500-mile
journey to New York City from the southern highlands of Ecuador on Tuesday, Feb.
4, after darkness fell.
A bashful, studious girl, Noemi walked 10 minutes across dirt roads that cut
through corn and potato fields, reaching the highway to Quito. She carried a
small suitcase. Her grandfather Cipriano Quillay flagged down a bus and watched
her board. She was 12.
From that moment, and through the remaining five weeks of her life, Noemi was in
the company of strangers, including coyotes — human smugglers, hired by her
parents in the Bronx to bring her to them. Her parents had come to the United
States illegally and settled in New York when Noemi was a toddler.
Noemi was part of a human flood tide that has swelled since 2011: The United
States resettlement agency expects to care for nine times as many unaccompanied
migrant children in 2014 as it did three years ago.
For these children wandering thousands of miles, it is a grueling journey,
filled with dangers. The vast majority come from Central America. Noemi’s trip
was about twice as long. She had already tried once, leaving home last May, but
was detained long before she even made it halfway.
“I went with a coyote and spent two months in Nicaragua and came back from
there,” she wrote in a school information sheet.
She got a little closer this year. In March, a month after she left home, the
police picked up Noemi and a coyote in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The authorities
took her to a children’s shelter. She was described as crying inconsolably after
being questioned by a prosecutor. A few days later, she was found hanged from a
shower curtain rod in a bathroom at the shelter. Her death, ruled a suicide by
Mexican authorities, remains under investigation by a human rights commission
there.
The number of unaccompanied minors caught entering the United States and then
referred for placement is expected to reach 60,000 in the 12 months ending Sept.
30, said Lisa Raffonelli, a spokeswoman for the Office of Refugee Resettlement,
an increase from 6,560 in 2011. In Mexico, the number has more than doubled.
No single factor explains these surges, but in Noemi’s hometown there are clues
about the forces at work in her story.
In the district of El Tambo in Cañar province, her maternal grandparents, Mr.
Quillay, 57, and María Jesús Guamán, 59, live in an adobe home with no running
water. About 15 years ago, during an economic crisis in Ecuador, their adult
children began migrating to the United States without visas.
“My four children went to find decent lives,” Mr. Quillay said. “So I took over
five grandchildren from when they were little.”
They ate from the grandparents’ farm. “We don’t have the little sweets that they
sometimes ask for,” Mr. Quillay said.
“She was just born when her father left, and when she was 3, my daughter decided
to go herself,” Ms. Guamán said of Noemi. “I raised my granddaughter the same as
the others.”
As the children grew, their parents sent money to pay for the construction of a
two-story concrete house nearby where the five grandchildren, cousins, lived on
their own.
Leonela Yupa, a cousin and playmate of Noemi, remembered playing “cocinita” with
her — fashioning from their imagination a little kitchen where they fixed
pretend meals. Noemi often joined in one of the world’s universal games: hide
and seek.
The children moved through a landscape that is a hybrid of
peasant houses, like the home of their grandparents, and larger, modern ones
that are “a symbol of the success of the Ecuadorean immigrant,” said Rafael
Ortiz, mayor of El Tambo.
The Quillays’ unparented household was common. “We have 1,040 students, and at
least 60 percent are children of migrant parents who have been under the care of
grandparents, uncles or older siblings,” said Magdalena Choglio Zambrano, a
guidance counselor at the regional high school.
The parents abroad “at times send a little shirt, shoes, $100, but it is not the
same as being papa or mama,” Noemi’s grandfather said.
A generation of children who grew up on their own in El Tambo have started to
leave, getting a hand from their parents abroad, but still requiring shadowy
journeys.
“Now we are seeing that the migrants are small children or teenagers whose
parents are sending for them, running the risk of putting them in the hands of
the coyotes to whom they pay 15, 20, 25 thousand dollars,” said Ms. Choglio, the
guidance counselor.
The cost of the trip depends on whether the smuggler uses airline flights to cut
down on overland travel, Mayor Ortiz said.
“We don’t know anything, not how they go or where they go,” Ms. Guamán said. The
parents “made the arrangements directly from there, and they called to tell us
when we had to send the girl.”
Both grandparents say they and Noemi were reluctant for her to leave. Ms. Guamán
said she argued with her daughter, the girl’s mother.
“I said to her, ‘Why take her away? She’s studying here, she’s doing well,’ ”
Ms. Guamán said. “But my daughter says education in Ecuador is no good and it’s
better for her to study there. And she took my Noemi away, only for this to
happen.
Little is known about Noemi’s travels until about 4,000 miles
later, more than a month after she left home.
On Friday, March 7, in Ciudad Juárez, police saw Domingo Fermas Uves, 52,
urinating outside a pickup truck, according to Alejandro Maldonado, a police
spokesman. Inside was Noemi. In the official account, Mr. Fermas told officers
that he was part of a network of smugglers hired by the girl’s family to take
her to the United States. The man gave false details about the girl, saying she
was 8 years old and from an inland state in Mexico. The police recorded her name
as Noemi Álvarez Astorga.
Noemi was taken to Casa de la Esperanza, a shelter for Mexican minors whose name
means “House of Hope.” Over that weekend, she was questioned by a prosecutor.
After that, a doctor described Noemi as being “terrified,” according to a report
in El Diario of Juarez.
On March 11, when called to eat, Noemi instead went into the bathroom. Another
girl could not get in. The doctor, Alicia Soria Espino, and others broke open
the door and found Noemi hanging by the cloth shower curtain.
The next day, her parents in the Bronx received a phone call from a woman who
told them that Noemi had safely crossed the border. Later that day, they
received a second call saying that she had died, according to Ecuadorean
consular officials.
The authorities determined that the girl initially thought to be an 8-year-old
Mexican was probably the 12-year-old Ecuadorean. In part because her parents,
who do not have legal immigration status, decided not to go to Mexico, DNA tests
were required to confirm her identity, said Jorge W. Lopez, the Ecuadorean
consul general in New York.
The man said to have been the smuggler, Mr. Fermas, was
arrested but was later freed by a judge, who did not find enough evidence to
hold him for prosecution, said Ángel Torres of the federal prosecutor’s office
in Ciudad Juárez. “Mr. Fermas is still under investigation for immigrant
trafficking,” Mr. Torres said. In published interviews, Mr. Fermas has said that
the story about the pickup truck was untrue and that the police had entered his
house and taken the girl under the guise of rescuing her. In the week after
Noemi’s death, 370 foreign child migrants were detained across Mexico, according
to the national immigration agency. Nearly half were traveling alone.
The minors coming from Central America and Mexico are “propelled by violence,
insecurity and abuse,” the United Nations high commissioner for refugees said in
a report issued the day after Noemi’s death. The prospect of immigration reform
in the United States is also enticing, Mr. Lopez said, because of the belief
that anyone already in the country illegally will be allowed to stay.
Noemi’s parents have said little publicly. Her mother, Martha V. Quillay, who
works in a hair salon, spoke briefly with a reporter, then curtailed the
conversation. Her father, José Segundo Álvarez Yupa, a construction worker, said
it was too difficult to discuss. “These are private matters,” he said. “This is
a very painful thing. It’s all over. We want to recover, we want to move on.”
Last week, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, who was visiting New York, called
on the family at their home in the Bronx to offer condolences. Ms. Quillay
posted pictures from the president’s visit on her Facebook page.
Msgr. James Kelly, pastor of St. Brigid’s Roman Catholic Church in Brooklyn,
which has a large number of Ecuadorean parishioners, said recently that he heard
every day about the young people traveling alone.
“I had parents in here yesterday whose child was coming north,” Father Kelly
said. “They wanted a Mass said, that the journey would be safe.”
Maggy Ayala Samaniego in El Tambo Canton, Ecuador,
Annie Correal in New York and Paulina Villegas
in Mexico City contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on April 20, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
A 12-Year-Old’s Trek of Despair Ends in a Noose
at the Border.
A 12-Year-Old’s Trek of Despair Ends in a
Noose at the Border,
NYT, 19.4.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/nyregion/
a-12-year-olds-trek-of-despair-ends-in-a-noose-at-the-border.html
Hoping for Asylum,
Migrants
Strain U.S. Border
APRIL 10,
2014
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
HIDALGO,
Tex. — Border Patrol agents in olive uniforms stood in broad daylight on the
banks of the Rio Grande, while on the Mexican side smugglers pulled up in vans
and unloaded illegal migrants.
The agents were clearly visible on that recent afternoon, but the migrants were
undeterred. Mainly women and children, 45 in all, they crossed the narrow river
on the smugglers’ rafts, scrambled up the bluff and turned themselves in,
signaling a growing challenge for the immigration authorities.
After six years of steep declines across the Southwest, illegal crossings have
soared in South Texas while remaining low elsewhere. The Border Patrol made more
than 90,700 apprehensions in the Rio Grande Valley in the past six months, a 69
percent increase over last year.
The migrants are no longer primarily Mexican laborers. Instead they are Central
Americans, including many families with small children and youngsters without
their parents, who risk a danger-filled journey across Mexico. Driven out by
deepening poverty but also by rampant gang violence, increasing numbers of
migrants caught here seek asylum, setting off lengthy legal procedures to
determine whether they qualify.
The new
migrant flow, largely from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, is straining
resources and confounding Obama administration security strategies that work
effectively in other regions. It is further complicating President Obama’s
uphill push on immigration, fueling Republican arguments for more border
security before any overhaul.
With detention facilities, asylum offices and immigration courts overwhelmed,
enough migrants have been released temporarily in the United States that back
home in Central America people have heard that those who make it to American
soil have a good chance of staying.
“Word has gotten out that we’re giving people permission and walking them out
the door,” said Chris Cabrera, a Border Patrol agent who is vice president of
the local of the National Border Patrol Council, the agents’ union. “So they’re
coming across in droves.”
In Mexican border cities like Reynosa, just across the river, migrants have
become easy prey for Mexican drug cartels that have seized control of the human
smuggling business, heightening perils for illegal crossers and security risks
for the United States.
At the Rio Grande that afternoon, the smugglers calculatedly sent the migrants
across at a point where the water is too shallow for Border Patrol boats that
might have turned them back safely at the midriver boundary between the United
States and Mexico.
A Border Patrol chief, Raul Ortiz, watched in frustration from a helicopter
overhead. “Somebody probably told them they’re going to get released,” he said.
As agents booked them, the migrants waited quietly: a Guatemalan mother carrying
a toddler with a baby bottle, another with an infant wrapped in blankets.
A 9-year-old girl said she was traveling by herself, hoping to rejoin her mother
and two brothers in Louisiana. But she did not know where in Louisiana they
were. After a two-week journey from Honduras, her only connection to them was
one telephone number on a scrap of paper.
A Honduran woman said the group had followed the instructions of the Mexican
smugglers. “They just told us to cross and start walking,” she said.
Other migrants were trying to elude the Border Patrol, and within the hour Chief
Ortiz saw his interdiction efforts working according to plan. A short way
upriver in deeper water, agents radioed that they had turned back a raft with
eight “bodies.”
Continue reading the main story
Moments later a surveillance blimp cruising nearby detected people lying under
dense brush. As the helicopter swooped low, the pilot spotted sneakers at the
base of the trees. Agents on the ground flushed out nine migrants, all men.
Continue reading the main story
Illegal Crossings in Rio Grande Valley
Migrants crossing the South Texas border illegally in recent years are no longer
primarily from Mexico, but from other countries, mainly in Central America.
“Technology, air operations, ground units, that’s the complete package,” Chief
Ortiz said.
The new migrants head for South Texas because it is the shortest distance from
Central America. Many young people ride across Mexico on top of freight trains,
jumping off in Reynosa.
The Rio Grande twists and winds, and those who make it across can quickly hide
in sugar cane fields and orchards. In many places it is a short sprint to
shopping malls and suburban streets where smugglers pick up migrants to continue
north.
Border Patrol officials said apprehensions were higher partly because they were
catching many more of the illegal crossers. About 3,000 agents in the Rio Grande
Valley — 495 new this year — patrol in helicopters and boats, on all-terrain
vehicles and horseback. Drones and aerostat blimps are watching from the sky.
Under a new strategy, border agencies are working with federal drug agents, the
F.B.I. and Texas police to break up Mexican smuggling organizations by
prosecuting operatives on this side of the border.
But whereas Mexicans can be swiftly returned by the Border Patrol, migrants from
noncontiguous countries must be formally deported and flown home by other
agencies. Even though federal flights are leaving South Texas every day, Central
Americans are often detained longer.
Women with children are detained separately. But because the nearest facility
for “family units” is in Pennsylvania, families apprehended in the Rio Grande
Valley are likely to be released while their cases proceed, a senior
deportations official said.
Minors without parents are turned over to the Department of Health and Human
Services, which holds them in shelters that provide medical care and schooling
and tries to send them to relatives in the United States. The authorities here
are expecting 35,000 unaccompanied minors this year, triple the number two years
ago.
Under asylum law, border agents are required to ask migrants if they are afraid
of returning to their countries. If the answer is yes, migrants must be detained
until an immigration officer interviews them to determine if the fear is
credible. If the officer concludes it is, the migrant can petition for asylum.
An immigration judge will decide whether there is a “well-founded fear of
persecution” based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or
“membership in a particular social group.”
Immigration officials said they had set the bar intentionally low for the
initial “credible fear” test, to avoid turning away a foreigner in danger. In
2013, 85 percent of fear claims were found to be credible, according to federal
figures.
As more Central Americans have come, fear claims have spiked, more than doubling
in 2013 to 36,026 from 13,931 in 2012.
The chances have not improved much to win asylum in the end, however. In 2012,
immigration courts approved 34 percent of asylum petitions from migrants facing
deportation — 2,888 cases nationwide. Many Central Americans say they are
fleeing extortion or forced recruitment by criminal gangs. But immigration
courts have rarely recognized those threats as grounds for asylum.
Yet because of immense backlogs in the courts — with the average wait for a
hearing currently at about 19 months — claiming fear of return has allowed some
Central Americans to prolong their time in the United States.
At the big immigration detention center at Port Isabel, which serves much of the
Rio Grande Valley, half of about 1,100 detainees at any given time are asylum
seekers, officials said. With the asylum system already stretched, the nearest
officers are in Houston, doing interviews by video conference. In 2013, the
closest immigration court, in Harlingen, was swamped with new cases, becoming
even more backlogged.
Detention beds fill up, and migrants deemed to present no security risk are
released under supervision, officials said, with their next court hearing often
more than a year away.
At their now teeming front-line stations along the river, Border Patrol
officials readily admit they are not set up to hold migrants for long. Agents
and migrants alike refer to the cells there as “hieleras” — freezers.
In cinder-block rooms with concrete benches and a toilet in the corner, there
are no chairs, beds, showers or hot food. On a recent day, migrants caked in
river mud were packed shoulder to shoulder, many on the floor, trying to warm up
in space blankets the Border Patrol provides. Some held their fingers to their
lips to signal hunger.
But agents said they have accelerated their work so more migrants are deported
directly from Border Patrol stations in as little as two days. Officials said
few migrants — only 4 percent — claim fear of returning when they are with the
Border Patrol.
Rather, migrants are claiming fear after they are sent to longer-term detention
centers like Port Isabel, leading officials to suspect they have been coached by
other detainees.
But lawyers for asylum seekers said migrants frequently report that Border
Patrol agents never asked them about their concerns, or that they were too
exhausted or intimidated to express them in the hours after being caught.
“A lot of times these people had very real, legitimate fears,” said Kimi
Jackson, director of the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project,
known as ProBAR. “But it seems to them they were not asked the questions by the
Border Patrol in the type of situation where they could talk freely.”
On a helicopter with its pilot and a Border Patrol chief, a reporter and
photographer for The New York Times watched migrants crossing the Rio Grande and
turning themselves in.
Lawyers said officials had started to make it far harder for migrants to win
release by requiring many more to post bond, with rates rising to as high as
$10,000.
That news had not reached migrants at a shelter run by nuns in Reynosa. Several
said they were heading to the United States to seek “asilo.” They could say
truthfully they were afraid to go home.
Luis Fernando Herrera Perdomo, 19, said he fled Honduras after gang members shot
and killed a brother who was sleeping in the bed next to his.
A 29-year-old former soldier from El Salvador, who asked to be identified only
as Jesús, said he left his wife and three children to escape a gang that came
gunning for him because he arrested some of its members while in the army.
In Reynosa, the dangers had only multiplied. José Rubén Hernández, 32, said he
had been kidnapped for two weeks while Mexican smugglers extorted $10,000 in
ransom from his frantic family in Honduras.
“We are a gold mine for the cartels,” he said.
Other migrants had been imprisoned in a smugglers’ stash house until Mexican
military troops stormed it to free them. Two Hondurans who had just arrived at
the shelter displayed new bruises, saying they had been beaten that morning in a
rail yard by smugglers associated with the Zetas, a brutal Mexican cartel.
But the migrants still intended to hire new smugglers and try to cross. “I’m
still alive and I have faith in God, so I will try to make it over to the other
side,” Mr. Herrera said.
Chief Ortiz said agents were speeding deportations to change the message
reaching Central America.
“It cost the migrant an awful lot of money and time and effort to get here,” he
said. “If I send somebody back to Guatemala or Honduras, chances are they’re
going to sit there and say, ‘You know what, I don’t think I’m going to try this
again.’ ”
“The word may get out,” he said.
A version of this article appears in print on April 11, 2014, on page A1 of the
New York edition with the headline: Hoping for Asylum, Migrants Strain U.S.
Border.
Hoping for Asylum, Migrants Strain U.S. Border, NYT, 10.4.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/11/us/
poverty-and-violence-push-new-wave-of-migrants-toward-us.html
Yes He
Can, on Immigration
APRIL 5,
2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
If
President Obama means what he says about wanting an immigration system that
reflects American values, helps the economy and taps the yearnings of millions
of Americans-in-waiting, he is going to have to do something about it — soon and
on his own. It has been frustrating to watch his yes-we-can promises on
immigration reform fade to protestations of impotence and the blaming of others.
All Mr. Obama has been saying lately is: No, in fact, we can’t, because
Republicans and the law won’t let me.
Mr. Obama is correct when he complains that long-term immigration repairs have
been throttled in Congress. Neo-nativist Republicans fixated on mass deportation
have blocked a worthy bipartisan bill. But Mr. Obama has compounded this failure
by clinging to a coldblooded strategy of ramped-up enforcement on the same
people he has promised to help through legislation that he has failed to
achieve.
With nearly two million removals in the last five years, the Obama
administration is deporting people at a faster pace than has taken place under
any other president. This enormously costly effort was meant to win Republican
support for broader reform. But all it has done is add to the burden of fear,
family disruption and lack of opportunity faced by 11 million people who cannot
get right with the law. Because of Mr. Obama’s enforcement blitz, more than
5,000 children have ended up in foster care.
Mr. Obama should know his approach is unsustainable, and immigration advocates
and lawmakers have applied intense pressure on him to deport “not one more”
deserving immigrant. With reform on life support, he recently told the Homeland
Security secretary, Jeh Johnson, to find ways to conduct immigration enforcement
more “humanely.”
That would be nice. But that is only the beginning of what Mr. Obama and Mr.
Johnson should do.
Those who would qualify for legalization under a Senate bill passed last summer
— people who do not pose criminal threats, who have strong ties to this country
and, in many cases, have children who are American citizens — should not be in
danger of deportation. The one recent bright spot in Mr. Obama’s immigration
record has been his decision, made on firm legal ground, to defer for two years
the deportations of young people who would have qualified for legal status under
the stalled Dream Act.
These immigrants, known as Dreamers, are a sympathetic group, and Mr. Obama’s
move to protect them was timely and wise. But millions of other unauthorized
immigrants are just as vulnerable and no less worthy. There is no good reason
not to extend similar relief to the Dreamers’ parents, or to the parents of
citizen children and others who pose no threat and should likewise be allowed to
live and work here while efforts to pass reform continue.
Besides deferring some deportations, the administration should adopt an array of
policy changes, no matter what Congress does. Mr. Johnson needs to get
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol to make noncriminals
and minor offenders the lowest deportation priorities. This has been tried
before, through a series of “prosecutorial discretion” memos that have had
little positive effect.
If their language needs clarifying, Mr. Johnson, once the Pentagon’s top lawyer,
surely knows how to write clear rules of engagement. Some states like California
do, too: They now strictly limit the kinds of people local police surrender to
federal authorities for deportation.
The administration needs to find ways to turn off the deportation machinery when
it gets abused. It should end programs like Secure Communities that enlist local
police as immigration enforcers. When immigrants assert their civil and labor
rights against abusive employers, it should protect them from deportation and
retaliation.
The administration should abandon quota-based enforcement driven by the urge to
fill more than 30,000 detention beds every day. And it should require bond
hearings before immigration judges for people who have been held longer than six
months, and end solitary confinement and other abusive conditions for detainees.
Above all, it should direct the nation’s vast immigration enforcement resources
more forcefully against gangs, guns, violent criminals and other genuine
threats.
These and other reforms should not be confused with a comprehensive overhaul of
immigration, which only Congress can achieve. But they are ways to push a
failing system toward sanity and justice.
Mr. Obama may argue that he can’t be too aggressive in halting deportations
because that will make the Republicans go crazy, and there’s always hope for a
legislative solution. He has often seemed like a bystander to the immigration
stalemate, watching the wheels spin, giving speeches and hoping for the best.
It’s hard to know when he will finally stir himself to do something big and
consequential.
A version of
this editorial appears in print on April 6, 2014,
on page SR10
of the New York edition with the headline:
Yes He Can, on
Immigration.
Yes He Can, on Immigration, NYT, 5.4.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/opinion/sunday/yes-he-can-on-immigration.html
Obama,
Citing a Concern for Families,
Orders a
Review of Deportations
MARCH 13,
2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
WASHINGTON
— President Obama said Thursday that deportations of illegal immigrants should
be more humane, and to make that happen, he has ordered a review of his
administration’s enforcement efforts.
Mr. Obama revealed the effort in an Oval Office meeting with Hispanic lawmakers
on Thursday afternoon, telling them that he had “deep concern about the pain too
many families feel from the separation that comes from our broken immigration
system,” according to a White House statement.
Representative Luis V. Gutiérrez, Democrat of Illinois, said afterward that it
was “clear that the pleas from the community got through to the president.” He
added that he and his two colleagues at the meeting — Representative Rubén
Hinojosa, Democrat of Texas, and Representative Xavier Becerra, Democrat of
California — “were adamant that the president needed to act.”
Mr. Obama — who told the lawmakers that he had ordered Jeh C. Johnson, the
secretary of Homeland Security, to conduct the evaluation — is under increasing
pressure from Latino advocates to all but suspend aggressive efforts to deport
illegal immigrants. Activists and Hispanic lawmakers say the government is
ripping families apart by deporting people whose only crime was coming to the
country illegally. Some groups said Thursday that a review by Mr. Johnson would
not go far enough.
“Relief delayed is relief denied,” said Pablo Alvarado, the director of the
National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “The president has no excuse to
continue his unjust deportation policy.”
Many Republican officials have said they already do not trust Mr. Obama to
adequately enforce the security of the nation’s borders, and early reaction to
his new order was sharp.
“Fifty million working-age Americans in this country don’t have jobs,” said
Stephen Miller, communications director for Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of
Alabama. “And what does the president do? He takes more steps that would provide
companies with illegal workers.”
More illegal immigrants have been deported during the Obama administration than
under any previous president, officials have said. Within weeks, the government
is likely to have deported two million immigrants during Mr. Obama’s six years
in office, a milestone that has intensified anger among some Hispanics.
The issue could be a critical one in midterm elections this year for Democratic
candidates, many of whom rely on Latinos to turn out and vote for them in big
numbers.
But any effort to pull back on deportations could threaten to undermine
longer-term hopes for bipartisan legislation to overhaul the immigration system.
In the past several months, Mr. Obama and top advisers have repeatedly told
activists that the president’s hands are tied by laws that require him to spend
millions of dollars in an effort to eject people who have crossed into the
country without the proper papers.
During a November speech, Mr. Obama responded to a heckler who shouted that the
president had “a power to stop deportation for all undocumented immigrants in
this country.”
Mr. Obama responded, “Actually, I don’t.”
White House officials said late Thursday that the president would not suspend
deportations because his advisers did not believe such a move would be legal. He
also will not expand his 2012 order to defer deportations of illegal immigrants
who were brought to the United States as young children, aides said.
But activists have refused to back down. Janet Murguía, who leads the National
Council of La Raza, said last week that Mr. Obama was the “deporter in chief”
and accused his administration of leaving “a wake of devastation for families
across America.”
Privately, top Obama aides have expressed frustration at the push from Hispanic
activists that the president act unilaterally to stop deportations. But the
pressure has moved in recent weeks from fringe activists to the mainstream. Last
week, Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, a leading Latino voice in
Congress, called on Mr. Obama to do something drastic.
“While we continue waiting for the House of Representatives to wake up and move
on immigration reform legislation, I urge the president to take action today and
halt needless deportations that are splitting apart our families and
communities,” he said.
On Tuesday, aides to four Democratic senators, including Harry Reid of Nevada,
the majority leader, met with Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House counsel, to
discuss how the president could curb the number of deportations, perhaps by
exempting the parents of children who were brought to the United States when
they were very young, according to two people familiar with the meeting.
White House officials said that Mr. Obama would meet on Friday with activists
from a number of Latino organizations to further discuss legislation to overhaul
immigration and to hear their concerns about deportations.
Angela Kelley, the vice president for immigration policy at the Center for
American Progress, said that activists also understood the importance of keeping
up pressure on Republicans in the House, who have refused to consider a
bipartisan Senate bill to overhaul immigration.
“Make no mistake,” she said. “It is the Republicans who are responsible for the
fact that we don’t have reform today.”
In the meantime, Ms. Kelley said, she and other advocates for illegal immigrants
were looking to Mr. Obama to slow the record number of deportations. She noted
that more than 5,000 American children are in foster homes because one or both
parents have been deported.
“We have reached a crisis point,” Ms. Kelley said.
“The question is,” she added, “which end of Pennsylvania Avenue” will fix the
problem.
Peter Baker
contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on March 14, 2014,
on page A17 of
the New York edition with the headline:
Obama, Citing
a Concern for Families,
Orders a
Review of Deportations.
Obama, Citing a Concern for Families,
Orders a Review of Deportations,
NYT, 13.3.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/us/obama-orders-review-of-deportations.html
Border
Patrol Instructed to Show Restraint
MARCH 7,
2014
By SARAH WHEATON
The New York Times
WASHINGTON
— The Border Patrol on Friday instructed its agents to show restraint when
people on the border throw rocks or flee in cars, after a series of fatal
shootings by agents provoked outrage from human rights activists and the Mexican
government.
“Agents shall not discharge firearms in response to thrown or hurled
projectiles” unless they have reason to believe there is “imminent danger of
death or serious injury” based on the size or nature of the projectile, the
chief of the Border Patrol, Michael J. Fisher, wrote in a memo to his staff.
Mr. Fisher wrote that agents should try to take cover in such situations. The
memo also instructed them not to shoot at fleeing vehicles and reiterated a
policy that forbids officers to place themselves in the path of moving vehicles
— an apparent response to accusations that agents had stood in front of vehicles
to justify firing their weapons.
Agents have been assaulted with rocks 1,713 times since 2010 and have responded
with deadly force 43 times, resulting in 10 deaths, according to Mr. Fisher.
The memo set out to change the mind-sets of border patrol agents, who often
operate in rural settings where cover and backup can be scarce.
“I cannot stress enough how important it is to physically and mentally prepare
yourselves, so that when dangerous situations arise, you increase your chances
of survivability while limiting unnecessary risk to others,” Mr. Fisher wrote.
“It is anticipated that these initial steps will help reduce the likelihood of
assaults against our agents.”
The new instructions, which officials said amounted to a clarification rather
than a set of new rules, appear to be a response to two major criticisms in an
external investigation, commissioned by the Border Patrol in October 2012 and
completed early last year by the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum. The
study of 67 instances of force that resulted in 19 deaths on the Southwestern
border has not been released, though members of Congress have been briefed on
its findings.
Human rights advocates and congressional critics of the Border Patrol questioned
how much practical change would result from the instructions, calling them, at
best, a positive first step.
“Effectively, this is just the beginning of the process,” said Fernando Garcia,
executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights, an immigration
advocacy organization, adding that “it looks good on paper, but it also needs to
look good while being implemented.”
New recruits are already receiving training to help them keep confrontations
from escalating, according to a senior official with the Department of Homeland
Security. Veteran agents will be briefed on the new instructions over the next
several days and receive more guidance during annual training.
The secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson, also released redacted versions
of the use-of-force policies that apply to all of his department and specialized
policies for two of its agencies, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration
and Customs Enforcement.
“Transparency is essential to the credibility of a law enforcement agency within
the communities it operates,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement.
But some critics said it was impossible to assess the agency’s efforts to
improve without the release of the independent report.
A version of
this article appears in print on March 8, 2014,
on page A11 of
the New York edition with the headline:
Border Patrol
Instructed to Show Restraint.
Border Patrol Instructed to Show Restraint, NYT, 7.3.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/us/
border-patrol-instructed-to-show-restraint.html
Second-Class Noncitizens
JAN. 30,
2014
The New York Times
By MAE M. NGAI
REPUBLICAN
leaders in the House of Representatives on Thursday unveiled an agenda for
immigration reform. It is a welcome sign that seven months after the Senate
passed a comprehensive bill that included a path to citizenship for the 11
million immigrants now in the country illegally, there might be movement on the
issue this year.
The Republican proposal predicates legalization for the undocumented on
stringent requirements and border enforcement. The House speaker, John A.
Boehner, ruled out any “special path to citizenship” for undocumented migrants,
but seemed to leave open the possibility that they could eventually be
naturalized. Even that stance, however, is likely to raise hackles among
conservatives.
Those who take this ultraconservative position (including many aligned with the
Tea Party) are blind to the lessons of history. The United States has a long
track record not only of legalizing illegal immigrants, by legislative or
administrative action, but also of pairing legalization with a grant of
permanent residency, the prerequisite for naturalization.
After the passage of the severely restrictive National Origins Act of 1924,
which cut annual admissions of immigrants to the United States by 85 percent of
pre-World War I levels, many Europeans, wishing to join family members in
America, entered the country unlawfully. In the 1930s and 1940s, tens of
thousands of people, overwhelmingly Europeans and Canadians, were legalized by
the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Labor Department and the Justice
Department through various administrative programs. In each case, the adjustment
to legal status came with permanent residency.
Even the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, known mostly as a conservative immigration
measure, included provisions for suspending deportation orders in cases in which
deportation would separate families or otherwise result in hardship. These
provisions also included adjustment to permanent resident status. The most
recent legalization program, under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of
1986, granted permanent residency, or green cards, to 2.7 million people.
The rationale for the linking of legalization and permanent residency is
straightforward. Legalization recognizes that the undocumented have become part
of our society — by working, paying taxes, raising families, owning property and
the like. In other words, we recognize their de facto inclusion and we adjust
their status to align with that reality.
Not all immigrants wish to naturalize, of course, and none should be forced to
do so. But since the nation’s founding, we have always recognized that access to
citizenship is the best way to promote social and economic integration,
democratic participation and political equality.
The alternative now envisioned by some House members — legal status without
access to citizenship — would effectively create a new stratum of society, a
permanent second class of Americans.
We have been down that road before, with grim results. The Asiatic exclusion
laws, in force from the 1880s to the World War II era, were openly racist
attempts to protect America from the “yellow peril” and “unassimilables.” These
laws not only prohibited most prospective immigrants from China and other Asian
countries from entering; they also excluded all Asians from naturalized
citizenship, including merchants and professionals who were otherwise legal
residents. In most Western states exclusion from citizenship also meant
exclusion from owning agricultural property and from a range of occupations,
from teaching to commercial fishing.
Congress repealed the Chinese exclusion law in 1943, when China had become an
American war ally. By 1952 all the other Asian exclusion laws had fallen. In the
late 1950s the I.N.S. and Justice Department legalized some 30,000
Chinese-American “paper sons,” who had entered the country with false identities
in order to circumvent the Chinese exclusion laws. They, too, all received green
cards, and those who had served in the United States armed forces during World
War II instantly became citizens. In 2012 Congress expressed “regret” over the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Today’s political opposition to a path to citizenship is out of sync with
democratic principles, historical practice and the vast majority of public
opinion. It is punitive in spirit. It also suggests an unease with the prospect
of more Latino voters. Republicans seem divided between those who recognize the
need to appeal to the growing Latino electorate and those who would rather shut
out prospective Latino voters than try to win their support.
Citizenship is precious. That is precisely why it shouldn’t be held hostage to
narrow, defeatist and racially discriminatory partisan interests.
Mae M. Ngai is
a professor of history and Asian-American
studies at
Columbia and the author of “Impossible Subjects:
Illegal Aliens
and the Making of Modern America.”
A version of
this op-ed appears in print on January 31, 2014,
on page A27 of
the New York edition with the headline:
Second-Class
Noncitizens.
Second-Class Noncitizens, NYT, 30.1.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/31/opinion/second-class-noncitizens.html
Immigrants Seen as Way
to
Refill Detroit Ranks
JAN. 23,
2014
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY
For
Detroit, a city that has watched a population in free fall, officials have a new
antidote: immigrants.
Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan on Thursday announced plans to seek federal help in
bringing 50,000 immigrants to the bankrupt city over five years as part of a
visa program aimed at those with advanced degrees or exceptional abilities in
science, business or the arts.
Under the plan, which is expected to be formally submitted to federal
authorities soon, immigrants would be required to live and work in Detroit, a
city that has fallen to 700,000 residents from 1.8 million in the 1950s.
“Isn’t that how we made our country great, through immigrants?” said Mr. Snyder,
a Republican, who last year authorized the state’s largest city to seek
bankruptcy protection and recently announced plans to open a state office
focused on new Americans.
Later, he added, “Think about the power and the size of this program, what it
could do to bring back Detroit, even faster and better.”
The fate of Mr. Snyder’s particular plan — unusual, officials say, for the way
it envisions allotting such visas to a specific city — remains uncertain because
federal authorities have yet to receive a formal request. The proposal comes as
part of a push in Midwestern cities — including Chicago, St. Louis and Dayton,
Ohio — to jump-start growth by attracting entrepreneurial immigrants.
“This is one way you grow the economy,” said Richard Herman, a lawyer in
Cleveland who advises cities on such matters and who praised Mr. Snyder’s
notion. “The Rust Belt has needed this for decades.”
Mike Duggan, the new mayor of Detroit, who has said he wanted to see an increase
in the population within five years, said he backed the idea, as did an array of
city leaders who attended the governor’s announcement.
“What seemed like a politically impossible thing in Detroit has changed
dramatically,” Mr. Duggan said. “The leadership of this community is united in
saying we are going to take full advantage of the governor’s initiative and we
are going to make sure everybody understands that Detroit has been historically
and is today truly open to the world.”
Still the politics may yet be complicated in Detroit, a mostly black city where
38 percent of people live below the poverty level. “There will be some whose
vantage point is going to be: ‘O.K., but what are you going to do to help the
people who are already there?’ ” said Eric Foster, a political consultant in
Detroit.
The Rev. Charles Williams II of the civil rights group National Action Network
said he believed Detroit, as well as other Midwestern states, should be
pro-immigration. “However,” he said, “I will say, on the other end of this, I
think it’s a little ambitious for Governor Snyder to put together a plan to
induce more population when still we have to work on double-digit unemployment
and high poverty that’s already in our city right now.”
But advocates of bringing an influx of immigrants into the city say the outcome
will ultimately benefit longtime residents, too, bringing new business
enterprises and jobs, as well as a more stable tax base. “They’re going to have
jobs as part of this process but the part you should focus in on, in particular,
are all the jobs they’re going to create for Detroiters, for Michiganders,” Mr.
Snyder said.
Under Mr. Snyder’s proposal, 5,000 immigrants would be granted visas in the
first year to live and work in Detroit, under a program known as EB-2, in which
federal authorities are permitted to grant a maximum of 40,040 such visas
nationwide each year. Over the following four years, the number of visas for
Detroit-based immigrants with advanced degrees or exceptional ability would go
up, ending with 15,000 in the fifth year.
Mr. Snyder said demand already exists for experts in fields like engineering,
technology and health care. And he noted that Michigan colleges and universities
are home to tens of thousands of international students — many of whom, he said,
ought not depart after graduation.
Representatives for Mr. Snyder said the governor had already had high-level
discussions with federal officials about the concept but had yet to submit a
formal request. Federal authorities said it was too soon to comment on it.
But a White House official issued a statement about the administration’s broad
views, which said, in part, “President Obama is committed to honoring our
nation’s legacy of innovation and competitiveness by attracting the world’s best
and brightest students and entrepreneurs to start the next great companies here
in the United States.”
A version of
this article appears in print on January 24, 2014,
on page A12 of
the New York edition with the headline:
Immigrants
Seen as Way To Refill Detroit Ranks.
Immigrants Seen as Way to Refill Detroit Ranks, NYT, 23.1.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/us/
immigrants-seen-as-way-to-refill-detroit-ranks.html
Old Job
Is Hurdle for Napolitano
on
Campuses
JAN. 20,
2014
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA
SANTA
BARBARA, Calif. — The choice sounded ingenious: Take a high-profile political
figure — a former governor and cabinet member — and have her apply her acumen to
the task of rebuilding one of the great public university systems ravaged by
decades of eroding state support.
So when Janet Napolitano, the former secretary of homeland security and governor
of Arizona, was named president of the University of California last summer,
expectations soared.
But her political skill was confronted almost immediately by a liability on
campuses filled with foreign-born students, hundreds of whom lack legal
immigration status — her role in the Obama administration’s deportation of 1.9
million unauthorized immigrants.
Now Ms. Napolitano faces a dual task of reviving the University of California
and simultaneously overcoming the deep distrust of her within some quarters of
the system.
So she has relied on a time-tested political strategy: the listening tour. Ms.
Napolitano has spent days at each of the 10 campuses, attending lectures,
touring labs and holding meetings with students, faculty members and staff
members. Any one of them can easily rattle off the problems caused by state
budget cuts: tuition that has more than doubled, star faculty members who left
for higher-paying private universities where their research would be fully
funded, and academic counselors crushed by increasing caseloads.
Launch media viewer
Students opposed to deportations demonstrated as Ms. Napolitano toured the
campus there. Richard Hartog for The New York Times
But at nearly every stop along the tour she has also been confronted by
protesters whose fury is not about the budget. As she walked into the faculty
club at the University of California, Santa Barbara, one recent evening, for
example, the polite chatter welcoming her fought a din of “Napolitano has got to
go.” When Chancellor Henry T. Yang walked over to the students mounting the
objection, they asked: “How can you support her? She’s hurt our families.”
When Ms. Napolitano appeared on a panel about Latinas in education that was
sponsored by Eva Longoria, the Mexican-American actress with a master’s degree
in Chicano studies, the ushers’ directions to the arriving audience were drowned
out by shouts of “Education, not deportation!”
“What this reveals is a law that doesn’t match our moral standards, and that
weight is falling on these students,” Ms. Napolitano said after another student
protester interrupted her at the panel. As she tells her critics, she has always
argued that enforcement of existing laws is the only way to get lawmakers to
back a comprehensive immigration overhaul.
In one of her first policy changes this fall, Ms. Napolitano announced that she
would set aside $5 million to assist the roughly 1,000 undocumented students in
the system, spread across the campuses. The money is a tiny fraction of the $25
billion overall budget, but it won praise from Latino leaders and campus
activists, who will decide whether to use the money for specialized counseling
centers or direct scholarships.
“The legacy of deportations is going to be with her for a long time to come, and
it is something that she is going to have to live with,” said Antonia Hernandez,
the president of the California Community Foundation and a former chairwoman of
the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who spoke with Ms.
Napolitano at the University of California, Los Angeles. “She is acknowledging
that diversity is a weakness that the system needs to address. If it is only
educating the wealthy upper class, there is not going to be a lot of will to put
money into that kind of public institution.”
Complaints about deportations are just the beginning of Ms. Napolitano’s
challenges. For years, the state has put less and less money into the university
system, reducing the state’s contribution to levels not seen since the Great
Depression — forcing the system to increasingly rely on tuition, government
research grants and private dollars, even as it reduced the number of courses
offered and cut back on library hours. In many ways, Ms. Napolitano’s primary
job is convincing people who will never set foot on a University of California
campus that the system deserves their tax dollars.
She is not the sort of magnetic leader who wins over skeptics with charm. But
what she lacks in charisma she makes up in dogged efforts, inviting some of her
harshest critics to intimate meetings and quickly deciding whether their
criticisms warrant action. She travels with a beefy security detail provided by
the university. At 56, she has never married and is a self-described wonkish
workaholic, telling audiences that she takes home budgets to read in bed.
That hard-nosed demeanor could make her the perfect match for Gov. Jerry Brown,
who has become deeply involved in the university over the past year and is
arguably the most important figure in its future. The governor, who served on
the search committee that selected Ms. Napolitano, has insisted that a $140
million increase proposed in the governor’s budget this year be tied to a
tuition freeze and an improving graduation rate.
Even as she continues to court the public, Ms. Napolitano’s most pressing
long-term task is to convince the governor and state legislators that the system
both needs and deserves more money to regain its luster.
“We need to make it clear that when we ask for something we’re not just going
with our hand out to be a supplicant, but we’re saying this is an investment and
here are all the many ways we are going to give you a return on that
investment,” Ms. Napolitano said in a recent interview. “The days of just
getting money are over. We have to be a place — and we are — that the state can
turn to help solve its problems.”
To bolster her case, Ms. Napolitano is encouraging more work on sustainable
energy, convinced that researchers across the system can help the state cut down
on fuel costs and the system’s environmental impact. She is explaining how
medical research affects patients all over the world. And she is constantly
explaining the way the state’s economic success depends on the university.
With the need for more money, the university system has increasingly relied on
out-of-state and foreign students, who pay a far higher tuition rate. While such
students still make up less than 10 percent of the overall enrollment, the
reliance has fueled the widespread notion that local high school students are
being squeezed out of the system. And many state and university leaders fret
that Latinos continue to lag behind the numbers of whites and Asians enrolling
in the system.
While blacks and Latinos make up more than half the graduating high school
seniors in California, they account for less than a third of the university
system’s freshman class. A video by a U.C.L.A. student lamenting the low number
of black males who graduate there each year has garnered attention, illustrating
the need for Ms. Napolitano and other top officials to sell the system to the
public.
These days, Ms. Napolitano speaks about financial aid any time she has an
audience. In courting Latino leaders both on and off campuses, she has
implicitly acknowledged the importance of having their support and of changing
the topic from deportation to education.
“At some point, I hope the protesters evolve and realize that it is not going to
foster immigration reform in this country,” Ms. Napolitano said in an interview.
“But I am the one with the ability to foster a thriving education system for
them, and they’re not inhibiting my ability to get at it.”
A version of
this article appears in print on January 21, 2014,
on page A11 of
the New York edition with the headline:
Old Job Is
Hurdle For Napolitano On Campuses.
Old Job Is Hurdle for Napolitano on Campuses, NYT, 20.1.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/education/
old-job-is-hurdle-for-napolitano-on-campuses.html
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