National Anthems: Home | Africa | Americas | Asia | Australia&Oceania | Europe | Olympic Anthem |
 
Passports: Home [ Africa ] [ Americas, Australia & Oceania] [ Asia] [ Europe] [ Other documents ] 
Travel:[Europe] [ Asia ] [ USA-Canada ] [ Latin-America ] [ Africa ] [ Australia ] [ Carabben ] [ Air ] [Cruises ]
Forum
Live chat

Re: NYT: A Mother Deported, and a Child Left Behind Posted on: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 22:08:55 +0000 (UTC)

kuacou241@yahoo.com (Kuacou) wrote in message news:<32c7c550.0411240208.58726560@posting.google.com>...
> The New York Times
> November 24, 2004
> A Mother Deported, and a Child Left Behind
> By NINA BERNSTEIN
>
>
> Photo 1:
> http://tinyurl.com/44zn5
> Caption:
> Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
> Carlos Feliz has struggled to support his daughter, Virginia, since
> his wife was deported last year.
>
>
> In April of last year, when her mother dropped by federal immigration
> headquarters in Manhattan to complete some paperwork, 8-year-old
> Virginia Feliz became part of a growing tribe of American children who
> have lost a parent to deportation.
>
> Her mother, Berly, 47, who migrated to the United States illegally a
> decade ago, went to the immigration office on a routine visit to renew
> her work authorization. But because an old deportation order had
> resurfaced, she was quickly clapped into handcuffs, and within hours
> placed on a plane to her native Honduras, unable to say goodbye to her
> husband and little girl.
>
> "I'm not happy; I'm sad," said Virginia, who lives in a small Bronx
> apartment. "Because it's not fair that everybody else has their mom
> except me." She dropped onto a couch next to her disabled father,
> Carlos Feliz, an American citizen who was born in the Dominican
> Republic, declaring that she hates her last name, which means happy in
> Spanish.
>
> No one keeps track of exactly how many American children were left
> behind by the record 186,000 noncitizens expelled from the United
> States last year, or the 887,000 others required to make a "voluntary
> departure." But immigration experts say there are tens of thousands of
> children every year who lose a parent to deportation. As the debate
> over immigration policy heats up, such broken families are troubling
> people on all sides, and challenging schools and mental health clinics
> in immigrant neighborhoods.
>
>
> Photo 2:
> http://tinyurl.com/6gwez
> Caption:
> Carlos, Berly and Virginia Feliz when Virginia was about 2 years old.
> Virginia, now 8, has been told that Mrs. Feliz is caring for a sick
> relative.
>
>
> Officials at the Department of Homeland Security say they are simply
> enforcing laws adopted in 1996, which all but eliminated the
> discretion of immigration officers to consider family ties before
> enforcing an old order of removal.
>
> "There are millions of people who are illegally in the United States,
> and it's unfortunate, when they're caught, seeing a family split up,"
> said William Strassberger, a spokesman for federal immigration
> services. "But the person has to be answerable for their actions."
>
> Federal officials said they leave time for parents to make
> arrangements for their children, and refer them to a social service
> agency if necessary. Many parents arrange to leave American-born
> children with relatives or friends; others, especially those who have
> no one to assume responsibility for a child, take the children along
> when they are expelled.
>
> "People refer to that as a Sophie's choice situation," he said. "Where
> the child is going to be is left up to the parent."
>
> As a practical matter, arrangements for a child left behind may be
> hasty at best, said Janet Sabel, who directs the immigration law unit
> of the Legal Aid Society. One mother about to be deported to Nicaragua
> last year was told to leave her four children with her husband, Ms.
> Sabel said. But the husband was an abusive drug user, and finally the
> mother persuaded the immigration officer to give her a few days to
> make other arrangements. A priest referred her to Legal Aid, which
> reopened the case, stopping the deportation.
>
> "There's a happy ending to this story," Ms. Sabel said, "but the fact
> is, there was total luck in her finding her way to us."
>
> By all reports Virginia Feliz had been a happy 6-year-old before her
> mother's expulsion. Two months later, doctors at the Child and
> Adolescent Mental Health Program of Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center
> found that she had a major depressive disorder marked by
> hyperactivity, nightmares, bed-wetting, frequent crying and fights at
> school. Now, medical records show, she takes antidepressant drugs and
> sees a therapist, but the problems persist.
>
> In a letter to the Department of Homeland Security last year, Dr.
> Victor Sierra, the clinic's director, made no bones about the
> underlying problem: "Absent mother, secondary to deportation." Another
> six to eight months may pass before the American Embassy in Honduras
> even processes her mother's application to return, officials say.
>
> In Brooklyn, similar cases cause concern for Birdette
> Gardiner-Parkinson, the clinical director at the Caribbean Community
> Mental Health program at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center. In one, she
> said, an outgoing, academically gifted 12-year-old began failing
> classes, mutilating herself and having suicidal thoughts after her
> Colombian father disappeared into removal proceedings. In another
> case, nightmares and school failure plague the youngest of six
> children whose father, a cabdriver with 20 years' residence in the
> United States, was deported to Nigeria six hours after he reported for
> a green card interview, seemingly for unpaid traffic fines, Ms.
> Gardiner-Parkinson said.
>
> "The impact is very devastating," Ms. Gardiner-Parkinson said. "When
> children lose a family member this way, even though they may have a
> phone conversation with them, the physical separation feels like
> death."
>
> The distress of children left behind in the United States echoes that
> of children left on the southern side of the border, say scholars of
> transnational migration like Leah Schmalzbauer, a social
> anthropologist who recently conducted a two-year research project on
> families split between Honduras and the United States.
>
> The numbers are expected to swell, added Ms. Schmalzbauer, now an
> assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Montana State
> University. Families in poor countries like Honduras can no longer
> manage without remittances from the United States, and women are
> beginning to replace men as the primary migrants, filling growing
> demands here for low-cost elder care, domestic work and other service
> jobs.
>
> "There's no protection for that undocumented labor, and even though we
> speak of family values, there's also no protection for the children,"
> she said. "The research shows the emotional impacts are huge, whether
> they're separated from parents on this side or on the other side of
> the border."
>
> To advocates of greater restriction on immigration, such families
> illustrate the painful consequences of poor enforcement in the past,
> and point to the perils of guest worker programs like one proposed by
> President Bush.
>
> "Once you let the person stay in the United States, it becomes
> extremely difficult in our society to make them go," said Steven
> Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies
> in Washington. "How are you going to keep them from falling in love,
> getting married and having U.S.-born children?"
>
> To critics of the sterner laws adopted in 1996, such cases show that
> more systematic enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001, is compounding the
> laws' contradictions and loss of discretion.
>
> "The cornerstone, the bedrock of immigration law is family unity,"
> said Jeffrey A. Feinbloom, an immigration lawyer who has been working
> for Mrs. Feliz's return since her deportation and has been frustrated
> by delays in processing. "The interest of the government in removing
> this woman pales in comparison with her suffering and her family's.
> And this child is a citizen, this husband is a citizen. What about
> their rights?"
>
> In a telephone interview from Honduras, Mrs. Feliz acknowledged
> entering the United States illegally in 1994. She said she made the
> dangerous journey through Mexico because she could no longer afford to
> buy clothes, food and school supplies for her son, then 13.
>
> Caught within hours of crossing the border, she was soon released on
> bond and fled to New York. When she failed to show up in a Texas
> immigration court, she was ordered deported in absentia. But like the
> great majority of such orders, it was not pursued for years, and Mrs.
> Feliz went to work, first as a live-in housekeeper, then in low-wage
> factory jobs.
>
> After her 1996 marriage, when she applied for a green card, federal
> immigration officials not only issued her an official work
> authorization several times, but also allowed her husband, as an
> American citizen and new stepfather, to sponsor the teenage son she
> had left in Honduras.
>
> Now that son, Cesar, is 24 and a lawful permanent resident with his
> own American child, while his mother is back where she began, without
> a job or her children.
>
> "I don't have peace because I'm not with my little girl," she said in
> Spanish, breaking down. "I don't eat. I don't sleep. I can't be
> without her - I have no life."
>
> The hardest part, she said, is that in telephone calls her daughter
> sometimes tells her, "You didn't take me with you; you're a bad
> person."
>
> "I can't handle that," she said.
>
> In the Bronx, Mr. Feliz, 48, who was disabled by a back injury in a
> workplace accident four years ago, said he was struggling to support
> Virginia without his wife's earnings and was also being treated for
> depression. He did not have the heart to tell Virginia her mother had
> been deported, he added. Instead, he initially told Virginia that her
> mother was caring for a sick relative in Honduras, a story her mother
> has repeated in telephone calls.
>
> Such lies are commonplace as shaken parents try to shield young
> children from the reality of deportation, counselors said. But the
> deception may only increase feelings of abandonment, anger and
> insecurity as the children hunt for reasons they were left behind.
>
> When the visitor remarked that she was pretty, Virginia, a doe-eyed
> child with a caramel complexion, loudly disagreed. "I'm ugly!" she
> insisted. "I want to be white, white, white."
>
> Asked about her mother's departure, she said: "I was really mad. How
> come she didn't take me?"
>
>
> http://nytimes.com/2004/11/24/nyregion/24deport.html





As someone else said, it's a start!!