Category: Family reunification

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George W. Bush on a path to citizenship for undocumented spouses

The remarkable thing about this 2001 letter from former President George W. Bush to Congress, is the numbers: 500,000 undocumented immigrants eligible for green cards with their U.S. citizen or permanent resident relatives, a majority of whom are spouses and 200,000 who missed the deadline because of Congressional inaction. That was 10 years ago:

The White House,
Washington, May 1, 2001
Hon. J. Dennis Hastert,
Speaker of the House of Representatives,
Washington, DC.

Dear Mr. Speaker: I am a strong proponent of government
policies that recognize the importance of families and that
help to strengthen them. To the extent possible, I believe that
our immigration policies should reflect that philosophy. That
is why I support legislation to extend the window created under
section 245(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act during
which qualified immigrants may obtain legal residence in the
United States without being forced to first leave the country
and their families for several years.

According to agency estimates, there are more than 500,000
undocumented immigrants in the country who are eligible to
become legal permanent residents, primarily because of their
family relationship with a citizen or legal permanent resident.
However, the law generally requires them to go back to their
home country to obtain a visa, and once they do so, they are
barred from returning to the United States for up to 10 years.
Many choose to risk remaining here illegally rather than to be
separated from their families for those many years. This issue
has been the subject of discussion in the Working Group that
Attorney General Ashcroft and Secretary of State Powell co-
chair with officials of the Mexican government, and should be
addressed to ensure a more orderly, legal, and humane migration
flow between our countries.

I encourage the Congress to consider whether there was
adequate time for persons eligible under section 245(i) to
apply for adjustment of status before the filing deadline
expired yesterday. Information indicates an estimated 200,000
were eligible to file but did not meet the deadline.
Preliminary reports suggest that many applicants were unable to
complete their paperwork in time, due in part to the fact that
the rules explaining how the provision would be applied were
not issued until late March. It remains in our national
interest to legitimize those resident immigrants, eligible for
legal status, and to welcome them as full participants of our
society. But we will only be able to do this if the path to
legalization encourages family reunification. For this reason,
I would support legislation that temporarily extends the
recently expired April 30, 2001, filing deadline, while
maintaining the requirement that the applicant was physically
present in the United States on December 21, 2000.

I look forward to working with you on this important
legislation.

Sincerely,
George Bush

Also remarkable: the civil language on strengthening the family, the use of “undocumented” rather than “illegal” and the assertion that undocumented husbands, wives, parents and children, are actually eligible for visas, not merely “deportable aliens.”

Did I mention that was (only) 10 years ago?

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Days of impending reunions

We had 24 hours of intense conversation and experience of family separation and impending reunion, in several formats this weekend.

Friday night, my wife and I went to see One Way: A Tuareg Journey, a very thoughtful documentary about a Tuareg family from Niger that immigrates to Northern Italy, where the father works at an electronics assembly plant. The father left first, in the hopes of earning some money for his family. A year or two later, he sent for his wife and two older children, who quickly adapt to life in Italy, thriving in Italian and soaking up knowledge and culture.

For about three years, the family is separated from the youngest son, who did not have a birth certificate or some other identity document and was not able to join the family in Italy. (In a particularly compelling scene, the boy takes a piece of scrap paper and fills it with geometric shapes, calling it his papers.) Filmmaker Fabio Caramaschi captured the intense reunion of father and young son in the desert, when the softening, westernizing father returns to collect his Tuareg son, who was left with grandpa to work the camel train and survive in the harsh Saharan climate. The son, al-Kassoum, is a brilliant 6-year-old upon his arrival in Italy, and is able to reflect on the stark cultural differences and opine that he’d rather return to Niger, to the desert.

On Saturday, we went to a birthday party for 1-year-old Sara, whose parents, Veronica and Juan, will appear in Amor and Exile. Sara has never met her father because he is in Mexico and barred from returning to the United States for a long time. Juan called from Mexico while we were at the house and spent a long time on the phone with his brother, his nieces and singing Happy Birthday to his baby. While he was emotional about missing the pink cake and kid games (as was I), Juan and Veronica are planning to reunite in Mexico before year’s end and their excitement was palpable.

Then we rushed home to meet another friend, a man from the Congo who had a kind of life changing experience this past week that is nearly unimaginable to me. I am just going to give the rough outlines here, because I think he is going to be telling his own story soon, but on Friday, Benjamin located his wife and two daughters in Kampala, Uganda after 14 years of searching. They spoke on the phone—well hardly spoke, they mostly cried on the phone, both in a state of shock. Benjamin lived in a refugee camp in Zambia after fleeing the Congo in 1997 and recently resettled in Boise. He had spoken to my wife, who works for a refugee organization here, about being unsure when to admit that he would never see his family again. And then, all of a sudden, some newly resettled Congolese refugees in Ohio got to talking and connected the dots between Benjamin in Idaho and his wife and kids in Uganda and all of a sudden they were on the phone, talking to one another again. Now he is trying to figure out how to meet them, again.

These disparate, yet related stories of family separation—whether through government policy, economics, war or some combination of the three—are all connected in my mind. And they serve as a reminder that the conservative talking point of “Family Values” is perhaps a good starting point, or re-starting point, for a national discussion on migration policy. The stories I have been reporting for the past year and a half all make that point and my discussions this weekend make the same point on a global scale: in a world of globalized culture and markets, the family is still a basic unit that requires some basic protections.

While brushing my 6-year-old’s teeth last night I was careful to avoid the two, extremely loose front chompers. She asked me if kids in the Congo lose their teeth because Benjamin had been quite impressed with the way she pushed them out with her tongue. I choked up a bit explaining that he missed his own daughters’ tooth-losing period. But I am confident that he will soon find a way to reunite with his now-teenage daughters and that Juan will soon get to meet his baby and that Sidi’s family’s one-way trip will not rob them of the essential wisdom of the desert.

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Americans, family members caught in Secure Communities dragnet

The airing of the PBS Frontline documentary Lost in Detention last week is part of a growing awareness across the country of the gravity of the Bush-Obama immigrant detention dragnet.

White House immigration advisor Cecilia Muñoz

I thought the film itself lacked focus and was dramatized in an unfortunate, made-for-television way. But the accompanying website, linked above is very useful and contains full text of the interviews that were obviously cut into sound bytes for the film, like this one of Obama Administration director of intergovernmental affairs and immigration advisor Cecilia Muñoz:

Frontline: Does President Obama believe that his aggressive policy in immigration and enforcement has been successful?

Cecilia Muñoz: The president has said a number of times, he swore an oath to uphold the law. It’s our responsibility to enforce the laws that we’ve got. Congress gives us resources to enforce the laws that we’ve got. But how we do it matters a lot. He’s talked about that as well.

And later in the interview, Muñoz picks up this same idea.

Muñoz: But at the end of the day, when you have immigration law that’s broken and you have a community of 10 million, 11 million people living and working in the United States illegally, some of these things are going to happen. Even if the law is executed with perfection, there will be parents separated from their children.

They don’t have to like it, but it is a result of having a broken system of laws. And the answer to that problem is reforming the law, making sure that we have an immigration system that works here. You can’t fix the heartbreaking things that happen as a result of immigration enforcement just through enforcement policy. You have to fix that by reforming the law, and that requires the Congress to act, which is why the president has been pushing them so hard.

It’s the same line that unnamed ICE officials have taken on a recent report from the UC-Berkeley Law School condemning Secure Communities for, among other things, possibly arresting some 3,600 American citizens.

ICE officials called the report “misleading and inaccurate,” saying Secure Communities has enhanced public safety and that the report failed to acknowledge ICE’s responsibility to determine who is in the country illegally.

“If there is a question about an individual’s status, ICE conducts appropriate follow-up. If the individual is a U.S. citizen, ICE takes no additional action. In exercising its civil immigration functions, ICE does not detain U.S. citizens,” the agency said in a statement released in response to the report.—Identical quote at San Jose Mercury News and Salon.com

The report in question expands on an American Immigration Lawyers’ Association survey that we wrote about in August. The University of California—Berkeley Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy completed a study of Secure Communities [full report .pdf]. Among the findings:

  • Approximately 3,600 United States citizens have been arrested by ICE through the Secure Communities program
  • More than one-third (39%) of individuals arrested through Secure Communities report that they have a U.S. citizen spouse (5%) or child (37%), meaning that approximately 88,000 families with U.S. citizen members have been impacted by Secure Communities
  • Latinos comprise 93% of individuals arrested through Secure Communities though they only comprise 77% of the undocumented population in the United States

Let me repeat that: based on extrapolations of a smaller data set that the law school obtained through the settlement of a lawsuit between ICE and the National Day Labor Organizing Network, 3,600 U.S. citizens may have been held by ICE since October 2008 and some 88,000 families with U.S. citizen members have been affected by Secure Communities.

“Overall, the findings point to a system in which individuals are pushed through rapidly, without appropriate checks or opportunities to challenge their detention and/or deportation. This conclusion is particularly concerning given that the findings also reveal that people are being apprehended who should never have been placed in immigration custody, and that certain groups are over-represented in our sample population.” —Warren Report

The most chilling line in the report, for me, is that the family connections of detainees to U.S. citizens are likely underestimates: “… as immigrants may fear disclosing personal information to immigration authorities, particularly if they live in mixed-status families and fear negative consequences for family members because many detainees do not want to implicate their families in their immigration cases.”

But it works the other way as well. The 88,000 or more American families caught in this system are often not able or willing to speak out on behalf of their detained relatives because of legal concerns, family complications, lack of access to media, advocacy groups or legal aid and their sheer need to survive while a spouse or parent is held and likely deported. And so we rarely hear their stories. Obama does not hear their stories. Republican presidential candidates do not hear the stories of American citizens detained by ICE or the American spouses of immigrants put in deportation proceeding because of a broken tail light.

That is the collateral damage that Muñoz calls inevitable in our democracy, a mere budget line item, and the cost of doing law enforcement.

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An excerpt from “Commemoration”

As Nathaniel can probably also attest, it’s a juggling act to have two blogs at the same time. I tend to write deeply personal posts, often about motherhood, culture shock, and conservation issues on my personal blog. But when it comes to how my life is affected by the political circumstances we write about in Amor and Exile (that also affects many other couples), these subjects overlap.

This is an excerpt from my most recent post on my blog The Succulent Seer. It’s about me getting Mexican citizenship and celebrating my daughter’s first birthday within a few days of each other:

The possibility of running out of money hasn’t occurred to me for at least 10 years, back when I was struggling to get on my feet as a recent college graduate. But when they turned me away at the SRE doors and I sat down on the bench outside with the baby, after 5 years of underemployment, and contemplating the possibility that my application for citizenship had been for naught, I wondered if heartless bureaucrats would continue to empty my pockets until I failed to even qualify for either a visa OR citizenship—and then how would my husband and I be together? I broke down in tears. So as to not get stuck in the paperless limbo land that my husband lived in the U.S., I decided to go ahead and reapply for the visa at the eleventh hour, on September 15th, the day before Mexican Independence Day. It was the last day I could submit my papers.

We were down in the commercial district making our way to the bank to transfer money to the INM coffers for the right to be here another year with my family when I got a phone call from my contact at SRE. Only that I couldn’t answer because I’d just dropped my cell phone on the ground and I could hear nothing on the other end. I ran outside to get my husband’s cell phone, ran into the grocery store to put credit on the phone, and ran back out to call my contact. “Is Syracuse spelled with a ‘Y’?” he asked. I stammered yes, wondering if this really meant my wait was over.

I’ve included the link to the full post if you want to read it there.

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ICE’s “Secure Communities” and American spouses

Click to read AILA Report

The American Immigration Lawyers Association has just released a report that documents 127 cases of immigrants who were taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody after minor interactions with local law enforcement officials. This often happens through the Department of Homeland Security’s “Secure Communities” program, which has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks. Secure Communities provides immigration authorities with fingerprints from local jails, but DHS has several other means of scanning arrestees for immigration violations including 287g, which deputizes some local police and sheriffs to enforce immigration laws and the Criminal Alien Program, which screens inmates in select jails and prisons for immigration violations.

Perhaps most chilling, however, as documented in the AILA report, is the tendency of local law enforcement, including U.S. Forest Service rangers in one example, to call in ICE after routine traffic stops and hand the case over to them.

The opposition to Secure Communities and to the large numbers of deportations under the Obama administration that the program has facilitated, is still being led by fearless undocumented youth, as evidenced by demonstrations in Chicago and Los Angeles (see YouTube video below). But as the numbers of U.S. citizens or permanent residents with close relatives and friends caught up in this federal dragnet increase, a new opportunity for protest is on the rise.

Of the 127 cases the AILA report documents, at least 27 of the immigrants in deportation proceedings have U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouses or fiances. Four are dating American citizens. And even more have U.S. citizen children, siblings and parents. Imagine for a moment that you are driving with your husband in Florida, you get a ticket and when you go to court to challenge it, your husband is arrested by ICE agents and placed in deportation proceedings:

In 2010, a man in Florida was a passenger in a car driven by his wife, a U.S. citizen, when the car was pulled over. The wife was given a ticket for driving without a license. The wife went to traffic court to challenge the ticket because she had a valid driver’s license. The man accompanied her to court. Even though the wife was a U.S. citizen, she was not fluent in English because she had spent many years outside the U.S. However, plainclothes ICE agents were at the courthouse arresting people who needed an interpreter, and they arrested both the man and his wife. He has been placed in removal proceedings and has no relief other than voluntary departure. He was the sole source of support for his wife and two U.S. citizen children. He also helped support his wife’s U.S. citizen sister and her two children. —AILA Case Study #26

These cases are occurring all over the country at all times of day and night. Even Good Samaritans and VICTIMS of crimes are being caught in the dragnet:

In September 2007, a man called the police after being the victim of a hit and run car accident in New Mexico. The sheriff’s deputy who responded to the call repeatedly asked the man if he was “illegal.” When he finally admitted to being in the country unlawfully, deputy arrested him. He was held until ICE picked him up and was eventually deported to Mexico. His lawful permanent resident wife and their U.S. citizen child moved to Mexico as well. —AILA Case Study #83

I cannot see how President Obama, a student of the 1960s Civil Rights struggle can watch this type of injustice occur, much less sit idly by as “citizens”—and I use that term in the broadest way possible, as in good citizens—take to the streets over it.

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Immigration talk on Capitol Hill

Last week, while visiting family on the East Coast, I spent a day in Washington, D.C. I hoped to interview several congressmen about their views on mixed immigration status couples but my timing was really bad: I arrived the day after the debt ceiling vote and most lawmakers were on their way home to “brag” about their votes. But I ended up meeting with staffers in two congressional offices and I think our background conversations were even more valuable than an interview with the elected officials would have been.

Though mixed status couples have not gotten very much press compared to other groups seeking immigration relief (like DREAM Act students or same-sex couples), there are some very good ideas floating around Capitol Hill, backed by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The CHC and individual lawmakers have requested that the Obama Administration:

  • Switch to processing waivers to the 3- and 10-year bars (essentially pardons for SOME undocumented immigrants who would otherwise have a family visa available) inside the United States, rather than forcing tens of thousands of relatives of Americans to travel abroad while waiting for their applications to be processed.
  • Expand the definition of “extreme hardship”—the standard for getting the above-mentioned waiver—so it includes separation from a spouse, for example, or from U.S. citizen children. These seem obvious, but currently Americans have to prove that they will suffer medical or serious financial hardship for their immigrant partners to win these cases.

I also heard that the Obama administration is very sensitive to media coverage—both in English and Spanish language press—on immigration reform. Perhaps this is obvious or old news, but I was surprised by some of the examples of press determining policy that staffers offered. I have to confirm this notion further.

I also realized that Obama is about two years behind the curve in thinking on Comprehensive Immigration Reform, a tactic that many in the pro-immigrant movement abandoned in favor of individually tweaking policies that help mixed status families, students, youth, and same-sex couples. Maybe a year ago, there were still a few pro-immigrant congressman who were saying they wanted comprehensive reform or nothing. The DREAM Act activists changed their tune by successfully demanding a vote and now Obama (and other presidential candidates who do not want to take a stand) is the only one talking about comprehensive or nothing. At least many Republicans talk about specific policies like border control or mass deportations—as flawed as their logic is—rather than the vagaries or Russian Roulette of comprehensive reform.

Another view from Capitol Hill is that LGBT advocates have made better headway in working with the immigration agencies than the undocumented in part because La Migra has a built in bias against people in the country illegally, but not necessarily against same-sex couples. Of course, those groups do overlap frequently and many same-sex couples are going to need the same relief that mixed-status couples are seeking, be it in-country processing, an expanded hardship definition or a legalization program.

Walking across Capitol Hill, from the Senate office buildings to the House side, you have to pass right in back of the U.S. Capitol. I’m always struck by how small it looks from the back: the nation’s capitol is just another building really (as is the Supreme Court, which sits just off the back lawn). I’m struck by how members of Congress appear so normal looking away from the TV cameras, as they walk to lunch or to their cars, sweating just like everyone else. While the business of governing exudes a mystical, larger-than-life persona on the evening news and in the papers, it’s just regular folks there in Washington, trying to keep themselves sane and popular. It’s worth a stroll around the congressional parking lot every few years to remember that.

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Summer Family Reunion, Mission Impossible, Part II

A friend of mine is a midwife educator and we took a few classes with her before our baby was born. In one of them, on the topic of pain, she introduced us to a great saying: FEAR is False Expectations Approaching Reality. It buoyed me at the time in the hopes that labor wouldn’t be as painful as I expected. Although I can’t say the birth of my daughter was less painful than I feared, I can say that traveling to the U.S. with her was.

There were many things that allowed my FEAR to be just that—false expectations. Some things were better than I worried they’d be, and some things were worse. But overall, it was a much more pleasant experience than I imagined—as another American friend who’s a long-timer in Mexico has suspected may be the case with me, I might be psyching myself out to be pleasantly surprised in the end. Not a typical personality characteristic of mine, but when it comes to love and exile, it can be a useful tactic.

The cost was not a problem because I did not keep track of how much money I spent like I have on other trips. Why bother? Keeping track of my receipts wouldn’t change how much I had to shell out, that I’ve been unemployed for the last 24 months, or that my financial safety net is developing some seriously large holes. In the end, I had enough to get back home.

The family reunion was a success, if you don’t count the fact that my husband wasn’t there. But then again, neither were several aunts, uncles, and cousins…so why be nit-picky? The important thing was that my daughter got to see her grandparents (my parents) again, meet her uncle (my brother) and his fiancée, her great-aunt & uncle and a couple of their relatives, a good handful of my high school friends, and a large number of my parents’ friends from work.

One unexpected dynamic was that despite his absence, Margo had a much stronger presence than past trips, and I chalk that up to him being present through our daughter. She looks a lot like him, questions directed to me about her invariably brought him up, and many people intuited how much she (and me, by default) must miss him.  So it was nice not having to tiptoe around the subject of his absence like a big white elephant.

I’d done my grieving over not being able to get a Canadian visa for Margo for travel. I’d prepared myself emotionally and let loose a few floodgates en route to have the best mindset possible upon arrival. Sure, a few tense moments occurred as can happen with anyone traveling with kids and aligning parenting philosophies with the grandparents. But I was surprisingly solid when it came to not falling apart.

It might have been because I convinced myself, as I told our daughter, that there were some good things about him staying home: he had to work, we saved money, someone had to feed the chickens and the bunny and the cats and water the garden, someone had to watch the house. So when we’d make our phone calls, it felt more like he was serving a purpose back home than languishing lamenting about not being with us. That was fortunate.

I also might not have had time to grieve his absence since I was so darn busy taking care of the baby. Besides fully co-parenting with my husband, we also had someone coming in a few days a week to help with the baby for the month before we left, and so I was used to getting a large amount of help with the baby at all hours. Her grandparents were great with her, feeding, entertaining, and bathing her to everyone’s delight, but spending the nights getting up alone with her and putting her to bed during Fourth of July fireworks and the days prior were more tiring than normal.

One FEAR that was more true than I expected was the exhaustion factor of the actual bus and air travel by ourselves. But even so, it was kind of funny to see a couple in the airport with two young kids bickering over some aspect of parental care mid-escalator ride. In the state I was in, baby hanging from the sling, (albeit balanced nicely with backpack weight), with luggage in tow, I smiled knowingly at the woman and said, just breathe. She looked surprised for a moment but then smiled back at me. Then they went back to their bickering and I thought to myself, I don’t have to deal with that aspect of traveling together, even if my back is aching!

The author and her daughter at her parents' home in NY

Another silver lining to the exhaustion was that all of that extra time with the baby by myself also led to something special—we bonded like when she was a newborn, and that was perhaps the sweetest unexpected benefit of all.

When I got back to Mexico, I got some feedback from friends with children that gave me some insight about the fact that, although I may have unique circumstances as to why my husband isn’t able to travel with us, it’s surprisingly common for many of my friends to fall into the traveling alone with kids department. One friend related how her husband is stuck in the PhD program from hell for almost 10 years, which has forced her to strike out camping on her own with two small boys. A new American friend here in Mexico traveled alone with not one but two kids up to the States in June—not because her husband doesn’t qualify for a visa but because he forgot to renew it. Others travel alone because their spouses can’t get time off work.

Although I feel womanly solidarity in that we all face similar challenges with our children and I empathize with their spouses’ unavailability for travel (and I also bow down to their ability to juggle multiple infants alone!), when I mentioned this to Margo, as well as the pros of the “holding down the fort” argument, he wasn’t 100% convinced. “Yeah that’s all true, but I would like to go.” Knowing he’s someone who doesn’t express their wants and needs often, his words didn’t fall on deaf ears. And perhaps that is the one expectation that most disappointingly approached reality: that on the subject of traveling together as a family,  reunion or otherwise, bright sides or not, ultimately we didn’t have any choice but for Daddy to stay home.

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Tony and Janina’s American Wedding, a Boise screening

“Tony & Janina’s American Wedding” Trailer from Ruth Leitman on Vimeo.

The Exploring Amor and Exile Last Thursday Series, in partnership with Boise City Arts and History Dept. Artists in Residence Program at 8th Street Marketplace, will present Ruth Leitman’s award-winning immigration documentary Tony & Janina’s American Wedding this week.

Film Premier Details
What: Tony & Janina’s American Wedding
When: 7-9 p.m., Thursday June 30, 2011
Where: The Cole/Marr Photography Workshops, 8th Street Marketplace, Lower Level, 404 S. 8th St, Boise, Idaho
Suggested donations of $7 – $10 will benefit the filmmakers as they take the film across the country and fight to reunite Tony and Janina. Or support the film on its IndieGoGo page.

Tony & Janina’s American Wedding is a feature length documentary that gets to the heart of the broken, red-tape ridden U.S. immigration system. After 18 years in America, Tony and Janina Wasilewski’s family is torn apart when Janina is deported back to Poland, taking their six-year-old son Brian with her. Set on the backdrop of the Chicago political scene, and featuring Illinois Congressman Luis Gutierrez at the heart of the immigration reform movement, this film follows the Wasilewski’s three-year struggle to be reunited, as their Senator, Barack Obama, rises to the Presidency. With a fresh perspective on the immigration conversation, this film tells the untold, post-9/11 human rights story that every undocumented immigrant in America faces today, with the power to open the conversation for change.

Read an interview with Leitman and Tony Wasilewski at the Baltimore City Paper and a profile in the Chicago Tribune.