Maryland girl’s comments to Michelle Obama revive debate over mixed-status families

By Tara BahrampourWashington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 21, 2010

Even as immigration authorities promised they would not try to deport the mother of a Silver Spring second-grader, the girl’s conversation with Michelle Obama reverberated through the family’s community and the country Thursday, reviving a debate about mixed-status families.

As of 2008, 4 million U.S.-born Hispanic children had at least one parent who was an illegal immigrant, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. The number is growing, with 300,000 to 400,000 children born to illegal immigrants each year, said Jeffrey S. Passel, a senior demographer at the center, who said that families are often neglected in the immigration debate.

Almost half of the households of undocumented immigrants include couples with children, a much larger percentage than households of those born in the United States.

At her school Wednesday, the second-grader told the first lady, “My mom doesn’t have any papers,” and she asked why the president was “taking away everybody that doesn’t have papers.”

The remarks, broadcast on TV and the Internet, drew empathy from the girl’s community, where people picking up students Thursday at New Hampshire Estates Elementary School said she gave voice to familiar anxieties.

“The children have seen with their own eyes the deportation of parents,” said Julia Aparicia, a native of El Salvador, who said she is a legal resident. She was picking up a 4-year-old girl she cares for. “That’s the fear of the children. It’s the fear of all of us.”

New Hampshire Estates has a diverse population of 410 students from prekindergarten and Head Start through second grade. Two-thirds of the students are Hispanic, and about two-thirds of all students are learning English as a second language. Eighty-one percent of all students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

The girl’s remarks provided fodder for both sides of the immigration reform debate.

“I think it helps us immensely,” said U.S. Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.), who has pushed for more protections for families of mixed status. “It really synthesizes in 20 words or less the need for comprehensive immigration reform.”

Gutierrez, who has called for a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants, said he would like to see a moratorium on deportation of parents of U.S. citizens. “Little girls in second grade should be worried about how many dolls they have or what song they’re going to sing, not whether the government is going to deport their mom.”

But Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for stricter immigration controls, said the girl’s questions highlight the need for immigration reform that would reduce the number of mixed-status families by making it more difficult for the parents to live in the United States.

“If the parents had been unable to illegally settle here, then you wouldn’t have this situation,” he said, adding that the girl’s exchange with Obama shows that undocumented immigrants live in the United States more openly than many people think.

But the high-profile context of the girl’s comments will make her family too well known to deport, Krikorian said. “This kid has basically guaranteed that her mother is not going to be deported under any circumstances.”

Children born to illegal immigrants in the United States automatically are granted citizenship. Some critics have called for a constitutional amendment that would end that practice.

Although U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not keep track of children left behind by those deported, about 100,000 children in the United States saw a parent deported between 1997 and 2007, said Laura Vazquez with the National Council of La Raza. Often, when one parent is deported, the other stays in the country to raise the children. Still, she said, “there is a strong economic impact on the family when one is deported.”

There is also a psychological impact, according to studies that found children of deportees are more emotionally unstable and less likely to be financially or academically successful.

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Hundreds of Union Janitors Fired Under Pressure From Feds

Friday 07 May 2010

by: David Bacon, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

 

San Francisco, California – Federal immigration authorities have pressured one of San Francisco’s major building service companies, ABM, into firing hundreds of its own workers. Some 475 janitors have been told that unless they can show legal immigration status, they will lose their jobs in the near future.

ABM has been a union company for decades, and many of the workers have been there for years. “They’ve been working in the buildings downtown for 15, 20, some as many as 27 years,” said Olga Miranda, president of Service Employees Local 87. “They’ve built homes. They’ve provided for their families. They’ve sent their kids to college. They’re not new workers. They didn’t just get here a year ago.”

Nevertheless, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security has told ABM that they have flagged the personnel records of those workers. Weeks ago, ICE agents sifted through Social Security records and the I-9 immigration forms all workers have to fill out when they apply for jobs. They then told ABM that the company had to fire 475 workers who were accused of lacking legal immigration status.

ABM is one of the largest building service companies in the country, and it appears that union janitorial companies are the targets of the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement program. “Homeland Security is going after employers that are union,” Miranda charged. “They’re going after employers that give benefits and are paying above the average.”

Last October, 1,200 janitors working for ABM were fired in similar circumstances in Minneapolis. In November, over 100 janitors working for Seattle Building Maintenance lost their jobs. Minneapolis janitors belong to SEIU Local 26, Seattle janitors to Local 6 and San Francisco janitors to Local 87.

President Obama said sanctions enforcement targets employers “who are using illegal workers in order to drive down wages – and oftentimes mistreat those workers.” An ICE Worksite Enforcement Advisory claimed, “unscrupulous employers are likely to pay illegal workers substandard wages or force them to endure intolerable working conditions.”

Curing intolerable conditions by firing or deporting workers who endure them doesn’t help the workers or change the conditions, however. And despite Obama’s contention that sanctions enforcement will punish those employers who exploit immigrants, employers are rewarded for cooperating with ICE by being immunized from prosecution. Javier Murillo, president of SEIU Local 26, said, “The promise made during the audit is that if the company cooperates and complies, they won’t be fined. So this kind of enforcement really only hurts workers.”

ICE Director John Morton said the agency is auditing the records of 1,654 companies nationwide. “What kind of economic recovery goes with firing thousands of workers?” Miranda asked. “Why don’t they target employers who are not paying taxes, who are not obeying safety or labor laws?”

The San Francisco janitors are now faced with an agonizing dilemma. Should they turn themselves in to Homeland Security, which might charge them with providing a bad Social Security number to their employer, and even hold them for deportation? For workers with families, homes and deep roots in a community, it’s not possible to just walk away and disappear. “I have a lot of members who are single mothers whose children were born here,” Miranda said. “I have a member whose child has leukemia. What are they supposed to do? Leave their children here and go back to Mexico and wait? And wait for what?”

Miranda’s question reflects not just the dilemma facing individual workers, but of 12 million undocumented people living in the United States. Since 2005, successive congress members, senators and administrations have dangled the prospect of gaining legal status in front of those who lack it. In exchange, their various schemes for immigration reform have proposed huge new guest worker programs, and a big increase in exactly the kind of enforcement now directed at 475 San Francisco janitors.

While the potential criminalization of undocumented people in Arizona continues to draw headlines, the actual punishment of workers because of their immigration status has become an increasingly bitter fact of life across the country.

President Obama, condemning Arizona’s law that would make being undocumented a state crime, said it would “undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans.” But then he announced his support for legislation with guest worker programs and increased enforcement.

The country is no closer to legalization of the undocumented than it was ten years ago. But the enforcement provisions of the comprehensive immigration reform bills debated in Congress over the last five years have already been implemented on the ground. The Bush administration conducted a high-profile series of raids in which it sent heavily-armed agents into meatpacking plants and factories, held workers for deportation and sent hundreds to federal prison for using bad Social Security numbers.

After Barack Obama was elected president, immigration authorities said they’d follow a softer policy, using an electronic system to find undocumented people in workplaces. People working with bad Social Security numbers would be fired.

Ironically the Bush administration proposed a regulation that would have required employers to fire any worker who provided an employer with a Social Security number that didn’t match the SSA database. That regulation was then stopped in court by unions, the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center. The Obama administration, however, is implementing what amounts to the same requirement, with the same consequence of thousands of fired workers.

Union leaders like Miranda see a conflict between the rhetoric used by the president and other Washington, DC, politicians and lobbyists in condemning the Arizona law, and the immigration proposals they make in Congress. “There’s a huge contradiction here,” she said. “You can’t tell one state that what they’re doing is criminalizing people, and at the same time go after employers paying more than a living wage and the workers who have fought for that wage.”

Renee Saucedo, attorney for La Raza Centro Legal and former director of the San Francisco Day Labor Program, is even more critical. “Those bills in Congress, which are presented as ones that will help some people get legal status, will actually make things much worse,” she charged. “We’ll see many more firings like the janitors here, and more punishments for people who are just working and trying to support their families.”

Increasingly, however, the Washington proposals have even less promise of legalization, and more emphasis on punishment. The newest Democratic Party scheme virtually abandons the legalization program promised by the “bipartisan” Schumer/Graham proposal, saying that heavy enforcement at the border and in the workplace must come before any consideration of giving 12 million people legal status.

“We have to look at the whole picture,” Saucedo urged. “So long as we have trade agreements like NAFTA that create poverty in countries like Mexico, people will continue to come here, no matter how many walls we build. Instead of turning people into guest workers, as these bills in Washington would do, while firing and even jailing those who don’t have papers, we need to help people get legal status, and repeal the laws that are making work a crime.” 

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Feds not pursuing after girl says mom lacks papers

By KATHLEEN MILLER (AP) – May 21, 2010

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — A Department of Homeland Security official says federal immigration authorities are not pursuing the family of a Maryland girl who told first lady Michelle Obama that her mother “doesn’t have papers.”

DHS spokesman Matt Chandler said in an e-mailed statement Thursday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigations “are based on solid law enforcement work and not classroom Q and As.”

Chandler added the agency “prioritizes criminal aliens who pose a threat to our communities.”

The second-grader asked Obama about deportations when she visited the girl’s elementary school with Mexico’s first lady on Wednesday.

The immigrant advocacy group CASA de Maryland is trying to locate the girl’s family and handed out fliers at the Silver Spring school Thursday.

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Boston Immigration Court Grants Asylum to President Obama’s Aunt, Zeituni Onyango

By MEGHAN BARR, Associated Press Writer Meghan Barr, Associated Press Writer

Mon May 17, 2010

BOSTON – A U.S. immigration court has granted asylum to President Barack Obama’s African aunt, allowing her to stay in the country and setting her on the road to citizenship after years of legal wrangling, her attorneys announced Monday.

The decision was made by a judge in U.S. Immigration Court in Boston and mailed out Friday. It comes three months after Kenya native Zeituni Onyango, the half-sister of Obama’s late father, testified at a closed hearing in Boston.

People who seek asylum must show that they face persecution in their homeland on the basis of religion, race, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group.

The basis for Onyango’s asylum request was never made public, but her lawyer Margaret Wong said last year that Onyango first applied for asylum “due to violence in Kenya.” The East African nation is fractured by cycles of electoral violence every five years.

Medical issues also could have played a role. In a November interview with The Associated Press, Onyango said she was disabled and was learning to walk again after being paralyzed from Guillain-Barre syndrome, an autoimmune disorder. At her hearing in Boston earlier this year, she arrived in a wheelchair and two doctors testified in support of her case.

Her lawyers would not comment on Onyango’s medical troubles.

“She doesn’t want people to feel sorry for her,” said Scott Bratton, another of her attorneys.

Onyango’s efforts to win asylum have lasted more than a decade, Wong said.

“She was ecstatic,” Wong said at a news conference in Cleveland on Monday, describing Onyango’s reaction to the news. “She was very, very happy.”

Wong said the White House was not informed of the ruling. Obama spokesman Nick Shapiro said Monday that the White House had no involvement in the case at any point in the process.

Onyango didn’t immediately respond to telephone messages left by The Associated Press and didn’t answer her door in Boston. Two police cars were stationed outside her apartment building trying to keep reporters away.

“She really does give people hope,” Wong said. “Because if someone like her who was in the spotlight, in the limelight — and it was all negative — could make it in our land of the law, I think other people could, too.”

Onyango will now apply for a work permit, which would provide some documentation that she is permitted to stay in the country and allow her to travel again, Wong said. A year from now, she will be eligible to apply for a green card, which is given to people who are granted legal permanent residency in the U.S., Wong said. Five years after receving her green card, she can apply to become a U.S. citizen.

“There are hundreds and thousands of people like her who really need help to stay here,” Wong said. “When they first come to this country, they don’t know what they are doing.”

The media’s portrayal of Onyango in recent years has not been entirely fair, Wong said.

“She may not be photogenic, but she’s very much a smart, thoughtful, regal woman,” Wong said.

Onyango initially came to the U.S. in 2000 just for a visit, Wong said. Her first request for political asylum in 2002 was rejected, and she was ordered deported in 2004. But she didn’t leave the country and continued to live in public housing in Boston.

Onyango’s status as an illegal immigrant was revealed just days before Obama was elected in November 2008. Obama said he did not know his aunt was living here illegally and believes laws covering the situation should be followed. To escape the media attention, Onyango came to Cleveland for a couple of months in 2008, where she has many friends in the city’s Kenyan community, Wong said. At that time, a family member in Cleveland contacted Wong.

A judge later agreed to suspend her deportation order and reopen her asylum case.

Wong has said that Obama wasn’t involved in the Boston hearing. The White House also said it was not helping Onyango with legal fees.

In his memoir, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” Obama affectionately referred to Onyango as “Auntie Zeituni” and described meeting her during his 1988 trip to Kenya.

Onyango helped care for the president’s half brothers and sister while living with Barack Obama Sr. in Kenya.

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