World of Story: Immigration Tales

Nick in the Headlights: Part Three

2012-02-23T16:17:00.001-08:00

It was already mid-November, and we would have to start working on Nick’s asylum claim to be ready to file the legal argument and supporting documents with the immigration court in January. But now everything had changed. We had a new reason to ask again for DHS to drop the charge against Nick: he had incipient mental illness and low intellectual functioning. Is this really the kind of person the US wants to deport? And could he even understand what it means to be in deportation proceedings? After all, he had been brought to the US as a three-year-old.

I asked for Sara and Nick’s help to prove that Nick had wide support from his community to stay here, and that he was receiving the mental health services he needed. With this, and the evidence of his diagnosis with incipient schizophrenia, we might be able to get the charges dismissed. It was a long shot, since the DHS attorney had already denied our request once. But the evidence of his illness was compelling. In a week, Sara gave me ten letters of support for Nick, and in another week, we had a report from his new mental health therapist.

The report from the therapist was grim. Nick had regular debilitating delusional episodes, and had suicidal thoughts. The therapist urged immediate psychiatric intervention, including medication for psychosis. I was stunned. Nick suicidal? But he was like a child! It was as if a nine year old was thinking of suicide. How did he even know about suicide? Sara said she was doing all she could to get Nick to a psychiatrist, but without health insurance, the waiting lists were long.

I filed the request immediately with DHS to withdraw the charge against Nick, with copies of the forensic diagnosis of Nick’s intellectual abilities and his delusional thinking, the therapist’s report, affidavits from his parents that they had no family in Mexico able to take Nick in, and an affidavit from Mexico’s former attorney general stating that Nick was very likely not to receive mental health care in Mexico and that he would be an easy prey for criminal gangs. The request included letters from Nick’s parents’ church community showing that many US citizens and permanent residents were standing in support of Nick and his family, and my argument that it would be far more conservative of DHS, court, and ICE resources to withdraw the charge against Nick than to face long court proceedings to determine if Nick were competent to stand trial.

I didn’t hold out much hope that we would get the charge dismissed, since the same DHS attorney who had denied my prior request to withdraw charges was still assigned to Nick’s case. But there was a possibility, particularly in light of new guidance from DHS headquarters, issued November 17 to all DHS attorneys, regarding “low priority” cases that DHS attorney should agree to dismiss. If the person in deportation proceedings had long residence in the US, had no immigration violations in the last five years, and had no serious criminal charges (driving drunk and domestic violence, among the most common crimes, were serious crimes), DHS should consider dismissing the case. The last factor listed in the guidance memo gave me the most hope: those in deportation proceedings with serious physical or mental illnesses should be considered for case dismissal. We were walking a fine line with Nick. How much weight would DHS give to Nick’s mental illness, balanced against his drunk driving charge?

The answer came two days after Christmas: no weight at all. The letter from the DHS attorney did not even mention Nick’s mental illness. The attorney cited Nick’s juvenile drunk driving charge as the reason for denying the request. There was no appeal. I hadn’t waited for the response anyway. Nick’s asylum case was almost ready to file. The asylum argument hit hard on persecution in Mexico of those with mental illness. The country’s documented human rights abuses of those confined to government mental institutions. We would complete the case and meet our filing deadline by January 31, 2012. In early February, I’d begin to prepare Nick for his testimony, and his parents to testify by telephone in court that Nick would not have anyone with whom he could live in Mexico. They could not risk testifying in person, since they were undocumented.

Meanwhile, although it was a long shot, I filed a motion to continue the asylum case with the immigration judge, citing new evidence of Nick’s mental illness and requesting time for the court to make a determination about Nick’s ability to understand the charges against him, and what deportation meant. I would not likely get word of the judge’s decision before the deadline to file the asylum case, so we had to file the case by the deadline. But if the judge granted the motion, we could win precious time, time for the DREAM Act to gain traction in Congress, maybe, or time for DHS to assign a new attorney to Nick’s case. A new attorney might be more approachable, and more open to dismissing the immigration charge against Nick.

In the second week of January, Sara called to ask me if I would talk to a group that she had heard about. It was a network of undocumented university students and their supporters in the US, called End Now. The network rallied support for passage of the DREAM Act, and in individual cases like Nick’s, they built community support that could change a government attorney’s mind. I said I would talk with the group, if Nick gave his okay. Nick did, and I spoke to a quietly determined young woman in Seattle about his case. Yes, she said, it sounds complicated, his case. But we’ve been successful in getting immigration charges dismissed in tough cases before.

To be continued…

Nick in the Headlights: Part Two

2012-02-17T17:05:00.001-08:00

Continued from 2/10/12 post

In November 2010, I made the request to DHS to withdraw Nick’s immigration charge, citing Nick’s age, the fact that he had been brought to the US at age 3, and that his DUI had been as a juvenile. I made the most of the letters of support, and included a drawing by Nick’s seven-year-old brother showing how sad he would be if Nick were deported. I showed Nick’s grade school and high school certificates of good behavior to prove that he had been in the US since before kindergarten. I got a one line letter from the DHS attorney assigned to Nick’s case: “The Department declines to exercise prosecutorial discretion.” Nick was still in deportation proceedings.

I called Nick’s mother, Sara, and requested a meeting with her, immediately. She told me that Nick could meet with me by himself, since his immigration case was his responsibility. No, it’s not, I said. He can’t do it alone. He must have your help. It was finally clear to me, at long last, that Nick couldn’t be alone in this. Sara reluctantly agreed to accompany Nick, and we met in mid-November 2010. Asylum is our only option now, I said. We have to file by December 10^th, Nick’s court date, and Nick needs help to get on the internet and look up what is happening in Mexico to US deportees. He has to know so that we can truthfully tell the judge if Nick is afraid to go there.

Nick’s 15-year-old sister, Maria de los Angeles, helped Nick research, and Nick told me on November 30^th, “My sister and I looked at what is happening in Mexico. Looks like a lot of bad things happening to people.” “Would you want to go there by yourself Nick, and live there without your family?” Nick said, “I don’t think so. Would I have a place to stay? I don’t think I know anyone there.” “Are you afraid to go there by yourself Nick?” “Yes”, he said, “I’m afraid.”

With help from Sara, we completed the ten-page asylum application and presented it to the immigration judge on December 10^th. The judge set the final asylum hearing for February 2012, in which we would document the threat of death that awaited Nick if he were deported to Mexico, and make the legal argument for asylum. I told Nick and Sara that we would start working on the argument and documentation in the case in November 2011, and to keep me informed of any changes in Nick’s situation.

In July 2011 Nick was arrested on charges of residential burglary and attempted theft. I got the call from his public defender, Cynthia. She told me that Nick was clearly functioning at a low intellectual level. She was ordering a psychological evaluation of his ability to stand trial and to understand the charges against him, in the hope of at least mitigating the sentence. She said that Nick had tried to attach himself to a group of his former classmates who were having a party, and come unbidden into the house where the party was being held. When the group left the house to avoid Nick, he stayed and started looking through a CD collection. The boy who lived in the house returned and saw Nick with the CD in his hand, and called the police. Nick was arrested, charged, and taken again to jail. Since the arrest was a probation violation, Nick was automatically found guilty of the juvenile DUI, and now sentenced as an adult. Cynthia told me that it was well worth it for Nick to stay in jail until the evaluation was completed; it could go far to help her get a lighter sentence on the theft charge, and would count towards serving his sentence on the DUI.

Nick spent four months in jail, and ICE put another hold on him. If ICE took him to detention again when his jail term was up, he would most likely lose his immigration bond, and I would have to present Nick’s asylum case while he was in detention. If I lost the case, which was nearly certain, I would have to appeal the denial while Nick stayed detained for up to a year while the appeal was being decided. Nick waited for nearly three months before the forensic psychologist could meet with him in jail, and another month to get the report. When it came, it was unequivocal. Nick’s intellectual capacity was borderline, just barely above the level that defines mental retardation. He could not read social cues, nor understand the consequences of his actions. But that wasn’t all the report said. Nick was an incipient schizophrenic, with delusions. He was at the usual age for onset of schizophrenia.

With this report, Cynthia was able to get a suspended sentence for Nick on not only the theft, but also the DUI. I requested and got the ICE hold lifted, with a promise that Nick’s parents would be responsible for making sure he showed up in immigration court. When Nick was released from jail, and walked out onto the street, he disappeared for nearly five hours. I got the call in the morning from Cynthia that he was about to be released, and told Sara so that she could catch the bus to downtown Seattle to pick him up. Sara called me hours later to say that she had been waiting at the jail with no sign of Nick. I called Cynthia, then the ICE officer assigned to Nick. Both affirmed that he had been released. He must have been put out on the street before his mother arrived, and just walked away. Sara frantically scoured the streets around the jail for hours, looking for Nick. He finally called her from a homeless shelter that gave him a free phone call, and she took him home.

Nick’s diagnosis had an electrifying effect on Nick’s parents and on me as his attorney. I went from sighing and getting annoyed about Nick’s crimes and lack of action on the tasks he had to do to in order to “look good” to DHS and thus have a better chance of getting out of deportation proceedings, to being passionate about proving that he didn’t deserve deportation. Once I understood that Nick wasn’t just being annoying and obtuse, but dealing with severe illness, I accepted Nick as he was. I was ashamed that I hadn’t read the clues about Nick before, and grateful that his public defender had. I turned to his parents for help. And this time, they were there for him.

Sara and Carlos, Nick’s father, asked me to have Nick’s evaluation translated into Spanish, and after they read it, we met to discuss next steps in Nick’s case. They too had made a turn-around about Nick. They told me that they didn’t know that Nick had an illness, and didn’t know that he had a hard time understanding the world around him. Sara cried as she told me that she regretted yelling at Nick for so many years to shape up, for not helping him in school, and for missing all the clues that he needed help. She said that not once had any of Nick’s teachers told her anything about Nick except that he needed to pay attention in class. She said they thought that if they left Nick on his own to find a job, and do what he needed to do for his immigration case, it would help him grow up. She and Carlos were ready now to do what they could for Nick’s immigration case.

To be continued...

Nick in the Headlights: Part One

2012-02-10T17:36:00.000-08:00

Nicolas was 17 when he was arrested on a drunk driving charge in January 2010, but he hadn’t been driving. He had been drinking though. The boy who was driving did a quick scramble under Nick, who was sitting on the passenger side of the car, and pushed Nick into the driver’s seat after the state trooper pulled the car over. It was dark and the trooper didn’t see the move. Nick tried to explain that he didn’t drive, didn’t have a license, hadn’t been driving, but his speech was muddled. The trooper arrested him when he failed the walk-the-line test by the side of the road and booked him into jail in downtown Seattle. When I got to know Nick, I could see how it happened, his being shoved into the driver’s seat, and taking the blame for drunk driving. His high school classmates had called him “clueless,” among other more unflattering names. He was so guileless that he didn’t think the other boy had done anything wrong.

Nick’s public defender advised him not to try to defend himself by pleading that he hadn’t been driving, since the judge wouldn’t believe him. This was Nick’s first criminal offense, so he’d get a deferred sentence. That would mean no jail time and the conviction dismissed if Nick had no probation violations for five years. All this sounded good, and sounded good to Nick’s parents, too, so he pled guilty, then waited in jail for his sentencing hearing a few weeks after his arrest. The judge had set bail, but Nick’s parents didn’t have money to pay it, or any collateral to offer to a bail bond company. Even if they had bailed him out, he would not have been released. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had placed a detention hold on him. He was charged by ICE with being in the country illegally.

Nick is an undocumented immigrant. His parents brought him at age three from Mexico, walking with him through the Arizona desert. Nick had never done well in school; in high school he flunked nearly all his classes, and finally dropped out at age 16. His parents repeatedly asked him to get a job, but even though he seemed to try, filling out applications for fast food restaurants and factories, he never got a call back. He was a tall, thin boy with a gentle manner, and amiable. He would have been good looking but for a vagueness about him; he didn’t look one in the eye, and his speech was disjointed. He answered a question, “Did you know that it was ICE who interviewed you in jail?” by saying “I was just sitting on the bunk, you know, and there was someone calling my name, and then I just went to a room and I sat there with a woman, who I thought I knew. I thought she was Mrs. Allbright, from the high school, and we talked for a while. She was nice.”

I met Nick in the Northwest Detention Center, and represented him in a bond hearing in April 2010. We got bail of $3000, the lowest bail usually given by judges in detention. Nick was only 18, was a first time offender, and had been in the country since he was a toddler. All that weighed in his favor. His parents’ church held a fundraiser for the bail money. His first immigration hearing was scheduled for Seattle in December 2010. Nick seemed unworldly to me, not able to connect actions with consequences, but his parents said he was just lazy; he needed to be responsible for himself. They told me to work directly with Nick; he needed to give me all the information necessary to prepare a request to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to drop the immigration charges against him. They seemed to wash their hands of him after he got out of immigration detention.

I told Nick that we needed to prove four things before we could ask DHS to drop charges: first, that he was getting a GED and enrolled in community college; second, that he was a volunteer for community organizations and had the support of many members of his community; third, that he was abiding by all the terms of his probation, including going to Alcoholics Anonymous and meeting with a counselor, and fourth, that he had the full support of his probation officer.

My plan was to show that Nick fit the DREAM Act criteria to have the immigration charge against him dropped, even though the Act was only a bill in both the Senate and the House, and a battered bill at that. The DREAM proposal was to give those who had been brought into the country undocumented before the age of 16, who had graduated from high school and fulfilled other requirements, a path toward legal residence and eventual citizenship. In late 2010 and early 2011, immigration advocates still held out hope that Congress would pass the DREAM Act. The bill at times looked as though it had enough bipartisan support to pass, and President Obama stood ready to sign it into law. The DREAM Act was Nick’s best hope; he would have no other way of staying in the country. If the immigration charge was not dropped, he would be deported immediately after his first court hearing in immigration court. There was one faint hope: asylum.

If we couldn’t get the Department of Homeland Security to withdraw the charges, and thus stop the deportation process, I would have a file an asylum claim for Nick. Such a claim had a zero percent chance of winning in court; federal courts in no instance that I could find had granted asylum to Mexican deportees from the US who feared that they would be targets for criminal gangs if they returned. Nick had no family in Mexico willing to take him in; he would be a homeless, destitute deportee who spoke Spanish with a US accent. It was clear to me that he would be easy prey in Mexico. It was equally clear that it didn’t matter a hoot to his chance of getting asylum. The only saving grace was the possibility, after we lost the asylum claim, that ICE would agree not to deport him, at least for long enough to benefit from immigration reform, that ever-receding chimera.

Nick called me every month to report on his progress with his four tasks. Every call was similar. I’d say, “So how’s it going with your number one task of getting into the GED program, Nick?” Nick would tell me, each time, a version of the same story. He had made calls, he had gone to the program to apply, he had filled out paperwork, and yet for a reason he didn’t know, somehow he was still not in a class. It was the same for the other tasks. He had asked at the youth program if he could volunteer, but the program director had not called him. He tried to find out where Alcoholics Anonymous was meeting, but he couldn’t get the information. He had the name of a counselor but the counselor had not called him.

Nick was unfailingly polite and cheerful during our calls. He always began them by saying, “Hello Margaret! How are you today? Do you have sun (or rain, or wind) over where you are? Over here, it’s really sunny.” He never reflected on his experiences, or seemed to learn new methods of achieving his goal. He didn’t blame anyone either, or seem bitter at his lack of success. In October 2010, I told Nick that we had one month left before I had to have all the information that I needed to show DHS that he deserved to have the immigration charges against him dropped. He had made no progress in getting any of the information I requested. I called his mother for help, but she said that Nick needed to learn that he was responsible for helping himself. She said she would ask people at their church for letters of support for Nick, but wouldn’t do more.

To be continued...

Representing Duncan McDonald: Part Two

2012-02-06T17:19:00.001-08:00

Continued from 1/27/12

Jonathan and I strategized on next steps every few days. We decided to negotiate with Immigration for his release – after all, there was no immigration violation – if he had a sponsor who would give him an address to which he could be released, despite not having clear identity documents. We thought about people we knew who might be willing to help Duncan, but he surprised us by saying that he had a friend of a friend, a woman who lived in Seattle, who had agreed to let him stay with her for a few days. We didn’t know he had been in touch with anyone but us. Immigration did release him when we furnished an address for Duncan.

Jonathan and I were elated at our success, and we drove down together to the Kent jail to visit other detainees, and to pick up Duncan and bring him back to Seattle. Duncan was a fair, slight man with reddish hair, in his mid-30s, and handsome. He sat in the back seat of my car as we drove to Seattle, but didn’t talk much. He didn’t seem to be happy about the release, but I brushed that aside. Of course, everyone is happy to be out of detention. But all the same, I felt a chill coming from him. We dropped him off at a house where a middle-aged, kind-faced woman greeted him, and we added Duncan McDonald to our list of clients served. That was that.

Except that there’s more. A few years later, when I was back in Seattle for six months between overseas assignments and working on contract for an immigration law firm, I saw Jonathan again at an immigration conference. “Did you hear about Duncan McDonald?” he said to me, without waiting for opening pleasantries. He looked to be bursting with the news. I instantly remembered the name, of course. The case was one of our success stories, how we got Duncan sprung by our negotiation powers. I expected Jonathan to tell me that Duncan had fought extradition to the United Kingdom, and won somehow. It had to be big news, by the look of Jonathan.

“Guess where Duncan was born,” he said. “Ireland, Australia, Germany, France?” I said. “Maybe Holland or Belgium?” “Nope,” Jonathan said. “He was born in Indiana.” He paused to let that sink in. “But….” I said. “Yes,” Jonathan said, “Indiana. His name is Steve Richland.” I couldn’t get my mind around this news. “But why would he let himself be detained in Immigration detention for months? Why would he make up this elaborate story?” “Exactly,” Jonathan said, “he really enjoyed setting a trap and seeing us fall into it.”

Jonathan said that Duncan was arrested for residential burglary in Chicago for the first time when he was 25 after he cleaned out the possessions of a woman with whom he was staying; he served a few days in jail and was released. He did the same thing again in Minnesota, this time robbing another woman who had given him a place to stay. He robbed many more women he had charmed before he was arrested in Seattle on the traffic stop. By that time, he’d stolen enough passports and driver’s licenses to confuse his identity, and he’d managed to scar his fingertips enough to make it hard to take prints.

When he robbed the woman who had given him a place to stay in Seattle, she called the police, who found and arrested him, and he was sentenced and served time in Seattle, and then served prison time in two other states as well. When his public defenders tried to introduce evidence of his lack of mental competence to stand trial, citing the immigration detention story, Duncan refused to allow it; he insisted he was not ill, that he always knew what he was doing. And each time, the judge agreed: he seemed perfectly in charge of himself.

So in charge of himself that he spent nearly three months in immigration detention, in service of a story about fleeing from the British government. The pleasure he felt in fooling us must have been worth the stay. So much so that he was angry when he was released from detention. For years afterwards, whenever I saw Jonathan again, he’d greet me with “Hello. Duncan McDonald speaking,” in Duncan’s soft accent, and we’d laugh. The accent probably would never have fooled someone from the British Isles, and even his name, we would have known if we had investigated, is not an Irish Catholic name. But we were enthralled by the romance of the story, and our white knight role. Neither of us has ever had a client like Duncan again. But sometimes, when my clients’ stories are grim and I’m taking myself very seriously, I remember Duncan again, and laugh.

Representing Duncan McDonald: Part One

2012-01-26T16:20:00.000-08:00

In 1999-2000 I was working a six-month stint as an attorney at Northwest Immigrant Rights Project in Seattle, filling in while the financially-struggling NWIRP sought funding for a permanent removal defense attorney position. I was waiting to go to El Salvador on a Fulbright fellowship to teach trial advocacy at the Jesuit university’s law school; the school term would start in six months. I had less than two years experience in removal defense, and I knew that I had no chance of adequately representing clients in complex removal cases without a mentor by my side. Removal defense is the most complex, intellectually challenging, rewarding, frustrating, and high stakes area of immigration law; throw in any criminal charges and prior removals, and it becomes an intricate puzzle that must be solved under pressure of court deadlines, imminent departure dates, and clients often in immigration detention.

Jonathan Moore was NWIRP’s long-time accredited representative (non attorneys who pass an exam administered by the Board of Immigration Appeals, and who work as attorneys for nonprofit organizations), and the most knowledgeable person in the Pacific Northwest in removal defense. He is a wiry man with shoulder-length graying hair, a uniform of t-shirts and jeans and sneakers (he put a suit jacket over this outfit when he had to go to court), a New York accent, and nervous energy. He is passionate about defending immigrants in an increasingly hostile immigration law environment, and has a grasp of case and statutory law that is unparalleled. He also had time to answer my questions, despite having at least a hundred cases at various stages of preparation. We shared a tiny office, perhaps 24 square feet of crumbling plaster walls that leaked moisture, sloping wood floor covered with a thin film of stained, ancient shag carpet, and a warped wooden window that wouldn’t open and a view of a parking lot. We had word processing computers, no internet connection, and law books and updates that came by mail, for our research.

In my first days on the job, Jonathan gave me a stack of cases to review for basic facts and deadlines. We met by turning our office chairs to each other while I balanced the files on an unsteady typing table between us. I told him the facts of a case, and he told me next steps, and where to start research. He was seldom too busy, too tired, or too stressed-out to give me direction, but he was a fearsome sight when he read another bad judicial decision limiting immigrant rights. And those cases were coming down every day. Jonathan would read a new decision, then jump up from his desk with the decision in his hand, tear into the hallway from which the rest of the staff offices opened, then stomp up and down shaking the crumpled decision in each doorway, shouting “The f**ers! The absolute f**ers! You will not f**ing believe this!” When Jonathan tried to give a summary of the week’s legal decisions at our case meetings, he was often overcome by emotion and could not continue. Every one of the attorneys and legal workers in the organization understood. It was the worst time ever in US history to be an immigrant. Jonathan’s angst, his very public rage and despair, gave the rest of us permission, in a way that we understood but did not articulate, to let Jonathan bear our anger, so we didn’t have to put ourselves through the physical effects. Jonathan was expressing anger for all of us.

Congress had passed the Immigration Reform Act and Illegal Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA – pronounced eye-rah eye-rah) in April 1997, changing the immigration landscape dramatically. Among other provisions, it slapped “unlawful presence” on millions of intending immigrants, requiring that those who were in the country unlawfully must leave the country in order to request an immigrant visa; they could only return to the US by winning a waiver. The waiver is based on a showing of “extreme hardship” to a US citizen or permanent residence parent or spouse, and is denied more than half the time in Mexico, less often in other countries. IIRAIRA also imposed a “permanent bar” on those with unlawful presence in the US who had more than one illegal entry, changed the standard for winning a visa in deportation proceedings from “extreme hardship” to “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” and limited such visas to 4,000 a year for the entire country, and barred those with certain types of crimes, including simple misdemeanors, from ever getting a visa.

It was a grim time, and requests for NWIRP’s services – disability waivers for citizenship applicants, asylum, family-based visas, visas for victims of domestic violence, suspension of deportation for Central Americans, and court representation for those detained in immigration detention who had a good chance of winning a visa – skyrocketed at same time as funding began to dry up. NWIRP, between executive directors and staff, was too busy with the flood of clients to work on fundraising. New callers were carefully screened to determine if they fit the criteria for representation and the financial guidelines, and many more than half of the callers had to be turned away or placed on long waiting lists.

One day in January, caller Duncan McDonald made his way through the phone screening. He was detained at the county jail in Kent, about 30 miles south of Seattle, not accused of a crime, but housed there with other immigrant detainees. In 2000, the new immigrant detention center in Tacoma that would house 1200 detainees by 2003 was not yet built, and detainees overflowed the old Immigration building near downtown Seattle. That building was never intended to be a detention center when it was built in the 1920s; it was an office building. It looked and felt like a surreal boarding school with barbed wire where detainees often slept on mattress in the hallways. Detainees would hang out the windows on the upper floor where they were housed, and call and wave to the people walking on the street below. It was pre-September 2001, and the building had relaxed vibe that is almost unimaginable today. Immigration detention looks and feels exactly like prison, now. In the late 1990s, the Immigration Service took to buying space in county jails to house the overflow detainees, where they lived side by side with criminal defendants, and under the same conditions.

Duncan called the main NWIRP phone number, and like all those detained, was connected to a screener at once, since we couldn’t call detainees in detention. Normally, the detainee would be told that a NWIRP paralegal or attorney would visit him the next time we had a scheduled visit to the Kent Jail, and the detainee’s name and basic intake information would go onto the detention visit list. That is when the staff would make the decision about if we would represent, and at what stage of the proceedings, or if the client would be referred to a pro bono attorney, or a list of private attorneys, or given information on representing himself. But whatever Duncan said, it must have been persuasive and urgent, since the screener forwarded his call to me. “He really needs to talk to an attorney right away,” our screener told me.

Duncan said that he was an Irish Catholic, from Northern Ireland, and had come to the US less than a year ago on a visa waiver (no visitor visa needed for nationals of certain countries) to escape retribution from the British government for his service as a young teenager for the Irish Republican Army, a guerrilla group opposed to British rule of Northern Ireland. He said he had refused to work for the IRA after he was 16, and had gone into hiding in the Republic of Ireland so that the IRA couldn’t find and punish him for leaving them. But the British government had him on a wanted list, and someone gave information on his whereabouts. So he went in a disguise to the airport in Belfast and flew to Boston, then rented a car and drove to Seattle where he had some cousins.

He didn’t have time to look for the cousins, since the Seattle police stopped him for speeding on a side street when he had just arrived in town. In the car, the police found three passports from three different countries – the UK, France, and Germany – in three different names and with his photo, and two different US driver’s licenses with different names and his photo. The police charged him with identity fraud, and jailed him at King County Jail in Seattle for a few weeks until Immigration put a detainer on him and transferred him to immigration detention. The county prosecutor didn’t want to prosecute, and Immigration didn’t know what to charge him with. Immigration would not release him until they knew he was. The cousins could not be found, Duncan said, and there was no one to bail him out. Immigration bail was set for $10,000.

Duncan was sure he could prove his identity and get out of detention if he had some help to contact some friends in Ireland who could get his birth certificate and other identity documents. He said he was afraid of asking the British Consulate to prove his identity since he was on a wanted list, and that he had all the passports and driver’s licenses in order to confuse his identity and throw the British government off his trail; he had ditched his own passport when he got to the US. He had already been in immigration detention for a month.

Duncan had a soft voice, a charming accent, and told his story well. I was riveted. I told Jonathan right away about the case and the need for delicacy; we could contact the Irish friends, get the correct identity documents, ask the judge to reduce bail, and get him out with few of our resources. Jonathan visited him a few days later; he too was eager to help, and we started calling and writing the Irish friends. But the phone numbers didn’t work and the letters went unanswered. We began taking phone calls every few days from Duncan. He always began, “Hello. Duncan McDonald speaking.” If Jonathan wasn’t available, Duncan would ask for me. Both of us enjoyed talking to Duncan; he had stories of being recruited at age 12 by IRA operatives who made him swear in a blood ceremony never to betray them, and who burned his fingerprints off with acid after he was caught once by the British, so they couldn’t identify him again. He gave us more names of people to contact in Ireland and Northern Ireland who could help us prove his identity but we couldn’t locate even one.

To be continued...

Justice Detained: Harlingen, Texas 1988

2012-01-09T17:32:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I think I must have imagined it, that it couldn't possibly be true. But it did happen, I did see it. An immigration judge foamed at the mouth while screaming at my client, a Nicaraguan asylum seeker, while he was testifying in court in Harlingen, Texas in January 1988. It was a riveting sight, and I had to blink to make sure of what I was seeing. I’d never seen anyone foam at the mouth before, and haven’t since. It wasn’t just spittle flying out of his mouth as he screamed; foam formed in globs at the corners of his mouth, visible at ten feet where I sat at the defense counsel table.

The judge sat in his black robe at a huge judicial desk elevated about five feet above the floor of the courtroom, and attorneys and defendants had to look up to him. My client was a very thin man dressed in government issue thin blue pants and t-shirt; I remember his thinness in particular because the judge made him pull up his t-shirt to prove that he had scars from the beatings he said that government soldiers had given him in Nicaragua. The man’s ribs stood out starkly over his nonexistent belly. He was sweating, and I watched a trickle of sweat run down the middle of his back along his protruding vertebrae as he stood with the t-shirt pulled over his head.

The judge said he couldn’t see scars, peering down over the edge of his great desk. Only an eagle could have done so from the height at which he was sitting. The judge didn’t wait to sit back down in his chair before he started screaming. He stood shouting about lying asylum seekers and how he hated (yes, hated) their brazen attempts to cheat the system and come to the US where they would freeload, lying about government persecution in their home countries. “Opportunist!” he screamed. My client and I were stunned into silence as we watched the judge. Apparently the INS attorney was used to this behavior, and didn’t look up from his files while the judge ranted.

Of course the judge denied asylum to my client on the basis of lack of credibility. I slunk out of the courtroom as if I had behaved badly, completely abashed by the ranting. I was a new attorney, new to asylum defense, and afraid of provoking the judge even more. He could have found that my client’s claim was frivolous, and that ruling would have made the appeal even harder. My client was taken back to the YMCA gym where INS had made an improvised immigration detention center in nearby Brownsville. His wife and three children were also detained there; they were on his asylum application. He looked confused and frightened. I had told him the night before trial that he had a good case.

There were many strange things that happened the month that I volunteered as an immigration attorney in south Texas, as the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) scrambled to manage the flood of Central American asylum seekers coming over the Texas border. The civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua were at their heights in those last years of the 1980s, and all three governments and their guerrilla opponents massacred civilians with impunity. The US supported the murderous governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the “contras”, the guerrilla group in Nicaragua, with arms, ammunition, training, equipment, and advice on strategy. When civilians fled their homes to seek refuge in the US and Mexico, they often had vague stories of “men with arms” who had wiped out their villages seeking informers, or enemy supporters, or just for food and goods, or sometimes, in Guatemala, in genocidal rage. Most of the time, civilians didn’t know who was after them, or why. But that is precisely what US law requires them to know.

US asylum law provides that those fleeing persecution – defined as a threat to life or liberty – from their government or forces that the government cannot or will not control, may qualify for asylum (and then for legal residence) in the US if the persecution is on account of their race, nationality, political opinion, social group, or religion. These five categories are known as protected grounds. There must be a connection between the persecution and the protected ground, and the asylum seeker must show that connection. For instance, if you claim persecution from the government, you must prove why you were persecuted. Was it because of your religion? How do you know this? And how do you know that it was the government?

This seemingly simple statutory scheme has given rise to an ever more complex body of federal judicial and Board of Immigration Appeals interpretation in the last twenty-five years since asylum seekers from Central and South America, Asia, and Africa began to come in much greater numbers to the US. These decisions are precedential, meaning that they change the way in which the law is applied. Add to this judicial hidden or overt bias and active US support of the regimes from which asylum seekers claim refuge, and the asylum maze becomes a nightmare for almost all seekers. From 1985-1991, the years of most intense warfare against civilians in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, the US asylum grant rate for citizens of these countries averaged three percent.

INS was struggling to control the southern border; within a few months in 1986, the stream of Central Americans coming over the border ballooned from the normal dozen or so a month, to hundreds, and then thousands by 1987 as the civil wars took a turn towards efficient and country-wide massacres. INS responded with increased border patrols, and by setting up detention and “processing” centers along the border, in existing jails, empty school gymnasiums, old YMCA buildings, tents in fields fenced with barbed wire, and even an unused church camp. Immigration courtrooms were rented in county courthouses. Nonprofit social services groups began to set up camps alongside the detention centers to help get people on their way once they were released from detention. They offered bus tickets, food for the journey, and a place to stay for a few days while refugees decided on where to go and what to do. The border scene was chaotic, confusing, shifting, and high-stakes; in short, normal for a border in wartime.

In 1987, a group of volunteer immigration attorneys and legal workers began showing up to represent asylum seekers for free in Harlingen, Texas where one of the busiest immigration courts is located. Within a few months, they formed a nonprofit, ProBar, to raise money for an office and a couple of staffers, and the American Bar Association, among other donors, provided funds. The ABA helped ProBar recruit volunteer attorneys from throughout the US to come for weeks at a time to represent detainees in asylum hearings, and that is how I came to Harlingen. I volunteered for a month’s stint, arranged for a motel room, and flew to south Texas to join the ProBar founding attorney director, ProBar’s paralegal, and Mark Silverman, an experienced and passionate attorney from San Francisco who volunteered to guide the rest of us in preparing and presenting our cases in court.

During my month, there were from two to four volunteer attorneys at a time; we had little to no asylum law experience, and heavily depended on Mark’s advice and suggestions for strategies. We each represented an average of one client a day in immigration court, a pace that meant long hours meeting with clients, taking their declarations about why they fled their countries, writing briefs about their eligibility for asylum, preparing them for oral testimony, and presenting the case. We also wrote briefs for cases on appeals.

ProBar volunteers won only a handful of cases while I was there. We told each other that at least we were making good records for the appeals, to console each other. We worked as a team from about 8 a.m. to nearly 11 p.m. every day, in a cramped office with two desks, office supplies that we bought ourselves, and two word processing machines; in detention centers where our clients were afraid and confused; and in courtrooms where judges were often rude and even sometimes crazed. But I was not discouraged, or tired, or frustrated, and neither were my co-workers. It was one of the most exhilarating times of my life, like soldiers’ wartime experience of camaraderie.

I rented a car to get from my motel – a room inhabited by a large family of south Texas’s stinking bugs, which are harmless and not stinky unless you step on them -- on the outskirts of Harlingen to the two detention centers, located about 30 miles apart from each other, and about 15 miles from Harlingen where the courtrooms and ProBar offices were located. The roads were mostly empty, built straight through cotton fields, and I sped along them listening to the few cassette tapes I’d brought along. Paul Simon’s Graceland album is still linked in my mind to that south Texas landscape: flat, humid, empty of all but cotton fields, and a feeling of happiness and freedom. I was doing exactly what I went to law school to do. On Sundays, we often went to South Padre Island to lie on the beach for a few hours. On Saturday nights, we went to a bar where we turned up the jukebox and danced.

The detention center outside of Brownsville was a rented YMCA gym; it housed families and single women. Each family and each of the single women had a space on the floor of the gym marked off in red tape, with mattresses, and a supply of sheets and towels. Meals were served cafeteria style outside under tarps, with long lines of wooden picnic tables, and detainees were assigned a time for meals and for showers. They were free to go outside into the big fenced and barbwire-festooned yards surrounding the gym, at any time, with few guards. There was nothing to do there for the detainees except wait for their court hearings, meet with their attorneys, and share information with one another.

Most detainees learned early on that they could get released only if they had an address where they would be staying, and to which INS would send the notice of their next court hearing. Since almost no one had an address to give, there was a lively exchange of names and addresses among detainees. “Here’s my sister’s address and phone number. You can use it.” Sometimes detainees sold the address, but often my clients told me that the addresses were freely given among friends. The same sister might have six or seven people using her address; INS wouldn’t release a detainee if the sister said she didn’t know the person about whom they were calling, but might release detainees with children to a local refugee shelter upon request. It was rare that detainees stayed more than a few weeks at the center. The atmosphere was hopeful, as unlike an immigration detention center in 2012 as a family church camp is to a federal prison. Detainees said that they felt safe for the first time in a long time, and that they were grateful for the meals and the place to sleep.

The Port Isabel center for single men, the majority of those fleeing over the border, was a collection of big tents fenced with barbed wire; the courtroom located in one of the tents. It was nicknamed El Corralon – the big corral – for its rakish south Texas cowboy vibe. Guards were mostly friendly, recently hired to handle the influx, and stays were short – a few weeks at most for most detainees. It definitely did not have the atmosphere of the family church camp; perhaps more like a minimum security work camp for prisoners with misdemeanor time to work off. Today, with high prison-like security and conditions at detention centers, the Y turned detention center and El Corralon seem almost quaint, a marvel of gentleness.

And in the end, for many Central American refugees in the late 1980s, things turned out well. INS released most detainees before their court hearings, and the courts did not schedule the hearings for years. The Board of Immigration Appeals held off on deciding many of the appeals filed in these cases. American Baptist Church’s immigration unit sued the immigration court for its politically-motivated denials and won a settlement that gives a right for all Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Nicaraguans who had applied for asylum in those years to apply for suspension of deportation and thus gain legal residence. Advocates pushed bills for temporary protected status for Salvadorans and Hondurans, and Congress designated nationals of those countries as protected from deportation. Many of those who fled war in those years are citizens and permanent residents today.

When I listen to Graceland again, it takes me back to south Texas and to our small band of advocates supported by a national network of smart and determined legal organization staffers. So much seemed possible then – that the US could really make good on its promises protect the victims of human rights violations, that a small group of advocates could change the world. One of my closest friends, a Guatemalan who came across the Rio Grande in 1989, won legal residence based on the ABC settlement. He’s married to a citizen and about to apply for citizenship himself. He has his own business now, and is a generous supporter of organizations to help people start their own small, environmentally sustainable farms. Without the national effort that mobilized advocates to fight for fair hearings, he would have been thrown back to Guatemala at the height of the war there. We as a country would have been the poorer without him and asylum seekers like him. And he owes his life to the passionate advocacy of attorneys who never knew him who didn’t give up.

Two Sisters: Fleeing Two Wars - Part One

2011-11-04T17:32:00.001-07:00

Salvadoran sisters Zelda and Rosa del Carmen both fled their country’s wars; twenty years apart. The civil war of the 1980s propelled Zelda to the US in 1989, and the gang war against El Salvador’s people forced Rosa in 2009 to the US border. They both sought asylum in the US. Their reception as asylum seekers has parallels, and both those similarities and differences are instructive.

Rosa del Carmen Ayala and her two boys, Lucas, age 14, and Gilberto, age 12, from El Salvador, walked over the US border from Mexico one September morning in 2009, and were arrested immediately by US Customs and Border Patrol. They were detained at a checkpoint for about twelve hours while CBP checked their identity documents, and listened to their story about fleeing the murderous rage of a criminal gang in their neighborhood in San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital. Rosa, a small woman with curly black hair usually covered by a knitted cap, looks much younger than her 35 years, and is shy. She has a way of ducking her head and looking upward towards those with whom she is speaking, then ducking her head again. The effect is charming. Maybe that was part of the reason that she and the boys were released after only a few hours, and given a notice to appear in court to present their asylum claim.

Almost all asylum seekers who come over the Mexican border are detained for months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in California, Arizona, and Texas. Asylum seekers comprise less than five percent of those who entered the US without documents at the Mexican border in the decade beginning with the Bush administration and continuing under the Obama administration. They come primarily from Central America, but there are some from Mexico, and a few from Africa, South America, and Asia. For Mexicans, the word on the streets of border towns is that they will be detained for more than six months, and then deported, if they try for asylum. Instead, Mexicans make no claim of persecution, and they get expedited deportation at the border when they are caught. Most will try to cross the border again the next day.

Rosa gave the ICE officer her sister Zelda’s address, in central Washington State, and the officer sent notice to the immigration court in Seattle to schedule the first hearing for asylum. Then Rosa and the boys boarded a bus for the trip from Texas to Seattle. Zelda told them to ask for a bus to Wenatchee when they got to Seattle; she would pick them up there. Zelda lived in a small town about 20 miles north of Wenatchee, in the Cascade Range of the Rocky Mountains, with her 20 year old son and his wife and new baby. Rosa had work within two days of her arrival at the fruit packing company where Zelda and her son and daughter in law worked; it was minimum wage and no benefits, but there were bonuses for packing faster. Experienced packers made up to fifty percent more than newcomers. The boys went to school in Wenatchee, taking the bus there and back every day. They were in English classes with other children of fruit packers. The house that Zelda rented was packed with six people and a baby, but Zelda was strapped financially, and Rosa would be helping with the rent.

Zelda is the oldest sibling in the Ayala family. When she was a young woman in the 1980s, her small town three hours from the capital was contested ground during El Salvador’s twelve- year civil war. The government suspected that the town was a guerrilla stronghold, supplying arms and supplies to rebels in the capital, and imposed martial law. Soldiers occupied houses at will, and behaved with impunity. Zelda was raped by several of the soldiers who had taken over her house. The army captain in command declared that Zelda was a guerrilla sympathizer, and when her husband protested, he was murdered, along with their two toddlers. Zelda fled on foot with a friend, Beatriz, whose husband and child had also been murdered; neither of them believed they had anything left to lose.

Very few women victims of war left El Salvador alone as they did; in almost all cases, women stayed in place, despite horrific violence. It was the young men who fled. But Zelda was unusual. She had gone to high school, the first and the last in her family to do so. She was a community educator in her neighborhood’s Christian base community, the movement of the Latin American Catholic Church that electrified poor communities throughout Central and South America with its “preferential option for the poor.” The communities met to study the Bible in the 1970s and 1980s and to seek to apply its message of radical social equality in their lives and in their communities. From the beginning in El Salvador, these groups were suspected by the government of socialist leanings, and their meetings were disrupted, their churches desecrated, and their members jailed. When the civil war broke out, the government engaged in wholesale roundup and murder of those involved with Christian base communities, so as to wipe out any possibility of support for the leftist guerrillas.

Zelda and Beatriz walked at night, moving north, hiding in the day, and made their way through Guatemala’s civil war, and then through Mexico on foot. They had no money, and lived on food and water they found and the kindness of strangers. It took them five months to walk to the US border in Brownsville, Texas. They were arrested and detained in an old YMCA gym that served as a stop-gap detention center for the unprecedented floods of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans fleeing their civil wars. The gym/detention center with its blankets and pillows scattered on the gym floor, its three meals a day, and its high roof were a comfort to the women, and they were reluctant to leave after their hearing with an immigration judge who accepted the applications for asylum that a volunteer legal worker from Houston had filled out for them. Zelda didn’t know what asylum was, but the volunteer, who didn’t speak Spanish well, said it was a way to stay in the US. The judge told them they were free to go until their next hearing on their claim for asylum. He said that the notice about the next hearing would be mailed to them at their addresses.

They had nowhere to go. They had given the immigration officer at the detention center the address of a person in Seattle who they didn’t know; it was a common practice in the makeshift detention centers in those years for refugees to help one another like this: if one had an address, he or she would share it with another, so that they could be released. Without an address to which the next hearing notice could be sent, the system would flounder, detainees would be stacked to the ceilings. If the immigration officers and judges knew that the addresses were shams, they didn’t let on.

Zelda and Beatriz walked the ten miles from the detention center to Brownsville, and found a refugee shelter where they were given a meal, $20 each, and two bus tickets. They chose Seattle since it was the only name of a city they knew, and rode in what seemed to them deep comfort for the six days it took to arrive at the Greyhound station in Seattle. They stayed in a downtown women’s shelter for a few days, long enough to hear about farm work in the Yakima Valley, picking apples, and got two more bus tickets to Yakima. It took less than a day for them to find a farm labor contractor and to start picking apples that September in 1989. They slept in a worker’s camp and used their daily pay to buy food from a woman who cooked for migrants.

Zelda didn’t hold out much hope that she would win asylum in the US. She had heard that a tiny percentage of Salvadorans fleeing the war since the early 1980s got asylum. But she wasn’t tempted to avoid the immigration court, either; she was determined to make her stand and speak out against what was happening there. So she wrote the court with her new address, a migrant workers’ program office in Sunnyside, outside of Yakima. She had asked one of the workers at the program office for a description of what asylum meant, and this is what he gave her:

Asylum is legal protection against deportation. It is the status sought by non-US citizens who enter the U.S., either legally or illegally, asking for refuge based on claims of persecution or fear of persecution in their home country.

In a couple of months, the apple picking season ended. Beatriz left the migrant camp and moved in with a labor contractor and his four children; she was to receive pay for taking care of the children and the house. The contractor offered to let Zelda sleep in the living room for rent, but Zelda declined. The camp was closing up for the winter, but she didn’t like the man; she suspected he would sleep with Beatriz and consider that it was payment enough for her labor. She heard that there was a company north of Yakima in the small town of Wenatchee that was looking for fruit packers to work through the winter. The company provided barrack housing to workers who needed it. She thought she’d work there until her asylum hearing. She wasn’t sure what would happen if she won asylum, but she imagined that her life would open up with possibilities, with perhaps even a chance at a good job as a social worker for migrants.

To be continued...

Mattress in the Courtroom: The Muddy Path to Court

2011-10-28T18:26:00.000-07:00

On a fresh, cool early morning, we left the capital, Lusaka, in a big USAID SUV with a driver and the Mission’s democracy officer, a Zambian attorney, to see how the court system in a small town operates. As we drove away from the hotel, the government buildings with their tended grounds, the shopping mall, the big old trees and the neatly stucco-walled compounds of upper- and middle -class housing complexes gave way to dozens of one-story storefronts lining the road, with litter blowing on the bare packed red earth. There were no trees. Women with lengths of brightly-patterned cloth wrapped around them for skirts carried large flat round baskets of fruit or vegetables on their heads, and men pushed wooden gurneys loaded with enormous burlap bags of produce or grain. Along the railroad tracks, people spread cloths on the red muddy ground on which to display all kinds of goods: clothes, cell phones, shoes, bars of soap, CDs and CD players, coat hangers, baskets of straw and plastic containers. There were women cooking over open fires, offering hot food for sale.

In less than an hour, we came to Kafue (ka-few-ee), and turned off the main road where a white metal sign announced “Kafue Subordinate Court”. We drove, very slowly, over a deeply rutted road, and parked on marshy land in front of three small white stucco buildings – the courtroom, the jail, and the court offices. There were no other cars in sight. People walk here – the state of the roads demand it, among many other reasons.

We picked our way over the wet ground, stepping a small stream on the way to the court administration building, where the chief judge awaited us. His office held statute books from 1995; he had never received any supplements. When he needs to know if the law has changed in the last 14 years, he calls lawyer friends in Lusaka who can help him. His court mainly hears criminal cases, primarily rape and incest, with some robbery and theft.

Once a week, he hears civil cases: debts, inheritance, and defamation. He showed us the record of appeal from the local (customary law) court decision that he was deciding that day: it was handwritten by the local court judge and held that the divorced woman in the case could not share in the property from the marriage because she had not worked outside the home. It’s a wrong decision, the judge said; we had a Supreme Court case years ago that said women are entitled to half of all property acquired during the marriage, but the local court judges don’t know it. I try to train them, but there are so many other things to take care of. He had a kind face and a gentle manner; he was humble too, about his role deciding the fate of thousands of people every year. I would have wanted him to judge me, were I in the dock in Zambia.

After we met with the chief judge, we walked to another building, the courtroom, to see a trial in progress. There was a double-size foam mattress in the very middle of the courtroom, on the floor. It was covered with a tattered, torn, and very dirty sheet, and a big blue carpet was heaped on it. There were three prisoners in the dock, the judge at the bench, and a police prosecutor at the counsel table. There are no state prosecutors for local and subordinate courts, which hear at least 95% of the country’s criminal cases. People were seated on the benches for the public; we quietly walked in and took seats at the back. Of course, we stood out, and the whole room, including the judge, stopped and looked at us before the judge continued.

The accused, two women and a man, were charged with stealing the mattress, the carpet, and some documents from a house. The man was in jail, but the women were out on bail. There were no bailiffs in sight, no handcuffs, no shackles. The accused were not represented by counsel, which is the case in nearly all criminal cases here. The judge asked if the accused were ready to go forward in their own defense; no, the prisoner said; the case was continued until March 25. He’ll stay in jail for another week, until then.

There’s so many problems in administration of justice in Zambia that donors (or as we say, “international cooperation”) have stayed away in droves from it, mostly because the leaders themselves don’t seem to want change or think it’s possible. Everyone in the justice system here is aware of the grave deficiencies but throw up their hands about leading for change.

So I wasn’t prepared for this courtroom trial. I thought I’d see grave miscarriages of justice, and put one more stroke down in my notebook against Zambian judges and police, with notes about police brutality, forced confessions, overcrowded court systems, untrained and unprofessional judges, lengthy pre-trial detentions, unconscionable delays, and on and on. Yes, all that may be true, but I didn’t see it here. The continuance was for a short time; the proceedings were translated into the local language, Nanja; the judge read the accused their rights; and the evidence was hauled into court. There was no sense, at least to me, of us-versus-them, we the good people, you the despised prisoner. It did seem to be a judgment of peers, a gathering of the people. At least what I saw that day fits with the traditional goal of justice here – to restore harmonious relationships, not to break them beyond repair. After the judge left the courtroom, the prisoner did too. He walked on his own back to the jail, tailed by a policeman.

Home Alone: Part Two

2011-10-21T15:32:00.001-07:00

When the agent handcuffed Marta, she said, “Please help me! My dog is in my trailer by herself. It’s just a few doors down. Please let me go there and give her to someone to take care of her. I’ll go with you, I promise. Just let me take my dog to my neighbor. She’s home alone.” But either the agent didn’t understand Spanish, wasn’t listening, or didn’t care, because he hustled her out the front door and into the van without a word. Marta began speaking more and more loudly, then shouting, until the agent gagged her with a strip of cloth across her mouth. Then she stomped her feet against the floor of the van until he shackled her feet together. After that, she sat still, arms twisted behind her back, tears coursing down her face.

When the van got the detention center, two big guards took Marta out, shuffling with her shackles, to the women’s processing area. The guards stood by while she was freed from the handcuffs, gag, and shackles, in case she tried to hurt someone. But Marta stood still, and asked, “Do any of you speak Spanish?” Some of the inmate processing staff did speak Spanish, and Marta began speaking urgently. “It’s my dog. She’s in my trailer alone. I have to call someone to come and take her. Can I use a phone now?” All in good time, one of the processors said, first you have to be checked in. After that, there will be no phone calls until tomorrow. What if everyone wanted to make a phone call tonight? The whole system would be thrown out of whack. Marta started to protest, but saw one of the guards shake the handcuffs at her. After that, she followed all orders, crying silently. It took six hours, until four in the morning, for the “processing.” She was led to a bunk in a large room with dozens of women sleeping in double stacked rows, and fell into bed exhausted.

Guards called all the women out of bed at 6 a.m. With breakfast and shower, and many hours sitting on her bunk with nowhere to go, it was 11 a.m. before a guard led her into a room where Marta met with a harassed-looking man who said he was her deportation officer. He began by asking her for her full name and place of birth, but she interrupted. “Please listen,” she said, “I have an emergency. My dog has been locked up in my trailer since 6 o’clock last night, without getting out, and without food, and her water will be long gone by now. Will you let me call my sister now so she can go get her?” The officer looked at her blankly for a moment, then pushed a phone to her. “Dial 9 for an outside line,” he said. Marta dialed. When her sister answered, Marta said, “I’m in immigration detention, Rocio. They took me last night. Jennifer has been home alone all this time. Can you go over there now and take her home with you?” Rocio had many questions, but Marta said, “I’ll call you later with details. Just get Jennifer. You still have the key, right?” Rocio promised to get her.

Only later, after Marta had been released on bond from detention, did she learn what happened to Jennifer. Rocio had been in eastern Washington visiting her daughter at Washington State University when Marta called. Rocio called her son to go get the key and get Jennifer, but her son didn’t answer his cell phone until that evening. Meanwhile, Rocio left Pullman, and drove straight for six hours, but didn’t arrive until after 9 p.m. She grabbed the key to Marta’s trailer, drove the 15 miles from her house to Marta’s, and finally liberated Jennifer at 10:30 that night, more than 28 hours after Jennifer had been left alone. She took Jennifer home with her that night.

The next day, at 9 a.m. when the bond window opened, Rocio went to detention and paid Marta’s $7500 bond. By 3 p.m., Marta was released, and Rocio picked her up. “Jennifer’s fine,” Rocio said as soon as she saw her sister. “She’s with Tyler.” When Marta and Jennifer were reunited that day, even Tyler, Marta’s stoic nephew, was moved to tears.

Rocio had petitioned for Marta’s legal residence many years before, and the visa was now available. She was eligible to get her permanent residence, and she did get it within a year of being arrested for being in the country undocumented. She and Rocio hired an immigration attorney to handle the case, and represent Marta in deportation proceedings, to terminate the process. She was one of the few lucky ones. She had been in the US before 2001, when Congress decreed that those whose family members petitioned for them before May 2001 could get their residence. Residence however, would only be possible when the long wait for the visa – from three to 18 years, depending on the country and family relationship -- was over. No one who entered the US undocumented after that time could get residence based on a family petition, not even spouses of US citizens.

What Marta could never understand was why the officers had arrested her. It was a huge waste of taxpayer money, when she was not a criminal and posed no threat to anyone. She paid taxes, and offered a good service to the community with her tailoring business. She had a permanent residence visa immediately available to her. What a waste! And what cruelty! But two things it had done for her, she told Jennifer. The arrest made her decide to make friends for herself and Jennifer with her neighbors, give two of them keys to her trailer, and make sure that she had their phone numbers with her always. And the second thing? It politicized her. She took Jennifer to every single protest march in Seattle and Tacoma that she could find against inhumane immigration laws and practices. Jennifer always wore the sign: “ICE left me home alone. Bark out against injustice!”

Home Alone: Part One

2011-10-14T15:36:00.000-07:00

Marta loved to design clothes and she loved to sew them. She taught herself, using scraps of fabric to make clothes for dolls, and later made clothes for herself and for her mother and sisters. She filled notebooks with her designs, but the family couldn’t afford the fine fabrics she craved. She made do with coarse materials, but the family was still by far the best dressed in their lower middle class neighborhood. When she was fifteen in 1965, she begged her parents to send her to Tegucigalpa, Honduras’s capital, so she could apprentice with a dressmaker and designer known throughout the country for dressing for the elite and wealthy. Her father was a tailor in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second largest city, and while he wanted to make Marta happy, he doubted that she could get into the great man’s workshop. He was touched by her brave spirit though, and so he took her to the capital on the bus, with her notebooks and a trunk full of her designs, and sat in the waiting room while Marta asked for a meeting with Mr. Alvarez, the famous designer. She got the interview that very day, and as her father later said in confidence to her mother, it wasn’t because of her looks either. It must have been talent and determination, since Marta was the plainest in the family, and had little time for social graces.

Marta stayed in the capital and worked for the designer for almost a year, learning to cut fabric. She would have gone on in her apprenticeship, but her father died suddenly, and she had to return to San Pedro Sula to help her mother run the tailor shop. Her sisters were still in high school, and had no interest in tailoring. Her mother did the business side, and Marta made the clothes: suits and shirts for men, as her father had done for thirty years. She hired a young man to do the measuring and fitting since it was completely unacceptable for a woman to measure a man, and she began making clothes for women too. Her sisters grew up and married, and Marta and her mother kept the shop going. It wasn’t the life of high fashion that Marta had dreamed of, but it did allow her artistic scope, particularly when her customers gave her a free hand. The business did well until the early 1990s when rival criminal gangs warred over who owned San Pedro Sula, and the middle class customers who had been loyal to Tito’s Tailoring for generations fled the city for safer suburbs, or the capital, or the US.

One of Marta’s sisters, Rocio, had gone to the US on a visitor’s visa, and then met and married an American. When she became a citizen in 1995, she offered to bring her mother to the US as a resident, but Marta’s mother was hesitant to leave Marta. Under US visa laws, permanent residence is immediate for parents of US citizens, but brothers and sisters of US citizens have to wait in line. The line might take years; the US Congress determines the number of visas available every year, and there are never enough for all those who want them. The tailoring business had fallen away to nearly nothing by 1995, and their old neighborhood was now ugly with burnt-out buildings and ankle-deep trash. It was dangerous to go out even during the day. Marta urged her mother to go to the States, and told her that she herself would get a visitor’s visa and come to visit. Marta’s mother made her promise that she would move from the neighborhood and live with a sister and her family in the capital, where she would be safer and could try to get work. Then when Rocio’s visa petition for Marta became available, Marta could get her permanent resident card and come to the US.

After her mother left, Marta sold the sewing machines for what little she could, and she did try to live with her sister, her sister’s husband, and their four children in their small apartment in the capital. But she felt that she was in the way, and she could not find a job, no matter how many tailoring shops she visited to show her portfolio. She knew what they said when she left each shop: she was too old. She had thought it herself when she had her own business; she wanted young people who she could train in the way she wanted, not those who already had their ways set.

She applied for a US visitor’s visa twice, and was turned down each time. Each visa appointment cost $50 US dollars, money she had to borrow from her sister. She was 45 years old and felt that she had come to the end of her options in Honduras. She borrowed money from another sister, and flew to Tijuana, Mexico. There she found a coyote, a smuggler of human beings, and paid to be taken across the border as part of a group of young men and a few young women. She was older by 20 years than the oldest in the group, and she struggled to keep up. She made it to San Diego, and she got a bus to Seattle where her sister and mother lived. She lived in her sister’s mother-in-law apartment with her mother, and got a job in the clothing alterations department in a big department store in downtown Seattle. After a few years, she had saved enough money to open a little alterations shop of her own in Burien, a town south of Seattle where many Hispanic people lived, and she designed and sewed dresses for recent immigrants for weddings and other special occasions.

Her mother died in 2001, and her sister was divorced shortly afterwards. Her sister had to sell the house, and Marta went out on her own to look for a place to live. She found a trailer park in Burien that she liked, and bought her own trailer to set on her rented plot. She was surprised by the sense of freedom she felt, living alone for the first time in her life. She thought she might be lonely, and she considered what she would do if she did. She could join a church, or try one of the new internet dating services, or join a singles group. But she wasn’t lonely. She worked most days from 9-7 p.m., except Sundays when she worked in her tiny garden, cooked for the week, cleaned, did her errands, and read fashion magazines for new ideas.

She didn’t know most of her neighbors, except for a friendly Mexican family that invited her to their many gatherings. Their trailer was no larger than hers, but they had three children and various other family that stayed for periods of time. She turned them down most of the time, but went for an hour or so sometimes, bringing her special dish, pan de coco – coconut bread rolls, or sometimes fried sweet plantains with sour cream. One night, one of the children brought home a puppy, of some indeterminate mixed heritage that he had found walking alone along a main road, but his parents refused to let him keep it. Marta surprised herself and them by saying that she would take it. She had never had a dog in her life, or ever thought she wanted one.

The first few weeks were confusing, both for Marta and the puppy, but they both persevered by some grace, and by the time three months had gone by, they were inseparable. She named the puppy Jennifer, an American name she had heard and liked, and took her to the shop every day. Jennifer didn’t shed hair, which was fortunate, and she was of a peaceful and friendly disposition. Customers mostly liked her, and Jennifer knew how to stay out of the way if someone didn’t like dogs. Marta started taking long walks with Jennifer at midday, which was good for both of them, and going to a dog park on the weekends so Jennifer could play with other dogs. By the time six months had gone by and Jennifer was no longer a puppy, Marta could not imagine life without her. Jennifer slept at Marta’s feet, ate when Marta ate, and learned to chase balls and return them for treats, which made Marta laugh.

A year after Jennifer came to live with her, Marta went one summer evening to the Mexican family’s trailer for a birthday party for one of the children. She left Jennifer at home since she thought she was better off away from the noise and confusion of the party, with so many people in such a small space. Right before Marta got up to leave the party, four agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement knocked on the door, pushed it open, and arrested every one of the adults, including Marta, after demanding that everyone show them “papers.” No one had papers to show, and they were all handcuffed with their hands behind their backs, put into a van, and after a two hours’ wait while the agents loaded more handcuffed people into the van, driven to the immigration detention center in Tacoma. The agents took the children to a neighbor’s trailer, a neighbor that the family didn’t know well, but who said they’d take them when ICE asked.

To be continued...

Ed In Chile: Part Two

2011-10-07T17:23:00.001-07:00

It did not occur to Ed to protest, or to file a lawsuit, or to build a movement of students to lobby for him. That would be distasteful to him. Lilia had the skills to do it for Ed, but he would not ask her or allow her to fight for him. He knew, in a vague way, that he was out of step with the rest of the department, with the rest of the university, but he had never spent time thinking about it. The university wasn’t the place for him anymore. He strongly doubted that there was a place for him in Chile.

At first Lilia couldn’t believe that Ed was just going to leave his job, walk away from his salary, and reduce his pension to a pittance. She urged him to at least try to do what Sergio wanted him to do, and she pledged to find people to help Ed develop research ideas that would appeal to corporate funders. She herself would help him rewrite his curriculum to come up to Ministry guidelines. She could not understand Ed’s point that he would never be happy prostituting his talent and skills, as he labeled it, in hope of keeping his job. She told him that he could still do his own research on the side, and teach first-year university students who weren’t yet locked into state-mandated practical curriculum.

But Ed did walk away, and he didn’t have another job. His children were disapproving, Lilia was angry, and his wife’s family took to whispering about the state of his mental health. He had never given himself time to develop friendships, so he had no one to talk with. He spent the first months after he cleaned out his office going twice a day to the pool in his condo building. It had been thirty-plus years since he had swum at all, and he was stiff and awkward in the water. But slowly, slowly he began to be more comfortable and to move more easily. While he was swimming he didn’t think about anything. The pool was on the 25th floor of the building; it was surrounded on three sides by glass walls, and the high roof had large skylights. In a month he was swimming a mile during each workout, and he had lost 20 pounds.

When he wasn’t swimming, he lay in a deck chair by the side of the pool and watched clouds. Sometimes he re-read the science fiction novels he’d loved as a boy and as a young man, before he went to graduate school and his life was too busy to read anything but the scientific literature on yeast. The science fiction comforted him. Reading them, those early sci-fi novels of the 1950s and 60s, where science solved all problems and the future was lustrous, he forgot the last 40 years of his life. Perhaps because of this, it seemed natural that he would return to Seattle. After two months, he was sure of it. Lilia was still angry and the children didn’t need him. Lilia spent at least half her time in Europe anyway. He would live with his parents and share the burden of their care with Nancy, his sister. She had been taking care of them alone for the last five or so years, as their strength failed. He could be useful again.

Besides, Chile wasn’t his country. Ed thought back over the last 30 years and told himself that it had never been his country. He had Lilia and the kids, and his job in Chile, but now all that was over. His true country had been his family and his work. He knew nothing about the politics, and little about the country’s history. The kids could visit him when they wanted to; Lilia, too, if she ever wanted to. He was going home. When he told Lilia that he was going, she predicted he’d be back in months. She reminded him that he always found his parents difficult to be around for more than a few days. But she didn’t beg him to stay. Ed was mildly surprised at that, at how lightly their 30 years together could float away, at how they could let it do that.

When Ed called Nancy to tell her he was coming home, he didn’t say it was for good. He told her he had retired early and could spend time now helping out with their parents. Nancy said he was welcome, of course. It would be good for their parents to have Ed around for company. They now had a housekeeper who also cooked and did personal care, but errands, groceries, house maintenance, arranging for doctors’ visits and outings, and general oversight were Nancy’s purview. She would be glad to share these tasks with Ed. She had two teenagers and a husband, and worked full time as a gardener at the University of Washington.

Ed packed light. He was surprised at that too, that he needed to take so little with him. He found his goodbyes easy to do; his children, his wife’s family, the doorman of their condo building, a couple of his former colleagues, a few of his students who had kept in touch over the years. There wasn’t anyone else. He said that he was going to spend some time with his parents and sister, help out for a while. Lilia took him to the airport, and their goodbyes were short. On the long flight, as he tried to sleep in his tiny seat – Ed was a big man -- he had a sudden memory of his first plane ride to Chile, when he was coming to meet Lilia’s family, interview at the university, find an apartment, and make wedding plans. He was 26, with a new doctorate in biology, a swimmer’s strength and physique, and a loving fiancée waiting for him when he landed.

He had been sitting next to a Chilean, a slight, grey man in his 60s who spoke English well. The Chilean, Julio, said he was going home to live after 43 years in Seattle. He emphasized the 43 years as if he himself could hardly believe how much time it had been. He had worked for a big parking garage company as a bookkeeper for most of those years. He was a US citizen, had Social Security and a pension, and had already bought a house, as yet unseen, in the small town 50 miles north of Santiago where he had grown up. He said he had no family left there, but friends from his youth still lived in the town. He thought he’d finally have time to write poetry. He loved to read poetry, he said, but had never had time to write while he was working.

Ed asked about his wife and children, and he remembered the look on Julio’s face: a grimace. Julio said he was divorced and his children grown and out on their own. They would be staying in the States, he said. Ed asked if he would miss the States. Julio paused a long time, and then said, “I don’t know what I miss. I don’t think I can find what I’m missing. It’s not in the States, and not in Chile. Maybe I lost my place.”

Julio said no more about himself, and began asking Ed about his reasons for traveling to Chile. Ed talked of Lilia, his job prospects, and his happiness. He was normally more reserved, but he was brimming with joy and was delighted to share it. He said goodbye to Julio and went out to meet Lilia and all her family who were standing at the gate with welcome posters and flowers for him. Lilia was nearly jumping in her excitement to see him. The happy group swept him up with them, and he didn’t see Julio again until they were standing at the baggage claim carousel. Julio was by himself. He caught Ed’s eye, and gave him a small wave. Julio mouthed something before he turned back to the carousel to look for his baggage, but Ed could not tell what he said. He lost sight of him after that.

When the plane landed in Seattle, Ed walked alone to the baggage claim.

Ed In Chile: Part One

2011-09-30T17:57:00.000-07:00

Ed grew up in Seattle in the 1950s, the son of a Boeing aerospace engineer and a mother who was passionate about gardening. He loved to swim, play the accordion, and conduct “science” experiments in the backyard, most of which involved something that might blow up if handled wrong. He invited his grade school friends to his parents’ basement to watch what liquid nitrogen did to common household items (it exploded them), and he spent hours in the summer collecting varieties of plants and insects and looking at them under a microscope. He was on the swim team in high school, and entered and placed highly in science fairs every year. When it was time to go to college, he chose a local private school with a strong biology program as well as an excellent swim team, and did well. He went to the University of California at Berkeley for his master’s degree and doctorate in biology, and graduated in 1972 with more than a dozen job offers both in business and academia. But staying in the US was not even on the table.

In his second to last year at Berkeley, he met Lilia, a doctoral student in inorganic biology from Chile. He was 24 and deeply in love; she spoke English with a charming accent and was beautiful with her long dark hair and graceful movements. She was his most serious relationship ever, and there was no question in his mind: he would follow her home to Chile. She didn’t want to stay in the States; she had a job waiting for her as a full professor in the biology department at a Santiago university. It was the most exciting city in the world, she told Ed; besides, she was from Santiago and all her family were there. She said he could easily land a job in at the university, teaching graduate students. She was right. He got an assistant professor job before they landed in Santiago, and had six months of intensive language study before his first class. They had a Catholic wedding, and got an apartment near the university in a lively neighborhood where musicians and artists lived and worked.

It was exhilarating to be in Santiago. Lilia’s family was welcoming, and his students were engaged and dedicated. The scientific community worldwide published in English, and English was the language of international conferences or from his international colleagues. Ed did not feel isolated from the latest discoveries in his field. The university encouraged his field work and experiments, and gave him time, resources, and space to devote to them. He published extensively in biology journals.

Ed and Lilia’s first child arrived in 1976, and their next in 1980. They moved to a larger apartment, and had live-in nannies and maids. They loved their children, and spent what time they had, apart from their work, with them. But it was clear that their passion was their work. Lilia was a highly-regarded teacher, and even more in demand as an international conference speaker. She published articles frequently in international biology journals, and had steady stream of income from consulting work with manufacturing companies and governments regarding the environmental effects of manufacturing by-products. She traveled extensively throughout the world.

Ed’s career was quieter. He loved the curiosity and intelligence of his students, and got inspiration from working with them on research projects. He sometimes was invited to speak at international conferences, but he was content to be home with the children while Lilia traveled, and to focus on his laboratory at the university, and his students. He delighted in her success, and didn’t feel that it took away from his. He took the long trip to Seattle to visit his parents and sisters once every summer for a month or so, and took the children. Lilia sometimes came for a few days or a week, too. In this way, the years went by.

Ed mostly didn’t miss living in Seattle or the States. His world was his family and his students and his research. He told himself that he could live anywhere, as long as he had Lilia and the kids, and his work. The wild swings of the Chilean economy in the 1970s leveled out in the 1980s and 1990s, and his and Lilia’s salaries continued to increase. He was happy, and even happier when he could go with some of his doctoral students to his mountain cabin in Cerro Arenas, a few hours away from Santiago, and conduct yeast experiments.

One day in 2000, when Ed was in his fifties and the children were grown, Sergio,

his university department head, met with him regarding his research and his teaching. It’s a new day for us, Sergio said, what with the recession and cutbacks in our government funding, we don’t have the money we used to have for theoretical research. We are going to have to show some practical application for your research if we want to keep getting it funded. I’ve been under a lot of pressure from the university president, he said, and I’ve been shielding you from it for a couple of years now because students like you and your classes are popular.

Sergio said Ed needed to choose research that had immediate practical application, publish his research results much more than he had been, and change his curriculum to focus on the Science Ministry’s new guidelines for master’s degree students in biology. Ed had seen the guidelines, and had dismissed them as simplistic and so directed to practical applications that the underlying science was given very short shrift.

Sergio gave Ed three months to “turn things around” as he called it. And then what? Ed said. What if I don’t, or can’t? Let’s talk about that in three months, Sergio said. He turned to his computer and started reading email. Ed was still sitting in front of Sergio’s desk, staring at his intriguing sculpture of the periodic table. It was the work of a well-known Chilean sculptor, given to Sergio by the CEO of one of the country’s large oil companies. The company had also given the university a large grant to work on improved chemical means of purifying crude oil.

“That’s all, Ed,” Sergio said. “Let me know if you need anything from me as you go through this.” Ed got up and left the office. He knew he couldn’t do what Sergio wanted, and he knew that Sergio knew it too. His work was over here, and it was over far sooner than Ed wanted it to be. His work. He had been naïve to think that his delighted playing with experiments, his sharing with students, his enthusiasm for the pure job of doing science, could last in the new Chile, the international economic powerhouse Chile. Yes, he had a state-protected job until he was 65, but he wouldn’t be teaching. Sergio would hire someone else who could bring in grant money, and Ed would lose his lab and his students. Sergio would say that he was looking for a position for Ed, but there wouldn’t be one; he would be counting on Ed just to leave.

To be continued...

We Are Citizens, Aren't We?

2011-09-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

Annie had been in the US since she was a year old and never thought about her immigration status. Her parents had taken care of all that. If anyone asked her, she said that she and her family were all citizens. They had all – her parents, her sisters and brother, and she – came to the US right after the Second World War, from New Zealand, where her parents and older sisters landed as refugees from Hungary during the war. They were the lucky ones; the most of the rest of their families died in concentration camps. But when she was growing up in southern California, she didn’t feel lucky. Her father died before she was four, and her mother remarried a man with an evil temper. Her sisters fled home as soon as they could, and Annie and her brother Stephen endured beatings with their heads down, trying to be invisible.

When she was sixteen, had left school, and was ready to get a job in the ballpoint pen factory where her mother worked, she went to the Social Security office for her Social Security number. She hadn’t brought any documents with her since she didn’t know she needed them. When it was her turn to approach the window, the clerk laughed and called out to her fellow workers to get a load of this girl who thought she could get a number without any proof of identity. Annie hurried out of the office, her face red with shame. She asked her mother for documents that night, and was surprised when her mother sat down to talk with her. Her mother never had time to talk, what with her work at the factory and housework, and trying to keep the children out of her husband’s sight. She gave Annie a card with Annie’s picture as a baby pasted on it, and Annie’s name, with the words “Lawful Permanent Resident” printed at the top of the card.

“I thought we were citizens,” Annie said. “Aren’t we?” Her mother’s hands shook as she tied up the old paper folder with the rest of the family’s immigration documents. “We never did anything about it,” she said. “After your father died, I didn’t know how to go about it, and your stepfather, well….he didn’t want me to spend any money or time on paperwork. Just don’t lose that paper, Annie. He won’t like it. It’s all we have to show that you are legal here.”

Annie got her social security number and started work, but didn’t stay long on the assembly line. She was bright and quick, and the manager promoted her to front office secretary. She was designing advertising for the company by the time she was 18. She lived at home and gave her earnings to her mother; if she hadn’t done so, her stepfather would not have been happy. Both Annie and her mother knew what that would mean. And the extra money meant that Annie’s brother could finish high school without having to drop out to work full-tine.

Annie made friends, girls who worked in the shops and small companies in Santa Monica’s business district, and they often lay on the beach, swam sometimes, and talked and drank cokes until it was time to go home to their housework and dinners. Annie left her purse on the beach blanket when she swam; one day her purse was stolen, and with it, her permanent resident card. She didn’t tell her mother, since she saw no need to worry her. And besides, she already had her social security number. Her mother died of cancer when Annie was 19; right after the funeral, Annie and Stephen packed their few clothes and fled their stepfather’s house. Stephen lived with a high school friend’s family, and Annie rented an apartment near the beach. She made enough money to provide the basics for herself and Stephen, but it was nearly half of what the men in the ad department made. When she asked her boss to increase her pay to equal that of her peers, he laughed out loud. Women don’t make that kind of money, he said.

Annie quit the job immediately. She later marveled at her own gumption, when she was older and more cautious. She opened her own graphic design company the next day, working from home, going in person to many of Santa Monica’s retail shops to promote her ad design services. She didn’t make enough for her rent and food, and for Stephen’s clothes and pocket money, in the first few months, so she worked at night as a waitress in a 24-hour pancake house. But within six months, she had enough money to rent an office and hire a secretary. In a year, she hired another designer, then a salesman. In two years, she was able to pay for Stephen’s college and buy a house of her own. She was 23 years old and the head of her own successful advertising firm.

Stephen graduated from college and came to work in the firm. Annie loved sharing the firm with him; she could ease up a bit, take some time for herself, maybe meet someone and get married. She got back in touch with high school friends, and went to the newly-fashionable square and contra dances and to the beach again. She joined a Christian church and helped with the singles ministry, arranging dances and hiking outings. She met Gary on a hike in the Agoura Hills. He was outgoing, talkative, and confident, not exactly good looking, but alert and quick enough to make up for it. She didn’t know what he saw in her, and was flattered by his interest. No one had ever been interested in her before. He was a salesman for a car parts company, a few years older than she.

After they married and he came to live in her house, he pressed her to sell out her interest in the firm to her brother, and to use the money to open a car parts company with him. She was not interested in car parts, but she wanted to please her husband. They opened the company, with plans to market directly to car manufacturers, but instead of making money, they lost it. There was a major recession in the early 1980s, and American car makers sharply cut back production. They lost her house to foreclosure, and pawned her jewelry for enough money to rent an apartment. She took a job as a teller in a bank, and Gary went back to selling car parts. They were frosty with each other; she didn’t like to blame him, but she was bitter about selling her firm. She tried to hide the extent of their money troubles from her brother, and she vowed she would not ask Stephen for money or ask for a job at the firm. She was touchy about being the older sister who had everything under control; she was the one who helped Stephen. She didn’t want it to be the other way around.

She and Gary soon fought every day about money. She didn’t want to spend money on anything that wasn’t necessary for keeping themselves and their two little girls, Sonia and Micaela, fed, housed, and clothed, but Gary insisted that he had to look the part of a prosperous salesman if he was to be successful. He needed a late model car, good clothes, and a nice watch. Their bills piled up, and creditor calls came every day. One day as they were screaming at each other, with their two-year-old also screaming in terror at her parents’ fight, she ran out the door to work at the bank, and came back that night with $2000 she had taken from the till. She hoped that he would say that he couldn’t take it, that they would do anything else rather than steal, but he didn’t. He took the money.

Of course the bank discovered the theft, and she was arrested and sentenced to a year in jail. She said later that the separation from her daughters was the hardest thing she ever endured in her life, worse than the beatings at home when she was a child, worse than the imprisonment itself. She served six months, and when she came out, Gary was gone. She never saw him again. The girls were with her brother and his wife, and they cried when Annie took them away with her. She didn’t know where she was going, but she couldn’t stay and face her brother’s pity and her friends’ gossip. She had her old car and $500 in cash from a prisoners’ help fund and she drove north to Seattle, to get as far away as she could. She knew no one there, and that is the way she wanted it.

She stayed in a Salvation Army shelter for a few months with the girls, and found a job selling encyclopedias and magazines door to door. She was always an excellent saleswoman, and had soon had enough to rent an apartment just north of the city, where she heard the schools were best. She found a job selling cemetery lots, then a better job selling jewelry in “house parties”. She moved on to setting up craft fairs in small towns, and then onto the internet in the early 2000s, where she sold jewelry, perfume, craft supplies, and framed oil paintings. She bought a house in a quiet suburb, and sent the girls to college. She found a lawyer and divorced Gary, and married again at age 45. With her husband Craig, she had another daughter, Rachel, at age 46, and became a grandmother at 50 to Sonia’s first child. Craig had a small handyman business, and with Annie’s income they had enough. They took time to travel with Rachel and developed passions for bridge and for dancing.

By the time Rachel went away to college, when Annie was 64 and thinking of retiring, she knew she had to do something about her immigration status. She had no way of proving she was in the country legally, no way to register for Social Security. Money would be very tight when she started to wind down her business. Craig was already retired, at age 69, and had developed some worrisome heart problems; Annie wanted to spend more time with him, take him to his doctor appointments, and take care of him. She spent a day on the internet researching immigration lawyers, reading their websites and checking lawyer rating listings. She found one she liked, and made an appointment. She was afraid of what she might learn; Craig went with her to the appointment for moral support.

The lawyer asked questions, and learned how Annie entered the country, and about the bank embezzlement. She recommended a request for Annie’s complete immigration records and the criminal records; it would take about six months or more for the immigration records. Annie agreed with the strategy and the lawyer made the requests. Five months later, the lawyer called; the records were in. Annie had entered the country legally and was a permanent resident, and now she had proof. But the crime made her deportable; if she applied to renew her permanent resident card, she would be placed in deportation proceedings. She might be sent back to New Zealand, where she knew no one, unless she won a case for cancellation of deportation in court.

But there is an option, the lawyer said. It may lead to deportation proceedings, but you will have a defense. You can apply now for citizenship; the requirement for citizenship is that you prove good moral character for five years before the date of application for citizenship, and that the crime occurred before November 1990. It is a gamble, with the risk that the immigration service will not apply the law correctly and put you in deportation proceedings anyway. If that happens, we will go to court to require the judge to give you your citizenship. It’s the only way for you to prove your legal status. It will mean additional legal fees if that happens. Do you want to go forward?

Annie took a week to think about it. What if the lawyer was wrong and there was no relief from deportation? If the law was clear that she was eligible for citizenship, why would the immigration service put her into deportation proceedings? If they did, would the judge agree with the lawyer? If the immigration service could find that she wasn’t eligible, wouldn’t the judge find the same thing? She prayed. She relived her shame about committing the theft. She had told no one about it except Craig, not even her daughters. Her brother and his wife never had revealed it to anyone, and she had dropped all of her southern California connections. If she did not get her citizenship, and had to fight for it in court, her daughters would have to know. Her friends and her church community would know. She thought that it wasn’t worth the huge risk, and that she would just live without Social Security. She had never left the country, and never would, to avoid the probability of arrest at the airport when she returned.

Craig told her, “I know about the crime, and I still love you. I think girls will too. And any friends who don’t love you once they know aren’t worth having anyway.” It did help to know that, and to have his support, but it was she herself who could not forgive herself. Then Craig said, “Annie, we need your Social Security. Do it for us.” She called the lawyer and went forward with her citizenship application. Three months later she got notice of her citizenship interview at the immigration service. In preparation, the lawyer had her prepare a declaration about her life, and her remorse about the crime. Her brother wrote a moving letter about what a fine person she was, the hardship she had endured, and the aberration that the crime had been. She told her daughters about the crime; not one turned away from her. They each wrote letters of support for her. Her prayer circle at church pledged to pay for the immigration examiner who would hear her case, and to meet together to pray at the time she would have her interview.

Annie studied the one hundred citizenship questions and memorized the answers. Name one reason the colonists came to the US, she read. The study guide gave five, and she memorized them all: Freedom. Political liberty. Religious freedom. Economic opportunity. Escape persecution. She was studying for her freedom; she felt, freedom from shame and fear.

On the day of the citizenship appointment, she woke with fear that settled in her stomach. She couldn’t eat. Craig reminded her that the prayer circle would be praying during the entire interview, and that strengthened her enough to get dressed and into the car. Craig drove, and they got to the immigration building an hour before their appointment. The lawyer came. Craig held Annie’s hand. He couldn’t go with her into the interview, and she nearly cried as she and the lawyer walked from the waiting room into the examination room.

The examiner was a harassed and weary-looking woman of about Annie’s age; she said her name was Officer Taylor, and told Annie not to sit down but to raise her right hand and swear to tell the truth. Annie swore. Officer Taylor read aloud some of the questions on the application, and Annie answered. Have you ever been a prostitute? Have you ever failed to pay federal or state taxes? Have you been a member of the Communist Party? Have you ever lied to obtain an immigration benefit? Have you ever been arrested? Yes, Annie said, I have. Tell me what happened, Officer Taylor said.

The lawyer had told Annie to state the facts, and she did. “I took money from a bank while I was employed there, in 1985. I went to jail for it. I was in jail for six months.” The lawyer handed Officer Taylor a packet of documents, with the certified court records, and the letters of support, along with Annie’s declaration of the facts. Officer Taylor took them without comment, and then asked Annie seven of the civics questions. Annie got all of them right. Annie then read a sentence in English, and wrote a sentence in English. “You passed the civics and English test,” Officer Taylor said. “If you’ve ever been arrested I can’t approve your application until a supervisor signs off on it. We’ll let you know. That’s all for today.” How long will it take to let me know, Annie asked. As long as it takes, Officer Taylor said.

In the waiting room, Annie asked the lawyer, “What do you think?” The lawyer said Annie had to wait; Officer Taylor was fair and experienced. In a month or two, Annie would get the decision. Annie waited a month with increasing fear; she was sure that the longer the immigration service took to decide on her case, the greater the likelihood that her application would be denied and she would be placed in deportation proceedings. She called the lawyer, who said that she had not yet received the decision. “See if you can forget about the application, forget that you are waiting,” the lawyer said. “Then when the decision comes, you will think it’s been a short time.” Hah! Annie thought. Forget that everything is at stake, forget that I could be deported and never see my family again? Forget that I might be exiled in a foreign land? I can’t forget! She told Craig that she never should have done this, that it was the second biggest mistake of her life to apply for citizenship. Then, when it was almost a month after her interview, she got a thin envelope in the mail from US Citizenship and Naturalization Service. She asked Craig to open it, and she sat down with her head in her hands, to await the news. He opened the envelope, and was silent for a moment. Then he said, “It is for another appointment….let’s see….it’s for the naturalization ceremony. Annie, you got your citizenship!”

Annie, dressed in her best, went to the ceremony with Craig, her three daughters, her four grandchildren, and the entire prayer circle, in October 2011. They each held US flags, and all of them cried when Annie went up the stairs to the podium to get her citizenship certificate. She was one of 50 new citizens that day, from 27 different countries. When her 6 year old grandson asked her, “Nana, what is citizenship?” she laughed and told him, “Freedom, Tyler, freedom from fear.”

Journey To Dungloe Part Five

2011-09-16T17:38:00.000-07:00

The Welcome

When we knocked at the parish house door, the priest let us in at once. In Donegal, wherever we went, everyone was in, had time for us, and was unfailingly welcoming. We’ve come to see if we can find my grandfather in the confirmation records, I said, in about 1903-05. He led us to his office and took several thick ledgers from a cabinet. “’Tis a pity,”he said. The confirmation records only go back to 1913 in Dungloe. He asked for my grandfather’s name. John Thomas O’Donnell, I said. “More’s the pity,” he said. “The O’Donnells are thick on the ground here, and Jack O’Donnell one of the most common names about.” How about Daniel Francis O’Donnell and Emma, his parents, in the 1880s? He scrolled through computerized parish records from the 1880s to the first decade of the 20^th century, and showed us the thousands of O’Donnells listed. It would be impossible to know which of these might have been my family, without more information. “Now, Emma,” he said, “that wouldn’t have been a Catholic name then. If she were Protestant, she was unlikely to be from Dungloe in those years.”

I was deeply disappointed. All our success in finding my grandmother’s parents’ lands seemed to pale beside this break in our link to my grandfather’s past. We went back to Main Street and began to walk down from the top of the street, looking at the buildings and shops – O’Donnell Pharmacy, the O’Donnell Building. The stores were mostly closed now, at 7 p.m. We were looking for a pub, and found one – the Town Bar. It looked at least a hundred years old, with its black and white painted sign in the lettering of the 1880s; the door was open. We could see a long hallway that opened into a room decorated in the style of a turn-of-century pub, with a woodstove and high-legged tables for standing and drinking pints of stout.

We walked in, and a man came out of a room off the hallway to greet us. “Can I help you?” he said. We asked if the pub was open. He said, sorry, the Town Bar wasn’t a bar, and hadn’t been one for many a long year. But come in, and welcome, he said, my mother lives here. This had been his family’s pub for seven generations, until about 50 years ago, when all the children of the house immigrated, to England, the US, and New Zealand. He grew up in England, where his mother had gone to find her fortune; she had returned in her 70s to Dungloe to live in the old house.

No, we won’t come in, pardon our intrusion, we thought it was a pub, we said. No, no come in, he said, we are glad to meet you. So we did; we sat for an hour or more with the Meehan family in their sitting room that looked like it was directly from a Dickens novel, with a view of the sea from the window. Mary, the owner of the house, and her brother Daniel visiting from the US, and Mary’s son Philip and his wife Irene, with their three young children from Glasgow – we felt like we too were family, and very welcome. We told of our search, and they of their emigrant stories. My great-grandmother Mary Toner had the same name as Irene’s grandmother, and they both came from the lands not far from Letterkenny; since Toner is an unusual name, we must be related, we said, and exchanged email addresses to follow up.

How is it that people here have so much time for visiting, and for meeting strangers? Perhaps it is because they are at peace, already arrived at where they want to be. The children, 12 and under, served us tea and biscuits, cheerfully, and listened with interest to the conversation. This family was so happy, so secure in each others’ love; it seemed to me, that it spilled out to all around them. They hadn’t had to emigrate because of poverty, they had no tale of parents dying young, they knew the stories of their ancestors. In that happy house, with roots that led back at least 250 years, I felt a weight of sorrow about my own family’s emigrant fate, and how pain as well as joy transmits down the generations.

We said goodbye to the Meehan’s and set off towards the lands around Sligo Bay, where we would spend the night in the shadow of Benbulben Mountain’s immensely strange and primordial heft. I was leaving behind in Dungloe the chance of learning about my grandfather’s life; more, I felt I had lost the chance of connection. It seemed then that Ken and I were the ones leaving all behind in Dungloe, to emigrate.

We drove across the country the next day to Dublin, and saw Brian Friel’s play Translations at the Abbey Theatre that night before we left Ireland. The play is set in 1830s rural Donegal, when the British have sent soldiers and surveyors to map the wild country and Anglicize the Gaelic names. Most of the country people fear the soldiers and hate their work to turn the Irish land into English land, but a few welcome them as bringers of modernity. But the welcomers are deluded; the British will never see them as part of any future that makes sense to them. The British may bring modern times with them to remote Donegal, but those times will crush the Irish. The only response for many Irish was to emigrate, or to die. In that way, my family was triumphant after all; they chose life.

Post script: My husband uncovered some of my grandfather’s story after all, in the month since we returned from Ireland. Jack O’Donnell was born in Philadelphia as I thought, but his parents didn’t die when he was two, and his father wasn’t born in Ireland. My great grandfather Daniel Francis O’Donnell was born in Philadelphia in 1863, to Henry and Sarah O’Donnell, who emigrated from Ireland likely in the mid- 1850s when Henry was about 25 and Sarah was 15. She may have come with her parents, or alone. We don’t know where they immigrated from, yet.

Henry and Sarah married in Philadelphia, and eight children, only two of whom survived past age five: my great grandfather Daniel and his sister Elizabeth. Some of the children lived a few days or hours, but two of them died in their fourth and fifth years. Henry was a laborer and driver, and his son Daniel began his own career as a driver when he was 17. Daniel married Emma (we don’t know her last name yet); she gave birth to my grandfather in 1891.

By the time my grandfather was nine, his mother was missing from the census records of the family, although Daniel still listed himself as married. One of my uncles told me that he heard the whispered story that his grandparents had divorced or separated. Another uncle said that Emma had been English and had returned to England; it would have been a scandal in the family to marry a Protestant. Daniel died of pneumonia at age 43 when his son was 13, and my grandfather was raised by his only remaining relative, his aunt Lizzie.

So there was no Dungloe connection; if there is one, it will be an astounding coincidence. There are many thousand small towns and farmlands in Ireland from which Henry and Sarah may have immigrated. But I’m pulling for Dungloe. Stay tuned.

This poem by the Irishwoman Eavan Boland speaks directly to my family’s history and the history of many immigrants who come with only hope and the old songs, and nothing to lose.

The Emigrant Irish

By Eavan Boland

Like oil lamps, we put them out the back —

of our houses, of our minds. We had lights
better than, newer than and then

a time came, this time and now
we need them. Their dread, makeshift example:

they would have thrived on our necessities.
What they survived we could not even live.
By their lights now it is time to
imagine how they stood there, what they stood with,
that their possessions may become our power:
Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parceled in them.
Patience. Fortitude. Long-suffering
in the bruise-colored dusk of the New World.

And all the old songs. And nothing to lose.

Journey to Dungloe: Part Four

2011-09-09T15:43:00.001-07:00

To the Horizon

From the coast road, we saw the Atlantic north and west and east, stretching blue to the horizon. We took a looping one lane road on the headland called Horn Head. It was a sunny, warm day and still it was desolate and romantic; the headland was studded with huge whitish rocks that looked like resting sheep. There was no one else on the headland, in either car or on foot; we stopped to eat our lunch but it was too windy to eat outside the car. Even inside the car, the immensity of the Atlantic was awe-inspiring and humbling. How fragile human life is here and everywhere, and how tenacious.

It was only about 30 miles more to Dungloe, but the coast road was narrow and winding, and lovely; we stopped frequently. We took a break at Teac Coll, a pub nearly 140 years old, owned by the same Gaelic-speaking family still. The young man behind the bar spoke into the phone and to customers in Gaelic, and to us in fluent English. He said he had been to the US for college but of course came back to run the pub; who wouldn’t, he said. Do you see how lovely it is here? He told us that people in the Gael Teac regions of Ireland, where Irish is the first language, speak Gaelic exclusively except when speaking to outsiders. Gaelic was forbidden until the 1830s by the English during their rule, and then strongly discouraged, but the Irish in far Donegal never stopped speaking it entirely. The road signs throughout the Gael Teac are only in Gaelic; we resorted to translations in our guidebook to find our way.

The outskirts of Dungloe are a short jog off the coastal road; bland suburban houses and a few new-looking shops scattered on asphalt roads. As we got closer to Main Street, though, the street took on what must have been its 19^th century look: narrow stone streets with weathered stone two- and three- story buildings. And Main Street itself, where our Donegal church directory told us the parish house would be, was a lovely sight. Seven or eight blocks on either side of the street are lined with white and pastel painted shops; the sun was shining, and we could see the sea beyond from the top of the street before it dipped and rose again.

We drove down and then up the street, looking for the parish house, but couldn’t find it. Ken stopped the car and rolled down the window to ask directions from two elderly women with shopping baskets on their arms. “Ah,now,” one told us, “the parish house hasn’t been in the Main Street for some time.” She told us how to get to it, and asked if we were visiting. “We think my wife’s grandfather is from Dungloe,” he said, “We are here to see where he came from.” “Welcome home!” she said at once. Her greeting brought me to tears, and surprised me. I hadn’t cried when I saw the soft green and peaceful land where my great-grandparents’ farms had been, or even when I learned about the harsh poverty and ingrained discrimination in that beautiful place that forced their emigration.

But it was different for my grandfather. Why had he not given his children more information about his life? Where had he lived growing up? What was his childhood like? Or was it that no one asked him? Or remembered now what he said? I felt that he had unfairly cut us off from our own history. I was invested in finding him in Dungloe and claiming the town as mine by right of inheritance.

To be continued next week...

Journey To Dungloe: Part Three

2011-09-02T14:16:00.000-07:00

The Four Hundred Year Old Wee House

In Creeslough, a slightly bigger town than Church Hill, we stopped at a small grocery store where the owner was working the till. We said we were looking for any Toners about, and he called over a customer to help him answer our request. No Toners around here anymore, the customer said; the last ones died some time ago, and the rest immigrated. But go out to Nat Russell’s farm; he’ll know where they lived. The directions to the farm were to turn left at the big stone house, the last one in the town, and follow the road to a fork where there’s a huge boulder. Take the left fork and keep on until you see the Russell van; they do building work, and their name is on the van.

We found Mr. Russell at home, a lively man in his mid-70s, wearing knee high rubber boots and working clothes. Follow me, he said, I’ll show you where the last of the Toners lived, Hannah and her brother Billy. Sweet-natured people, he called them. He walked quickly up the road – no more than a strip of pavement barely wide enough for one car -- and we followed in the car. He showed us an empty lot between a large cow barn and a big tool shed. Their wee stone house stood here, he said; it was 400 years old, that house and barely big enough for a tiny kitchen and a small room for two beds. They lived here until they died.

Hannah and Billy were the last of the Toners in Creeslough district. They died at advanced ages in the 1960s, after selling the small farm in the 1950s on the mountainside where my great grandmother was born. They spent 40 years in Philadelphia, but returned home when they retired. They had inherited the farm, and perhaps they were Mary Toner’s niece and nephew. I want to see the farm, I said, and asked Nat Russell for directions. But there’s no way to get up there now, he said, except by a hard long climb. The roads are gone.

Ireland had eight million people before the 1845 famine, and only three million by the time my great grandparents left Ireland in the 1880s. Died of hunger or sorrow, or immigrated, and most never returned. The countryside is still depopulated, especially in Donegal; Ireland’s population is only four million now, with one-third in Dublin. We drove as far as we could towards Gortnalecky, the farm tenanted by Mary’s parents; along the thin strip of road that Nat Russell told us used to be a cow path when he was a boy. The fields stretched empty and green with low grasses, all the way to the purple Muckish Mountain standing straight up from the fields as if cut out and placed there, sharp against the sky. It was the most beautiful place I’d seen in Ireland. There was nearly absolute quiet, strange in a place that obviously used to be farmland. We stopped the car at the turnoff for Gortnalecky, and gazed towards the far distance, where the farm would have been. There was no road now. I imagined this place humming with life and work and people, 170 years ago. People fled this place for their lives. I wonder if they longed for it again, from their tenements in Philadelphia.

It was nearly eight in the evening when we drove the five miles back to Creeslough. Nat Russell said that it would have been too far to walk to church or school, from Mary’s farm; they would have gone to church for special holy days only, and Mary would not have gone to school. We stopped at the Corn Cutters Rest for dinner, a restaurant that had been in operation for a hundred years; the haddock and mackerel chowder was the best either of us had ever had. Our dinners came with mountains of potatoes: seven large scoops of potatoes for each of us. One hundred and seventy years after the potato blight wiped out Ireland’s potato crop and up to a third of the people died all the restaurants we visited piled on the potatoes at every meal. We’ll never be hungry again! The whole country seemed to say.

The next morning we stopped at the Creeslough cemetery; Ken found Hannah Toner’s grave, with lettering already so faded that he had to trace out the words with his finger. The stone was tilted and moss-covered, although it was just fifty years old. There were no family left to care for the grave; by the time she died, at age 89, most of her friends would have been dead too. The graves were laid out in a way I saw in other Irish graveyards: each stone was set at the head of a large rectangle made of iron railings, so that it looked like a bedstead without a mattress. That night, I dreamed that I was Hannah, lying six feet deep and sensing my great great niece sitting by the grave.

We were only a few miles to the Atlantic; did Mary and James ever walk there to see it, far below the cliffs? Before we got to the coast, we saw a cow standing in a wood; it was at least double normal size; it dwarfed the others in the herd. I thought it was a giant cow statue, until it moved.

To be continued next week...

Journey to Dungloe: Part Two

2011-08-26T15:51:00.000-07:00

Irish-American in Ireland

Continued from posting of 8/19/11

There wasn't enough time to find out more about my grandfather Jack before we left. My uncles said that their father didn't talk about his family or his youth, and I didn’t press them. I was confident of the orphan journey story, though, and Ken said we would do some research in Ireland, with original sources in the National Library in Dublin. We spent three days in Dublin, walking everywhere, so entranced by the buildings (many of them elegant, and drenched in the history of colonialism and of the revolutionary years), and the people (welcoming and talkative) that it seemed a punishment to spend any time in a library. We went to pubs in the evenings, where everyone from grandparents to children seemed to go, talking and drinking Guinness and listening to traditional music. We got up late, what with the late evenings and the jet lag; we bemoaned our short time.

We dashed into the gorgeous and ornate 1920s library an hour before closing time on our last day in Dublin. I took on my grandfather, and Ken my grandmother’s family, so he could find land tenancy records. A librarian in the genealogy department showed me how to search the 1901 census; my grandfather would have been ten then, and living with his grandparents. I searched any John O’Donnell in Ireland, age ten, living with grandparents, and found two: one in Dungloe, Donegal, and the other in County Tyrone, which is now in Northern Ireland. But the Tyrone child had a younger sister; my grandfather was an only child.

It’s him, it’s him! I told Ken; now we know it’s Dungloe we need to look. Dungloe is a small village on the very northern tip of Donegal, right on the Atlantic. Ken was skeptical; he said that people said nearly anything they could get away with in census surveys. Ages varied, names varied, and districts shifted. The record only said Dungloe district; we would have to research what that district included in 1901. It’s all we have, I said, I want to try. And the library was closing.

We left Dublin the next morning, heading northwest towards Donegal. Ken navigated the unfamiliar round-abouts (our traffic circles) while driving on the left side of the road, and did it with calm skill. We stopped in Kells for picnic food, and bought the best brown bread I’ve ever eaten. A man we met on the street took us to see the grey stone eighth-century church, monastery, and round tower, built for defense against the Vikings. The round towers weren’t much use and the Vikings triumphed. We spent the night at a bed and breakfast in Enniskill, in Northern Ireland, and arrived in Letterkenny, the biggest town in Donegal, by midday the next day. Creeslough and Church Hill, my great-grandparents’ homes, were nearby, but we needed ordinance maps and local help to pinpoint the farm on which Mary Toner was born. For James Callahan, we only had the general area in which his parents’ farm was located. It had been 150 years since their births; boundaries and names may have changed.

Letterkenny’s cathedral secretary was kind, and tried to be helpful, but their parish records didn’t go back as far as the 1860s. We slacked off for the afternoon and visited the cathedral, built in 1900 when Irish Catholics began to have enough money for such grand endeavors. Immigrants sent money home, too, for the buildings. Catholicism had been outlawed by the English from the early 1700s through the 1830s, and it took decades to rebuild the Church’s internal and external structures. We had dinner at a pub first opened in the 1890s, and then drove out of town to pub with a locally- renowned traditional band playing. We talked and listened for hours, until it was past eleven and dark, and Ken drove along the narrow, unlighted roads back to our bed and breakfast.

When we set out for Church Hill the next day, we were half-way through our short time in Ireland, and I was pessimistic about what we could find in just a few days. We only had some garbled place names for Mary Toner’s family farm, and even less for James Callahan; we knew that the Callahan’s were thick around in Church Hill. But I underestimated the weight that history has there, and the long memories of the people of that place. We stopped at the parish house near Church Hill, and Father McHugh invited us in. He gave us a history of immigration to Philadelphia from the people in rural Letterkenny district, and directed us to the post office in Church Hill. The elderly postmistress in the tiny town told us the turnings we’d need to take to get to Charley Callahan’s farm. He’ll know, she said, where all the Callahan’s are. Many we met seemed to have personal memories that stretched back two hundred years; the result, I think, of an unbroken connection to the land, for those who had not immigrated.

A slim, active-looking man in his mid- 60s was working on a van in a driveway when we drove down his narrow road to ask where we could find Charley Callahan. I am he, he said, and immediately invited us inside. In his large comfortable kitchen, he gave us tea and shortbread, and told us that the farmhouse in which we were sitting stood of on the site of generations of farmhouses belonging to the Callahan family. It wasn’t our branch of Callahans, though. He knew all the names of his forebears and their siblings, and my great-great grandfather John wasn’t one of them. He took us to see an old farmhouse built of field stone, with some of its walls still standing. It had been where his great grandfather, Edward Callahan, was born in the 1840s. He told us that our branch was likely the Callahans of Tulanascreen a few miles away. It was already past three in the afternoon, though, and we wanted to get to Creeslough, ten miles north, to see if we could find Mary Toner’s farm. We had only a day and a half left in Donegal, and I wanted to get to Dungloe on Jack O’Donnell’s trail, too. Thank God for long, long light until eleven each night. We promised each other that we would return next year, for the Callahans of Tulanascreen.

On the way to Creeslough, we stopped at the cemetery Templedouglas, the name an Anglicized version of the Gaelic name for the place. Ken, like a good genealogist, took pictures of all the Callahan gravestones so he could fill in his family charts. We stopped too at the church were my great grandfather would have been baptized; the old building was replaced by one from the 1920s, which was locked up, a grey flat stone building with windows so high we couldn’t look in. It was paved all around for a parking lot; no one was there. It stood in a breathtakingly lovely spot, overlooking a lake with low mountains in the distance. It was eerie, though, and had a deadened feel; we hurried away from it.

While we were in Ireland, several life-long devout Catholics told us that the raging priest pedophile scandal had finally turned them away from the Church. The front page headline in the Irish Times the day we left Dublin was: Church refuses to cooperate in priest pedophile scandal. Was the scandal putting the last nails in the coffin of traditional and unquestioning Irish Catholicism? The church in Church Hill looked as if it had been deserted long before.

To be continued next week...

Journey To Dungloe

2011-08-19T16:47:00.000-07:00

“If we would have done more research before we left for Ireland,” my husband said, “we would have known that your grandfather Jack O’Donnell never was in Ireland; it was his grandparents who immigrated in the 1850s, not your grandfather in the 1910s.”

True, I said, but then we never would have gone to Dunloe. And that I would not have missed for the world.

Where Do We Come From?

My husband and I traveled to Ireland in July. It was a trip I’ve wanted to make since I was a child and my parents told my brothers and sisters and me that we were Irish-American. My father said that my grandfather, my father’s father, had been born in Philadelphia to Irish immigrant parents, Daniel Francis O’Donnell, and his wife Emma, who both died of influenza when he was two, in the 1890s, and that he had been sent back to Donegal, Ireland to be raised by an aunt. He returned at age 18 to work in the Philadelphia shipyards. He met and married my grandmother Agnes Callahan, the child of Irish immigrants, in Philadelphia. I imagined the filthy living conditions and hard work my great-grandparents must have endured in the Philadelphia slums, with no family to help them, their lonely deaths far from home, and the orphan Jack, traveling with a stranger on the ship back to Ireland. It was a fine romantic story, and it suited my desire for an out-of the-ordinary family history.

Immigrants and immigrant stories fascinated me from the time I can remember, perhaps because there were no immigrants in my small southern Ohio town in the 1950s and 1960s. The most foreign we ever got was a 1963 visit from a Russian family who was touring the US in a cultural exchange program. I read about it in the newspaper, and instantly knew that I had to go to the lecture they were giving in the high school auditorium. My family never attended events of any kind except for church and school. I must have been extraordinarily persuasive, since my mother promised to take me to it. I spent the week before reading everything I could find in the public library about Russia. But on the day of the lecture, one of my brothers was sick, and my mother had to stay home to take care of him. Our town had no public buses, it was too far to bicycle, and a cab was out of the question. People took cabs only to go to the hospital. I was crushed; I had wanted badly to just see people who weren’t American like me, to hear their foreign language, and to know directly from them what their lives were like. But I had to wait until I was in college in Chicago to meet my first foreigners, exchange students from Africa, France, and Germany.

My parents were not interested in genealogy, and didn’t know much more than the names and lives of their own parents. Why does it matter? They asked me when I questioned them about “where we came from.” I couldn’t find the words to explain why I thought it mattered, then. Now I can. Through knowing my family’s stories, I’m connected to history, to our human history. I know that torturously, amazingly, life goes on despite the pain of death, separation, poverty, and back luck. My people’s past, why they left Ireland and what their lives were like there, makes a difference today in who we are, who I am, and how our descendants’ lives may take shape. Knowing their stories helps me bear my own pain, somehow. In the end, the pain isn’t the most important thing.

The story about my grandfather’s orphan journey was detailed and solid, full of explicit facts and dates. I assumed it was general knowledge in our family. I didn’t question it; it was enough to know that we were Irish. It was an absorbing story that linked us to a country that had great literature, myths, and stories; dances and music that were melancholy and vibrant at the same time; and to a history of oppression, famine, survival, and defiance that stirred my soul with pride. But no one in my father’s family talked of family history. They were storytellers, singers, joke-tellers, urban Irish-Americans who liked to sit around the kitchen table in the evenings with a few drinks in them, telling tall tales. Telling a story and having people believe it was true was a high art among my father’s brothers. Truth was beside the point; the purpose was entertainment. If they had told stories about our family’s history, they would have been inventions, expressed for the sheer joy of invention.

Before we left for Ireland, Ken researched, in the thorough, original sources way of genealogists, my grandmother Agnes Callahan’s family history. We talked, before we left, with my uncles, cousins and second cousins about my grandmother’s parents, and we learned that Creeslough, in County Donegal, was the district where my great grandmother Mary Agnes Toner was born, and that her parents were Daniel Toner and Susan Trainor. My great-grandfather James Joseph Callahan was born not far from Mary Toner, near Church Hill, County Donegal, and his parents were John Callahan and Marjorie Maugh. With this start, Ken found more: my great-grandparents immigrated separately, in 1880 and 1884; they met in Philadelphia at the wedding of his sister and her brother, and married in 1887. In Donegal, we would go to these districts to find their parents’ tombstones, and see their farms, talk with our distant cousins to learn how it was that some immigrated and some did not.

To be continued next week...

What will you do?

2011-08-12T16:07:00.000-07:00

You have been in the US for twenty two years. You came, only eighteen, without a visa or any other kind of permission and stayed, working in construction, dishwashing, roofing, farm work, picking apples, and processing fish – in short, any job that you could find. You could get these jobs because the employers could find no one else to do them. Most of the time you got paid, but sometimes you didn’t. You always had work, and after a few years, you went back to Mexico, married your childhood sweetheart, and brought her back with you. You entered the US again without a visa, as did your wife.

You could not stay in your hometown in Mexico. It was a town of the old, of widows and of families living on the money their men sent back from the US. The old people remembered when every family had some land to till and a few cattle to raise, but now the farmers couldn’t get their produce to market. Drug cartels controlled the entire countryside where you were born.

In a few more years, your father got very sick, and you took the long journey to your home town in Mexico. He died before you arrived, but you were in time for his funeral. You had to go back to the U.S.; your wife and two children depended on you. This time, Immigration caught you at the border and deported you. You came back the next day, coming over the border at another, more dangerous crossing, and made your way home to Seattle, because now it was home to you.

You didn’t know that you now had a potential felony charge against you: illegal entry after deportation. Fifteen years go by.

Now your elderly mother is ill, and you are determined to see her before she dies. You fly home, and are able to say goodbye. You come back to the US, crossing at night through the desert after walking for three days, and you don’t get caught. You go home to Seattle, and you work, raise your children, and volunteer to help coach your daughter’s soccer team. Your children make you proud, and your wife talks of immigration reform, that someday, it can’t be long now, President Obama will reform the laws so that you both can get your legal residence.

You are very tired of being undocumented in the US. You have never been able to buy a house or open a bank account because you don’t have a social security number. You worry about what will happen to your children if you aren’t here. There are four of them now, and the youngest is only seven. Your employer, the one who never asked you for your papers in the ten years you’ve been working for him, mentions that he’s going to need to see your work permit. You hear about other undocumented immigrants being picked up by Immigration and deported, in higher numbers than in President Bush’s administration.

You decide to make an appointment to see an immigration attorney to see if there is a way to get your papers. You go to the appointment with your wife and sixteen year old son. Your son wants to go because he is determined to help you. He thinks that because he is a US citizen, he may be able to get your residence for you. The attorney asks about your immigration history, and you tell her. She asks if you are afraid of returning to your home town, if you fear that someone will try to kill or imprison you. No, you say. She asks if you have been the victim of a crime. If you have been the victim of a serious crime in the US and reported the crime to the police, you might be eligible to request a visa to stay legally in the US, she says. No, you say, but your son says, but Dad, what about when you were beaten by the Seattle police?

So you tell the attorney: You got in your car to drive your child to a doctor’s appointment. You drove a couple of blocks. You didn’t know that the police had cordoned off several streets in order to find a fugitive. A policeman stopped you, dragged you out of the car, and beat you with his pistol in front of your screaming five year old. He told you to go ahead, complain to the police chief, see if he cared. So you did complain. You went to the police station near your house, and asked for the captain. You said you had a complaint about police conduct.

After you waited a while, you were shown into the captain’s office. The captain said, yes, this is a serious allegation. I’ll send an investigator to your house to take your statement. Here’s my card, the captain said, so you can call me. But the investigator didn’t come. A week later, you called again, and then you called the third and last time a month later. But the captain didn’t return your calls. You say that you don’t want to try again, and besides, it’s been more than two years since it happened.

The attorney says you have no options because of your deportation, and then your re-entry to the US without documents. This is a federal felony, she says. If you are picked up by Immigration, you will be deported immediately, without any opportunity to see an immigration judge. You may be prosecuted for the illegal re-entry, too, and face up to five years of federal prison time. Your son, the one who was sure he could help you, begins to cry.

What will you do?

Before I Die

2011-08-05T15:15:00.000-07:00

Everyone called him Don Julio, giving him the courtesy title not only because he was elderly, but because he had dignity, and was unfailingly polite. He came to the US from Mexico when he was already in his late 40s, after his wife died and his children had emigrated. He sold his small piece of farmland to pay for the journey and the smuggler; he couldn’t keep a farm going without his wife’s help. He planned to live near one of his children and work at whatever he could find; he had no grander hopes than mere survival. He believed his true life ended when his wife died.

The US held a surprise for him, though. A year after he arrived in Seattle and found work as a construction laborer, he met 25 year old Diana at his son’s house during a birthday party for his grandson. He was entranced by her quiet self possession and her seriousness; he found her small, neat figure and her shy smile beautiful. She loved his courtly manners and his lean strong looks, and was moved by the way he listened closely to whoever spoke to him. They were both from rural Nayarit, the Mexican state on the Pacific side of the country, and both were in the US without documents.

He got up his courage, feeling like he did when he was 17 and asked his future wife to walk out with him for the first time, and called Diana a week after the party to invite her to a restaurant for a Saturday night dinner. She said yes. He was more nervous than he could remember ever being as he got ready for that evening, and went to pick her up. He berated himself for being an old fool who wouldn’t have the first idea about what to do with a young girlfriend, and a dullard who would have nothing of interest to say. He felt so discouraged that he almost called Diana to cancel, but the memory of his wife’s words came to him. A few weeks before she died, his wife said, “Promise me that you will do your best to enjoy your life; promise me. Our lives are so short….” He hadn’t thought about those words until now. He took it as a sign, his wife’s blessing.

The first date went well, and so did the others. Don Julio and Diana married a year and a half after their first meeting, and had their daughter Lissette a year after that. Three years later, their son Rodrigo was born. Don Julio continued healthy and strong, and worked construction through his early 60s. He then found work as a cashier in a Mexican butcher shop in Burien, a small town south of Seattle, until his late 60s, when he became too tired to stand on his feet all day in the busy shop. Diana insisted that he stop work; she said that her salary as a hotel maid, and Lissette’s earnings at McDonald’s, were enough to keep the family going. Don Julio finally agreed to stop work at the butcher shop, but he did all the family cooking and cleaning and laundry. Diana joked that she lived like a queen at home.

Don Julio now had time to listen to the radio in Spanish in the mornings; his favorite show was a daily news program that had an immigration attorney for a weekly show on immigration law. At least once on each weekly show, someone called in to ask the attorney about immigration options for people who had been victims of serious crime in the US. The attorney would say, yes, if you have been the victim of a crime like domestic violence or a gun or knife attack, and reported the crime to the police, you might be able to get legal status for yourself and your family. The purpose of the U visa, she said, was to encourage undocumented people to report crime to the police, without fear of deportation for doing so. This is so we have a more secure society, for all of us, she said.

Don Julio made up his mind to consult the attorney, and Diana agreed. Years ago, when Lissette was seven and Rodrigo was four, Don Julio suffered a ferocious knife attack in their home, during a Thanksgiving dinner they hosted. One of their guests, a single young man who they had met at their church, suddenly picked up the carving knife and stabbed Don Julio three times in the chest before fleeing. They called the police; an ambulance shortly arrived and took Don Julio to the hospital, where he stayed more than a week, recuperating. The police caught the attacker and charged him with the crime. Don Julio still had shortness of breath due to his scarred lung, but the attack didn’t make them stop inviting guests to dinner.

Don Julio and Diana were both worried about their undocumented status. President Obama had not done what he promised to do to reform the immigration laws and provide a path to legal residence for the country’s 12 million undocumented people. They had neighbors, friends, and Don Julio’s oldest son all who had been arrested by ICE and given voluntary departure, but who had returned to the US again. Diana’s employer, a large hotel chain, had recently begun the process of checking staff social security numbers to verify legal status and permission to work. If she lost her job, only Lissette’s minimum wage job would stand between them and losing their house trailer. It would be two years before Lissette would graduate from community college with her associate’s degree in nursing, and two more years before Rodrigo would graduate from high school.

They went together as a family to the appointment with the attorney, the kids included. The attorney asked a lot of questions about their history in the US, and then said that it sounded as though Don Julio might be eligible for a U visa, for victims of crime, and that Diana would be included in the visa. With the visa, they both would have work permission for three years, after which they could apply for legal permanent residence. It would be a two-step process: first to get the police and the prosecutor to certify that Don Julio had been a victim of the crime of felonious assault, and that he had helped the police in the investigation of the crime; and second to apply for the visa, proving that Don Julio had suffered “substantial harm” as a result of the crime. But the crime happened more than 14 years ago; would the police still have the record and be able to certify that Don Julio helped in the investigation? The attorney said it might not be possible to get police or prosecutor certification, but that she would try for it, if the family was willing. They were.

The attorney submitted the paperwork to the police to begin the process; sometimes police departments take a month or so to respond. A month went by, and still no response. Then, Diana called the attorney. Don Julio had been very ill just in the last few weeks; his doctor did tests, and said that Don Julio had cancer, advanced cancer. “Will I still be eligible for the U visa if my husband dies?” she asked. How very cold and heartless she is, the attorney thought; while her husband is dying, she is focused on herself. Yes, the attorney said, you will be, as long as the police will certify you as a victim as well, since you were by his side when your husband was attacked, and suffered psychological trauma. You also were a witness, and gave your statement to the police.

Over the next few weeks, while the attorney pursued the U certification with the police, Diana called twice more, each time to ask the same question. Each time, the attorney said the same thing: yes, you will qualify as long as the police will certify. At each call, Diana reported that her husband was getting weaker; his cancer was too advanced for chemotherapy, and his only treatment was pain medication. Then, another call to the attorney. This time, it was Lissette, Don Julio’s daughter. My father died yesterday, she said; he insisted nearly every day, since he was diagnosed with cancer that we assure him that my mother would still qualify for the U visa after his death. We told him that she would, but it was so important to him that he made my mother call you several times. Yesterday, before he died, he said that at least he will die happy, knowing that she will qualify.

Don Julio was buried in the US, where he wanted to be. Others had their ashes sent back to Mexico so they could be buried there, but he told Diana that he had a second and happy life here, and wanted to be close to his wife and children, in death as in life. Diana is still waiting for the police or the prosecutor to certify the crime against her, and she is still hopeful. But she knows that the time is coming when her employer will check her status to see if she has work permission. And then? Will Rodrigo have to quit high school to support the family? Will Lissette have to quit college?

To be continued….

Poet

2011-07-29T16:41:00.000-07:00

Claudio walked over the border into Texas in 1981. He was alone, and didn't have a smuggler. It was easier in those days for Salvadorans fleeing the civil war to come to the US. He called his mother's cousin in Chicago from a pay phone in Brownsville; Cousin Armando wired enough money for a motel room for the night, and a bus ticket. The trip north in the old Greyhound was a luxury ride compared to bus travel in El Salvador, but Claudio did not notice. He didn't notice the quiet green countryside, the absence of soldiers patrolling the roads with automatic rifles, or the sleepy small towns along the Greyhound's milk-run route. He was working on a poem.

When the bus pulled into the station in Chicago, Armando was there to meet him and take him to his North Side apartment. Claudio was distant with Armando and his wife and children. Armando thought he was war-shocked, and the family made allowances for his coldness. Claudio had been a student at the national university and he was one of the student-poets who published an anti-government magazine. He had been arrested, tortured, and imprisoned, but his businessman father bribed the officer in charge of the prison for Claudio's release. He had to leave the country. His father paid someone to take him as far as the Mexican border with the US.

It was December in Chicago, and Claudio thought he was in hell. The trees looked dead, the old apartment was cold and rat-infested, and the sidewalks were ice-covered. No one walked. There seemed to be no life in streets, no place to be but huddled inside. Armando's family was not literary; they watched TV in the few hours they were not working or sleeping.

Armando found Claudio a job in the same banquet hall where he worked as a waiter, but Claudio dropped too many trays and spilled too much food and drink on the banqueters. He was fired after a week. Armando couldn't imagine another job that Claudio could do. He was too absent-minded to be a waiter, too clumsy to be a dishwasher, too slow to be a janitor. He was skinny and lank-haired, and shivered all the time, even in a heavy overcoat. He didn't look strong enough for anything other than a desk job. Armando suggested English classes, but Claudio refused. It would interfere with his poetry, he said.

Armando waited three months before telling Claudio that he would have to start paying for a share of the rent and food. “I can help you find a job,” Armando said, “but once I do, you have to keep it.” Armando's friend owned a shoe store that served mainly recent Latino immigrants to the North Side. Claudio worked stocking the shelves, taking out the trash, sweeping, unloading boxes. The owner kept him on because he knew he was a poet, and made allowances for his frequent inattention.

Claudio did keep the job, but he was never promoted. He refused to speak English, or even attempt to learn it. He was keeping his head clear of the new language and culture, waiting for the war in El Salvador to end so he could go back. He won asylum status in the US, and became a permanent resident. He wrote poetry in the first year or so, but then his inspiration dried up. He paid rent to his cousin, and kept to himself in his own room. Years went by, and the war ended in 1991. He thought of going back, but his father had died, and his mother and sister fled to Mexico and decided to stay.

Claudio has never found a home in the United States. He no longer has a home in El Salvador either. Unlike many immigrants, Claudio did not come in hopes of fulfilling his dreams. He fled to the US because he had no other option. He was physically tortured in El Salvador and now lives another kind of torture in the US. Despite having legal status, he remains an alien, a poet with no outlet, a man without a home.

Mismatch

2011-07-22T13:12:00.000-07:00

Nathan was a student from India in the early 1990s at a Seattle community college, when he met and married Susan, a US citizen. They lived together for eight years before separating, but didn’t divorce for nearly ten years after their separation. Nathan got his legal residence based on the marriage, and became a citizen in the 1990s. He and Susan had no children.

In 2008, after years of living alone, Nathan signed up for an Indian matchmaking service. These services – there are many that match Indian nationals in the US seeking marriage – are a primary way for Indian professionals to meet and marry. This is vital, since often families of recent immigrant professionals don’t come with them. This kicks the legs out under the traditional Indian path to marriage, where families make the arrangement.

Nathan met three or four women in the Seattle area, but each match fizzled after the first date. He went further afield, and started corresponding with women in Oregon and California. He paid the match service fees for a year before he found Miranda, a high school teacher in a San Francisco suburb. She was in the US on a work visa, and was from the same Indian state as he. After two months of writing, posting photos and phone calls, Nathan flew to San Francisco to meet Miranda and her brother’s family, with whom she lived.

The first meeting was awkward. Nathan was smaller and thinner than Miranda had guessed, and was pockmarked from acne scars. He wasn’t witty or much of a talker. Miranda was more forceful, taller, and older-looking than Nathan had guessed. They sat at her brother’s dinner table while the brother and his wife tried to make conversation with Nathan about their memories of their home city. Miranda and Nathan had been born Christians, and belonged to the same evangelical denomination. It had given them plenty to talk about by phone – their churches, their faith – but didn’t lend itself as well to dinner-table conversation. Nathan talked about his high-tech computer programmer work, and didn’t let on that he was divorced. Miranda wondered why a forty-year-old man still wasn’t married. He said, “I guess I just never found the right woman.” He said he’d been work-focused to the exclusion of wife-hunting. He said he’d gotten his permanent residence in the US when his employer petitioned for him. Miranda barely spoke.

Nathan went back to his hotel room after the dinner meeting, and then flew home. He wrote right away to Miranda, to say he enjoyed the meeting and looked forward to seeing her again. He waited an agonizing week before she replied. She wrote, “As you can see, I’m no longer young. I was engaged when I was twenty, but my fiancée’s family thought my family was too poor, and he broke our engagement. Now I’m facing middle age with no husband or children. Our Christian faith can be a strong bond. I’m willing to continue to meet you and to see if a marriage is the right step.”

On this encouragement, Nathan flew several more times to San Francisco, and Miranda visited Seattle four or five times. She thought Nathan’s apartment rather small and dingy for a computer programmer who had focused on his work, and told him so. “I have to send a lot to my parents and brothers,” he said. “I’m building a compound for them all.” Hmmm, she thought, but then remembered that she was 36, nearly 37, with a teaching contract that would end in a year’s time. She’d have to go back to India, to nothing. Her parents were dead, and her brother and sister in the US, married to citizens.

She was prone to headaches, and got one nearly every time she visited Nathan. But I must marry, she thought. A year after meeting, they did marry, in San Francisco. She kept her job teaching – her contract was extended – and flew to Seattle for school vacations. Nathan visited her for long weekends.

She asked to see his workplace, but he demurred. “It’ll be dull for you”, he said. “No, really, it won’t”, she said. He said “No, family never visits; it’s not a good idea”. He took the car and left. She called a taxi, and went to the place he said he worked. No one had ever heard of him there.

She confronted him; he said he’d changed his job a week ago. She called him a liar. He insisted that he now worked at a new company. She insisted on seeing a paystub. He tossed one to her, and she saw the name of the company, and the fact that his hourly rate was $20, before he snatched it back. “Twenty dollars!” she shouted, “that’s not a programmer’s salary.” “Go to hell,” he said. “What is your job?” she shouted. “Tell the truth!” “None of your business”, he said. “Liar, liar!” she said, and went back to California without saying goodbye.

He called in a week. He said he was sorry about the lie, but he knew she wanted a professional. Every woman he’d ever dated wanted a professional. He didn’t have a degree, but he was a good man, a Christian, and he would be a good provider, a good father. He was a warehouse worker, and operated a fork lift.

She relented. What else could she do? The wedding had been in her church. It would be shameful to divorce. She traveled to Seattle during summer break. She was job hunting at high schools in Seattle and its suburbs. She and Nathan were looking for a bigger place, a condo. While organizing boxes, she found Nathan’s divorce certificate. It was dated nearly a year after he’d begun the relationship with her.

She was trembling as she held it out to him that night. “You lied! You lied!” She threw the certificate on the kitchen table. “You, you, you… you said you’d never been married!”

Nathan shouted, “Why are you snooping in my private papers? Now I’ll never petition for your residence! Get out of my house! No one will ever want you!” He slammed her against the wall, and tried to choke her.

Miranda took her suitcase, stuffed in her clothes, and ran out the door. She took a taxi to the airport. After a month, she filed for divorce. Nathan didn’t respond, and the divorce was granted. Her work visa expired, and her school let her go, since she couldn’t prove work authorization. She took a job selling clothes, in a store owned by her brother’s friend. She made minimum wage. She didn’t go back to her church, for shame. It wasn’t until another year went by that she learned that she could petition for her own legal residence in the US, based on the abuse she suffered. She is now a legal permanent resident. She has no plans to remarry.

Desert Crossing continued…

2011-07-18T15:33:00.000-07:00

For the two days and two nights he spent wandering, looking for the road that la Migra must have used to capture his companions, David was tormented by thirst. The few tortillas he had in his pack were of no interest to him, without water. He slept in the day short stretches, his hat over his head and face, moving around a boulder when the sun’s blaze on his face woke him, dreaming of water, of swimming, of waterfalls, of rain.

He was a city boy and had no experience of desert of even of countryside, but what he did seemed instinctual. Keep low during the day, suck mosoquelete stems, try to sleep. At night, he blessed the nearly full moon, and walked northwest where the coyote said Tucson lay. He gathered mosoquelete as he walked and stuffed as much as he could in his backpack, for the day.

About an hour before dawn on his second night walking alone, he found a road, a two-lane blacktop. He walked along it toward the north. He was going to take it wherever it led, even if straight to border patrol headquarters. He’d turn himself in, ask for asylum. He’d heard that the US didn’t give asylum to Mexicans no matter the circumstances, but he couldn’t go back.

When the sun came up, he saw that there was no shade of any kind along the road. The asphalt began to heat up, and he walked in the powdery dust at its side. By mid-morning he was hallucinating, stumbling, barely able to keep to the side of the road since there were so many clear sparkling pools of deep water just a few yards away from the road. There were people, too, sitting by the pools, laughing and splashing each other with water. Some of them called to him to come to drink, to swim. He wanted to go, but something kept him to the road, a stubborn part of him that held one small thought; he must keep the black line of the road always in his sight, and when sight would fail, in his touch.

An hour or so before midday, an even more vivid hallucination began to torment him. A silver late model car pulled up beside him, and the elderly white man driving it asked in English “Want a ride?” David leaned against the car hood but couldn’t speak. The car felt real, and it was on the road. The metal was burning him, but it was an illusion anyway.

The man got out of the car and steered David into the passenger seat, then handed him a tall plastic glass filled with water. David made no move to take the water, so the man held it to his lips, and tilted the water into his mouth. Some of it ran out of David’s mouth before he began to drink. David tried to grab the glass, to gulp the water, but the man said, “Steady, amigo, take it slow.” David heard the word amigo – and it struck him, as he lost consciousness, that it was the first thing he understood in this very realistic mirage.

When he woke, he was in a bed with white sheets in a patio, under a clay tile roof. He watched water splashing in a small stone fountain in the center of thep atio, for a long while. He didn’t feel curious about where he was. It was so restful just to lie there. He noticed a needle in his arm attached by a clear tube to a hanging bottle of fluid. He slept; he woke, and slept again. It was dark and light, day and night for a dream-filled week. He mostly saw himself as a child again, on the old truck with his father making deliveries, but now they drove only in the desert, and made their deliveries to swimmers and picnickers lounging by the side of mirage lakes and waterfalls. He and his father swam and picnicked with their customers, too. These dreams were so happy that he mourned their end, when he was well enough to to be given a bus ticket to Seattle, where his cousin awaited him. He was never told who the people were who saved his life.

He started working almost right away as a dishwasher in the restaurant his cousin partially owned. But the conditions were hard, the workers joyless, and the pay not even close to minimum wage. He found another dishwashing job easily, and had the great good fortune to land in a good place, where he worked his way up to prep cook within a year. He discovered a flair for cooking, and loved his work. His wife told him not to risk coming back; the Zetas were stronger than ever, and never forgot anything. She tried to get a visitor’s visa to the US, but failed three times. He told her that he was fine, and he was.

When he was 65, after 10 years in the US, he thought he’d consult with an immigration attorney to see if there was any way he could get legal status. When he heard the news that there was no way, unless Congress passed immigration reform, he was unfazed. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m happy here. I’ve got my work and I’ve got friends. I have my church, and I know my wife is fine. I send her money, and she bought a house in Puebla, where she’s from. She’s happy too.”

He has no health insurance, and no Medicare or Medicaid, no food stamps, no retirement savings, and no car. His apartment is small and dark, and he walks with a pronounced limp and a stout cane. He has no family in the US, and no legal status, either. Yet he said, as he left the lawyer’s office, “I have never met an American who treated me badly, from my first ride in the desert with the elderly man who gave me water. I’m lucky.” He is a happy man.

The Pastor's Blessing

2011-06-30T17:26:00.000-07:00

Blaz, born in 1970 to Pentecostal Christians in Slovakia, trained as a dental technician in his teens, but could not get a job. His parents had warned him about spending money on the dental technician program; Pentecostals will never get those kinds of jobs, they said. All those kinds of jobs are only for Catholics. They wanted him to go into business with his father, selling auto parts, but Blaz was stubborn. He had worked in his father’s tiny shop since he was 12; he saw nothing interesting in it. Pentecostals had their own businesses, and employed their own families, because jobs other than laborers and domestic servants were closed to them. The government did pass laws against discrimination, but they weren’t enforced. Pentecostals were only about 3% of the population, and had no champions.

He wanted to build molds for false teeth, and make teeth that fit beautifully. There was a big market for false teeth, and Blaz had an entrepreneurial streak, but setting up a shop was expensive. He needed to get some experience and save some money before he could do it. He applied everywhere in Bratislava, the capital, without success. He then astounded his family by filing a discrimination claim, without a lawyer, against the largest dental workshop in the country. It was 1989, and Slovakia had just had an amiable divorce not only from the Czech Republic, but also from the Soviet Union ; people felt great optimism about the country’s future. Blaz thought it was high time to dismantle the entrenched culture of discrimination against Pentecostal Christians.

Right after he filed the suit, his father’s shop burned in an arson attack, and he was beaten, quite badly, as he tried to salvage parts the next day from the smoking ruins. The attackers, three beefy young men, made it clear that he needed to leave the country before he and the rest of his family were murdered. Blaz went to the police, and collapsed in the police station as he tried to tell the sergeant what had happened. He woke up three days later in the hospital, and spent the next two weeks recovering. His father insisted that he flee to the Czech Republic, get a visa to the US, and then fly to Seattle to live with his father’s second cousin, who had fled Slovakia years before. Blaz was too sick and too discouraged to fight any more, and he did as his father wanted.

He arrived in Seattle in 1990, applied for and won asylum status from the US government, and went to work as a construction laborer. He lived with his cousin and his family in a room in their basement in Bellevue, and attended a Slovakian Pentecostal church. Attendance was required at the Sunday services from 9am -noon and from 6-8 pm; the Wednesday service from 7-9 pm ; and the Saturday service from 5-8 pm. There were optional classes on the Bible on Tuesday nights, and classes for “applying our faith to the challenge of modern life” on Thursday nights; Blaz attended both. On Saturday mornings, he went to English classes at the church, and on Monday and Friday evenings, he volunteered to clean the church and do repairs and handyman jobs. Back home, he had only attended required services, and did that at his parents’ insistence. In America, he found that the church was his family. The church rules gave him a structure and purpose that he did not think he could find without them. He found it sensible that there was an absolute prohibition against drinking alcohol, dancing, listening to secular music, and divorce, and that the pastor must approve all marriages and job and school choices.

The rest of the recent Slovakian arrivals spent almost as much time as he did at the church. But there was not one girl of marriageable age at all, for two long years. In 1992, shy 16-year-old Danila, another Pentecostal asylee from Slovakia, arrived in Seattle alone to live with her mother’s cousin, and the church community quickly matched her with Blaz. The pastor gave his blessing to the marriage, and they married the same year she arrived; the community loaned them money to buy a house near the church. Blaz worked construction, and Danila stayed home to have children. They had a child within a year of their marriage, and then another, and another; within the first five years, they had five children. By their 10^th anniversary, they had three more, and by their 16^th anniversary, they had 12 children.

Eastern European Pentecostal Christian families are very large, and children are considered a great blessing. The children were baptized and went to church with their parents, as often as their parents did. The babies were in the church nursery and little ones in the church preschool. School-age children spent nearly all their time when they weren’t at school at the church, which had a playground and a well-stocked kitchen. Danila thought about learning English and even getting a job, when her older girls were old enough to take care of the little ones, but she was so tired all the time.

When her youngest child was three months old, Danila complained of pain in her stomach, and went to see a doctor. The doctor said that she was just worn out from having so many children so quickly, and advised rest. She was only 33, and needed to start to pay attention to her own health, he said. Take walks, leave the children for an afternoon and meet with friends for the church sewing bees. Danila did as he said, but the pain didn’t go away. It got so bad that she screamed in her sleep, and Blaz took her to another doctor, who found that Danila had an advanced case of pancreatic cancer. He gave her six months to live. They did not have medical insurance.

The entire church community sprang into action. The women of the church cooked and delivered a meal a day for six months, in turn, for the entire family. They took turns staying with the children during the day so the older ones could go to school, and washed the laundry and cleaned the house. The church paid the mortgage and utilities for six months so that Blaz could stay home and take care of Danila. The church bought morphine for Danila with a doctor’s prescription, but she spent the last month of her life in great pain. When Danila died, the church paid for her funeral and her burial plot.

After Danila’s death, her sister Arva and her husband Andrej came from Slovakia to help care for the children, and Blaz tried to find work again. But it was 2009 and no one was building anything much. The church continued to pay the mortgage, but told Blaz they couldn’t do so much longer. Blaz met with Pastor Tomasz, and told him that he was desperate to see his family in Slovakia again, before his parents died, and to have some time away to recover from his grief. The pastor gave him money for the air ticket out of his own pocket, and Blaz flew home for the first time in 19 years.

He was gone four months. When he came back to church, he told everyone that he was engaged to a 24-year-old woman from the Slovakian countryside, and that he planned to bring her on a fiancée visa to Seattle, as soon as he had the pastor’s blessing. The church erupted in gossip and condemnation. The church council stopped mortgage payments immediately. Some said that it was disgusting that he wanted to trick a woman more than 15 years his junior into being a stepmother to 12 children, in exchange for US legal status. Others said that he obviously cared nothing about the children he already had, and wanted only to exercise his prurient sexual desires. The church council debated a resolution to make Blaz repay the money they had given him.

Blaz made an appointment for a Sunday afternoon, when almost no one would be at church, to meet with Pastor Tomasz and ask for his blessing on the new marriage. He rehearsed his speech; he would tell the pastor that he was looking out for the children by finding a good woman to take care of them. He would say that his sister-in-law Arva wanted to return to Slovakia soon to resume her life there, and that it was not fair to his older girls to ask them to care for the younger children. The girls would have to forfeit their chances of finishing school if they were tied to the house. He would say that he needed a wife at home so that he could go back to work. He would pledge to take no more money from the church, and that he would pay the pastor back for the cost of the air ticket he gave him to Slovakia.

Blaz put on his best suit, and drove to the church. He knocked on the pastor’s office door at the appointed time, but the pastor shouted, “Wait!” from behind the door. Blaz stood outside the door for long minutes before the pastor opened it. This was reported to the church community that night by a church member who observed from behind a door in the lobby where he had hidden himself, to spy on the proceedings. The man could hear nothing for about five minutes. Then, he told church members, the pastor began the most awful shouting, angry shouting, and shouted for ten minutes straight. Try as he might, the man could not hear what the pastor was shouting. He saw Blaz open the door, sweat pouring from his face, and stumble out of the office, out of the church. He drove away.

What the pastor said is not known, to anyone except to him and to Blaz. What everyone does know is that Blaz and his children disappeared from their house in the next few weeks, and never returned to church. Some said that he was in a different city in the US, and others that they heard that he was back in Slovakia. Whether he married the young woman from the countryside isn’t known either, but in December 2010, six months after the family disappeared, the church council got an email from Blaz, with picture of the entire family dressed in Sunday clothes, all 12 children and Blaz , and a young very pretty woman smiling in their midst. Thank you for your support, Blaz wrote.

Desert Crossing

2011-06-30T17:21:00.000-07:00

David had lived his entire life in Mexico City, and never once thought of leaving it. His father was a street vendor of fruits and vegetables, and so was David. While his father was still alive in the 1950’s and 60’s, they went together every morning at 3 a.m., except Sundays, to the huge central wholesale produce market to buy enough produce to fill their red Ford pickup. By 6 a.m., fully loaded, they drove to the middle class neighborhood they’d sold in for a generation, and motored slowly through the streets, shouting “Fruta! Vegetales!” At their cries, the maids came out of the houses, and bought what they needed for the day. By 9 a.m., the truck was empty, and they headed home to sleep until lunch. David’s uncle had a furniture factory. David and his father carefully washed their pickup every day after lunch, and then delivered wooden tables and chairs, dressers and bedsteads all over the city.

When his father died in 1970, David took over the business alone until his own son was old enough, at 15, to help. They took the business in a new direction when they began selling vegetables on contract to restaurants. They made more money than David and his father had, and took on two of David’s nephews as helpers when they expanded to three delivery trucks. By the time David was 50, in the mid-1990’s, he was able to devote himself to the marketing and sales building while his son supervised the delivery staff. David had his office at home, and was able to sleep until 6 a.m. for the first time since he was 12 and began working with his father.

One of his contracts was with a wealthy man who owned three restaurants; it was their biggest contract, and provided almost ten percent of the company’s income. This man, Salvador Mendez, suggested to David that he would like fruit and vegetables delivered daily to his mansion in an exclusive neighborhood, as a thank-you for his business. David obliged, especially since his trucks had that neighborhood on a daily route. The cook would choose what she needed, and there would be no charge. It wasn’t an inconvenience, and it didn’t cost much. Mr. Mendez died in the late 1990’s, and the restaurants went to his son, Marco, who terminated the contract with David in order to buy from his brother-in-law’s vegetable delivery company. But there was a mix up, and David’s staff kept delivering vegetables for free for a few months to the mansion, where now Marco Mendez lived. When David organized his books and ordered a stop to the deliveries, he decided to send a bill to Marco for the months of free fruit and vegetables. It totaled about $400.00 US dollars.

A month went by with no response, so David called Marco, who swore at him and hung up. Against his wife’s advice, David went to a lawyer who sent a letter to Marco to demand the $400. And that is when David’s troubles, the first of his relatively serene life, began. In front of David’s house, which was set inside a walled garden and patio, four thugs in dark suits and dark glasses appeared one late morning a week after he’d sent the letter. David was in the house when the blockade began, but his wife and three of his four children were not. David’s daughter, Maritza, and her two toddlers were in also inside, but Maritza’s husband had gone out. The thugs stood in front of the only door to the street, which opened in a long wall against the sidewalk. David saw them from an upper floor of the house.

The phones didn’t work; the lines had been cut. Cell phones weren’t much in use in 1998, and there were none in the house. The thugs threw a note tied to a rock over the wall. It read, “Come get your $400, asshole. It’s waiting for you.” It was signed “Zeta.”

Zeta. It meant Marco was aligned with the powerful Zeta crime organization, one of the largest in Mexico. It meant no escape, no begging forgiveness, no way to have life go on as before. It meant his death. No one in the neighborhood would call the police; it was dangerous in addition to being useless. David knew all this from the moment he saw the four men, standing in front of his house like they were settling in for a long wait. When his wife and children walked towards the house, they would know, too, and would turn away. They too would not call the police. It would make things so much worse when the police informed their Zeta contact.

David had to either give himself up and accept his torture and death, or somehow leave the house unnoticed if he was to save the rest of the family. He and Maritza waited until dark. She went out the door with her children in her arms and told the thugs she was going to her in-laws house. She left the door open. At the same time, when Maritza was talking to the thugs at the front door, David used the bed sheets he and Maritza had tied together to lower himself to the street from a back window. He dropped to about three feet from the pavement, let go, and jumped. He heard a snap; he was a heavy man, unused to exercise, and he broke his left ankle on impact. But he couldn’t lie in the street. He dragged himself across the street to a neighbor’s house, who, miraculously, let him in.

From his neighbor’s house, he saw the thugs going from room to room in his house, and heard the crashing as they hurled vases, dishes, and furniture to the floor. After an hour or so, they left, with, David assumed, anything of value they found. They didn’t come back, and in the weeks that followed, as David’s ankle healed in his neighbor’s house, his family returned to clean up and restore the house, and to keep the business going. The Zetas seemed to have lost interest in pursuing David, but everyone knew that it was only because he disappeared. He would be a target again if they found him in Mexico.

This ankle healed, but incompletely. The doctor who came to his neighbor’s house to attend him wanted him to go to the hospital for surgery, but David couldn’t risk it. He would walk with a limp to the end of his days, but he would walk. His son made arrangements for him to be taken by private plane to the border with Arizona, and then by a “coyote” (a smuggler) to Tucson. From there he was to fly to Seattle, where his cousin Angel had lived for more than thirty years. He would live with his cousin, find work, and then return to Mexico when the Zetas’ crime network was dismantled by Presidente Calderon, who had pledged to break the powerful organization. He wouldn’t be gone long.

That was the plan. Here is the reality: he did fly to Ciudad Juarez, bordering Arizona, and he did find the coyote his son hired. But instead of taking just him, the coyote had a group of 18 men and four women to walk into the Arizona desert. David told the coyote that his son had paid for him to be smuggled alone. The coyote laughed. “No one goes alone,” he said. “I can’t make money like that.”

The group left at night, at about 9 p.m., and walked by moonlight until they took a break at 1 a.m. They started again at 2 a.m. and walked until about 5 a.m. when, he heard shouts of “Paren, paren (Stop! Stop!)” coming from all around him. “Escondense! (Hide!)” He heard a man shout. “La migra! (Immigration!)” With his limp and the pain from the walking, David was behind the group, who were in their teens and twenties and a few in their thirties. The coyote already had had to slow the group several times, so David could keep up, and he had urged David to go faster. One of the boys in his teens found a thick stick that he cut to fit David’s height, to use as a cane. But when la Migra surrounded the group, David was at least twenty-five yards to the rear. From behind a small boulder, he watched the border patrol close in, approximately fifteen officers holding the group at gun point. They handcuffed the entire group, including the coyote, and marched them over a rise where a van must have been waiting for them. David heard the van start up, and drive away. Then it was silent, and David was alone in the desert without a map or guide, little food in a small backpack, and no water. The kind teen who cut the cane for him had offered to carry David’s water.

The daylight came on soft at about 6 a.m., but by 8 it was already too hot to move. He knew he needed to find even the tiny shade of a cactus or a rock, and stay there, moving with the sun, until it was low in the sky. But he was parched with thirst. From his years of selling vegetables, fruit, and herbs, he knew of some desert water- filled plants, and he looked for them. He found mosoquelete in relative plenty, with thick stalks that he could break and suck, but handfuls of stalks were barely enough to wet his mouth.

To be continued...

Memory Streets

2011-06-24T15:44:00.000-07:00

Baba was not a magician. She was not a time traveler. But she could turn a cold Chicago suburb into the sunny Macedonia she remembered from her childhood. She created an elaborate visual mechanism to link each step along the sidewalks of Berwyn to a specific memory. From the house to Anja’s school... She was a child at her parents’ and grandparents’ farm, sitting in the sun crocheting. It was a white shawl for her sister’s wedding. She was six and the sister who would marry was 15. It was summer, and she was sleepy in the sun. She was sitting on a big flat rock, listening to her brothers, sisters, and cousins laughing and calling to one another as they weeded the wheat field. Flies buzzed; there was a smell of fresh manure. The shawl had a pretty sliver thread running through it…

Baba immigrated to Chicago from Macedonia in the mid-1930s, a new widow with her five-year-old daughter. She was 45, and dressed in a widow’s long silky black dress that she never removed, even in Chicago’s stifling Augusts. She added a black woolen shawl from October to May.

Her oldest daughter Sonja married a Chicagoan of Macedonian descent, moved to Chicago, and obtained a visa for Baba. Baba’s husband had left her for a new life in Canada, and Baba’s brother-in-law told her that it was getting to be a burden to keep her and little Anja fed and clothed. Baba packed up a few clothes and her jewelry, some photos very dear to her, and sailed for New York.

Sonja and her husband owned a yellow brick 3-flat in Berwyn, a close-in suburb home to recent eastern European immigrants. They and Baba and Anja lived in one large apartment with three bedrooms. Baba and Anja had their own room, unimaginable to her, because back in Macedonia, fifteen relatives slept in a one-room farmstead – and not a big room at that.

Despite the big apartment, the kindness of Sonja and her husband, and the happiness of Anja in her new school, Baba was listless. She knew she didn’t want to go back to Macedonia, because what she missed was gone. And there was nothing for her in Chicago. She cooked for the family, washed clothes, cleaned, and tried to teach Anja how to bake bread, make yogurt, and roll fine filo dough, but the child wasn’t interested. Anja stayed in the park after school with her friends, playing until supper, and then ran out again after the meal to continue with her play.

Baba began walking, winter and summer, for miles along the city streets. She walked hours during the afternoons after her housework was done, and Anja had eaten lunch and run back to school. Each block was a memory, and she walked her history. Berwyn’s streets were her memory palace. She doesn’t remember exactly how it began…maybe something – the way the bread sat on a thick white plate in the baker’s window, or a woman holding a baby on a stoop, singing in a thin faltering voice – reminded her of home. As she walked the blocks, she lived again. Some parts of her life took a mile or so, others less. She could see everything again, taste it, smell it, and hear it.

It wasn’t easy at the beginning. She struggled to tie a particular block to a memory, so she could walk it. But it got easier with practice. She could go forward or backward in her life, eventually, or take only a particular memory.

From the school to St. Saba’s Orthodox Church... She was 12, a girl small for her age but so pretty and quiet and quick-witted, that three families asked for her hand in marriage for their sons. Her father was stunned at the swift upturn in his fortunes; each of the three families was willing to pay a substantial down payment to secure her. He was a nervous, doubtful man and was afraid of offending any of the three much richer families. But he was a kind man, too, and he gave the power of choice to Baba, although his new wife told him he was a fool to do so. He brought the families one by one to the farmhouse, with their sons, while Baba sat crocheting, screened by a curtain. The moment she saw Anders, only 16, she knew he was the one.

Anders was standing next to his father, looking calmly and levelly at her father, as if he knew how serious this was, this moment, but not fearing it. He had blond hair that fell straight across his forehead. He listened while the men talked, gravely, but didn’t comment, or smile, or twitch. Her father cleared his throat, and asked about Anders’s prospects for inheritance. He couldn’t bring himself to name a price for the dowry. Anders’s father said Anders would have a half-share in the 100-acre farm; he had only one brother with whom to share it. “Handsome, handsome!” her father cried, but couldn’t seem to think of any more questions. Anders’s father had to state a sum. Her father said, “Generous, generous!” It was her stepmother who had to state that her father would consider all the offers and let him know the decision.

Anders’s father’s offer was not the highest one, but Baba was clear in her choice, and Baba was pledged to Anders. Three months later, at the betrothal ceremony, as she sat beside Anders, the entire side of her body next to his buzzed. It would be three more years living apart until they would marry.

She had other memories for the rest of her long walks...about Sonja as a child learning to walk, about Anders and she working together to get in the harvest until it was too dark to see anymore, about winter Sunday afternoons with the three of them playing in the warm barn, jumping and tumbling among the hay bales. But she did not walk memory streets for any time after 1914, when Anders was drafted into the Army, then killed at the front in 1916. She refused to dignify with her memory the cruel years of hunger and cold and fear that followed, the hard corner in her father-in-law's house she and Sonja lived in for ten years, and then the marriage to Anja's father, the cold man. She was glad when he left them, glad when she heard that he had a new life in Canada and wasn't coming back, and glad when Sonja sent for her and Anja.

But was this life, in Chicago? Was it just waiting? And if so, for what? So she walked, and walked, and while she was walking, she lived again.

As American as They Come

2011-06-24T15:36:00.000-07:00

His name was John Lincoln. He chose it because it was very American, he said. He was a Romanian immigrant, originally Stefan Andreescu. He came to the US as a student to study English at a community college in Seattle in the early 1990’s, and before his visa expired, he married a US citizen, a woman more than 20 years his senior. She was one of the volunteer tutors at the college, recently divorced. John moved into her big house in a neighborhood of broad lawns and quiet streets and took a job delivering pizzas until, he said, his English improved and he could get an associate’s degree in computer networking. But he didn’t get the chance.

Four months after the wedding, before he could have his permanent resident interview, his new wife threw him out of the house and out of the marriage. She got a divorce and wrote to Immigration to withdraw her immigrant petition for him. With the petition withdrawn, the Immigration Service placed him in deportation proceedings. That is how I came to know John. I was working as an attorney at a downtown immigration firm in the late 1990’s, and John’s case was assigned to me. I had my first meeting with him to assess the kind of relief available to him, if any. The US immigration system is based primarily on family or work, and asylum. When one is in deportation proceedings in immigration court, one must usually prove that one merits legal status, and that a family or work visa is available. John did not have any US citizen or legal resident family, or an employer able or willing to petition for him. What he did have was the absolutely unshakable desire to stay in the US. There is no way I’m going back he said, not even if I’m deported.

So I began to examine him for a possible asylum claim, based on a fear of persecution by the government of Romania if he returned. The fear, to qualify for asylum, could also be of a group the government could not or would not control. John would have to have suffered this persecution because of his race, nationality, social group, religion, or political opinion. I had been practicing asylum law for more than 15 years by the time I interviewed John, but no matter how I framed the questions, he steadfastly refused to give me any information about his life there.

“I had parents like everyone does, I went to school, I left, that’s all,” he said. We were stuck. I would have to refuse representation. He would be better off going to court alone than paying a lawyer who could learn nothing to help him. We sat in silence for a while; John stared at his feet and I looked at his bowed head. He was still in his twenties but he looked much older. His hair was thin and dull and he already had a bald spot. His skin was pasty, and his narrow shoulders and hunching made him look like a great blue heron tucking its head under its wing.

I asked John what it was about the US that made him want to stay here. His head snapped up, and he nearly shouted, “Freedom, freedom!” He told me that in the US he could go wherever he wanted, live where he wanted, get work where he wanted, have the house he wanted, study if he wanted to, or not. Back in Romania, could he do the same? I asked. “Never, never, never,” he shouted.

And then, rushing as if he were running away from his own past, he began to tell me his story. His mother died when he was five, and his helpless father gave him and his younger sister to a great aunt to rear. His great aunt died when he was six, his father couldn’t be found, and he and his sister were sent to separate orphanages. When John was twelve, after repeated attempts to run away, he was committed to an insane asylum. I would only get the story from John in the weeks that followed; it was so painful for him to tell it that he cried, sweated, writhed in his chair, and pounded my desk as he spoke. He could only talk for a half hour or less at a time, before both of us were exhausted. I wrote his story taking close notes. We would need every detail for the asylum hearing.

John had been committed at the age of twelve to one of the Soviet Empire’s most notorious experimental insane asylums. He had suffered years of solitary confinement, shock therapy, strait jacketing, chaining, and drug “therapy,” all for his mental illness of running away. He was completely unable to communicate with anyone outside the asylum. At seventeen in 1989, he succeeded in running away for good, with the help of a sympathetic kitchen worker in the asylum, who hid him in her Pentecostal pastor’s house for a few months. The entire country was convulsing in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989. The Romanian dictator was executed by his own people, and the notorious asylums, the torturous prisons, the entire secret police structure which reached into the lives of nearly everyone in the country, were deserted by their staff when the government no longer paid them.

In the chaos, the pastor and his congregation managed to get John a passport and visa to Spain, and paid for his flight. John had no idea until years later who had done this for him, nor how hard it must have been for the church to pull off, and for him, a friendless stranger. At the time, he didn’t even know he was on a plane or what a plane was until he saw the ground fall away under him. He didn’t know he was arriving in Spain until he got there, and then spent weeks thinking he was in a part of Romania that had a different accent to the language (Romanian is a romance language with marked similarity to Spanish), and was much warmer.

He was assigned to a refugee camp on the outskirts of Valencia, and began to go to school. He was an apt pupil, and learned Spanish in a few weeks. He then taught himself, with the help of a passionate set of camp schoolteachers, an astonishing array of subjects: arithmetic and then algebra and trigonometry; English; geography; European and American history; and the new information technology skills. He was fascinated by what he learned of the US, particularly of its personal freedom, and determined that he’d get a student visa to go there. After two years, he succeeded in getting the visa to the Seattle community college.

I drafted John’s affidavit for his asylum claim, based on the persecution he had suffered in Romania by the Romanian government. We had expert testimony in his case from a US political science professor who specialized in Romania during the Dictator Ceausescu’s reign. We included testimony from a Seattle psychotherapist who corroborated John’s story of mental abuse, based on his current symptoms of fear and post-traumatic stress. We won the case, in large part because John’s story of the abuse he had suffered was detailed and consistent.

Bringing up all the torture was to relive it again, for John. After his win, and his grant of permanent residence in the US, he went into a deep depression and lost his pizza delivery job. I lost touch with him for years, until he contacted me in 2010. He called and said, “Hello, this is John Lincoln. Do you remember me?” Of course I did; no one else with a Romanian accent had a name like that. He told me that he had indeed gone to school and gotten a network administrator diploma, and then a job. He was married, and had two children and a house in Bothell. He had become a US citizen, and petitioned for his sister’s residence in the US as soon as he could, his sister from whom he had been separated at age six. He wanted help with the legal procedure to bring her and her husband and children to the US.

When I saw John again, he looked younger than he had 10 years before, and his wife and children seemed happy, and happy to be with him. I asked him if America had been for him what he wanted, all those years ago in the refugee camp in Spain when he dreamed of freedom. He was unhesitating. “Yes. But it’s more complicated than I could have known. It took me a long time and a lot of suffering to build a life here, despite or maybe because of all the freedom.”

Patience as a Vice

2011-06-17T15:48:00.000-07:00

Eugenio and Marta married in their small Salvadorian town when she was 15 and he was 17. They had five children in the first six years of marriage while they lived with Eugenio’s widowed mother. Eugenio supported them all with his shoemaking; he went, as his father had, from house to house to repair shoes and leather bags. He could make dirty broken shoes look almost new again. But by then, in the early 1990’s, it was nearly cheaper to just buy new shoes; they were cheap and fell apart quickly, but couldn’t be fixed easily. Soon, the shoe repair trade crumbled. Eugenio decided to come to the US, alone, find work, send money home and save enough to buy a house and send for the entire family.

He did this; all of it. He made it over the border and got two full time dishwashing jobs in Seattle, where he rented a room from a Salvadorian Family from his home town. He sent enough money home by his third month in the US to support his family. He saved and bought a house. He sent for his family. Trouble is: they didn’t want to come. It took him too long. Nearly 17 years, all told. Eugenio is a perfectionist. He saved $50,000 for the down payment on a 4-bedroom house in Tukwila. Then he saved for the money to bring his family. He didn’t believe in making promises he might not be able to keep, so he didn’t talk about when he would bring them. He wanted to surprise them all. After he bought the house, he felt he had a big lovely gift to give them, when everything was ready.

When that time came, he made the call: come now. But, the family had grown and settled. His wife had found another man, a young man, and already had two children with him. His youngest child was 18 and had moved to the capital to find work. The rest had children, partners, and spouses.

Eugenio…well, he goes on, saving money. He still works two jobs; says he’s bored if he doesn’t. He sends money to his mother and his children, but cut off his wife after he learned he was supporting her boyfriend and her new children. He says he’s not bitter, but he wishes it had been different. He’ll be a citizen in the US soon. Maybe, he says, he’ll see if his mother will come to live with him in Tukwila. He’s ready for some company.

Walking North

2011-06-17T15:41:00.000-07:00

Note: This story continues from the story entitled Lost, the May 2, 2011 posting below.

Pierre expected that his wife would come out onto the road when the sound of the truck faded, but she didn’t. He called to her, softly at first but then more loudly when she didn’t reply. He crawled through the bushes on both sides of the road, and then became frantic, screaming her name and that of the boys. He berated her, shouting, “This isn’t funny, Marie! Where are you? Please, please answer!” but he heard nothing. After a time, he stopped shouting, and sat in the bush, letting the mosquitos bite him. He felt blank. The sun was at its height by the time he realized how hot and thirsty he was. He was carrying half of their water supply, about a half gallon. He took a small sip. It could be a long time before he found water again.

He began his search along the sides of the road again; this time, he was methodical. He went back about a half mile, and then forward a half mile from the place he saw her last. He searched until almost nightfall, then walked to a tiny collection of huts he’d seen in a clearing a mile or so up the road. At this point in his story, Pierre’s memory goes dim. Was it because of the fear and loss? Or because what happened to him in the next five years was too awful to tell? All he will tell is that he moved deeper and deeper into Congo, asking for his wife, searching for anyone who looked like her, who looked like his sons. He never found them.

He remembers that he lived with a band of pygmies for a long time, hunting with them, and fleeing war with them. They fled consistently to the north, away from the violent, crazed path of war in central Africa. They were experts at fleeing the terror of modernity, of surviving where no one else could. He remembers thinking in the first years that surely the wars could not last long, and that of all people, he should be able to find a way back to normal life. He was educated, spoke English and French, and knew how to operate a car. But after a time, he forgot about those things.

In about 1998 the band was in Sudan, close to Egypt’s southern border. Pierre remembers that when he saw a truck loaded with migrant workers stopped for a rest break, he walked without thinking up to the truck and swung himself onto the flat bed with the other migrants. He watched his companions of the last five years fade from sight as the truck pulled away. He worked on a dam project in Egypt as a laborer, and earned a bit of money. He made his way to Cairo, and found Burundians in exile who helped him get a false Egyptian passport. Some remembered his family, and gave him enough money to fly to Mexico.

There, in Mexico City, he found a bus to the border with the US. When he got to Cuidad Juarez, sister city with El Paso, Texas, he walked to the border crossing and asked for asylum in the US. He was immediately arrested and placed in immigration detention Texas. He was detained for six months before he won his asylum hearing with an immigration judge in detention, in January 2000. He was one of the few detainees that got lucky: he had a pro bono attorney assigned to him through an immigrant legal project. After he won, the guards put him out of the detention center, where he sat on a speed bump in the parking lot for hours until one of the guards, on his way home, gave him a ride to a homeless shelter.

Pierre got a job in Houston as a day laborer, and earned enough money to take a bus to Seattle, where some Burundians he knew from the university lived. He lived with a couple and their young children for a year, then got a place of his own. He worked as a nurse’s aide, and then a translator in a hospital. In 2010, he heard through the Burundian social network that his wife might be in Tanzania, and that his children might either be in Congo or in Tanzania. He is saving his money to go look for them, and he is hopeful.

Lost

2011-06-08T14:55:00.000-07:00

The Hutu and Tutsi people live side by side in Burundi, Africa’s smallest nation. They intermarried for generations. Outsiders could not tell them apart, although some Burundians said they could be distinguished – something about the shape of the head, the length of the legs. But living together in peace was not an option for Hutus and Tutsis in Burundi in 1993, even though their customs, food, language, culture, and appearance were identical . Many thousands were murdered for their ethnicity, and many others fled in 1993 as refugees to Congo and Tanzania and beyond.

Pierre was a university graduate who worked in a car dealership in Bujumbura, Burundi’s capital, as an accountant in the head office. His father was Hutu and his mother Tutsi; both of them had been educated in France, and had returned to Burundi in the 1960s as part of the new urban middle class. In the 1993 presidential election, Pierre campaigned for the Hutu candidate, who would be the country’s first Hutu president. He gave campaign speeches from the back of a truck in neighborhoods throughout the city; after the speech, campaigners handed out bags of sugar and flour to the audience. It was the only way to attract and keep listeners. Pierre’s candidate won the election; many of the losing candidate’s supporters believed that his opponent won only through fraud. One of the prominent campaigners for the winning president was assassinated, then a few more, and then the new president was assassinated. Murderous mayhem took over the capital.

Pierre’s mother and sister were murdered in their house, and Pierre believed it was because of his campaigning. He went into hiding in a friend’s storeroom with his wife and young sons, and stayed there for weeks while battle raged in the streets. Was it Tutsis against Hutus, or vice versa? It was unclear, once the killing became indiscriminate. After weeks of hiding, Pierre and his wife decided to flee the capital in the night. They strapped food in blankets to their backs, stuffed cash in their clothes, and took their sons, ages 3 and 4, by the hands. They fled, street by street, hiding at every sound of gunfire or a truck, and made it to Lake Tanganyika before daybreak. Their plan was to walk at night north around the lake to Congo, where Marie, Pierre’s wife, had family. It was only about 50 kilometers, but controlled by Tutsi extremists, who were on the watch for escaping Hutus.

They kept to the side of the road that bordered the lake as the sun rose so they could hide in the thick bush if needed; Pierre went first around bends in the road so he could signal his wife when to hide. He heard a truck coming and turned to motion to her; he saw her and the boys disappear into the bush, and then hid himself. The truck stopped a few feet from him, and the soldiers crammed into the open truck bed got out to relieve themselves, resting their automatic rifles against the side of the truck. Pierre waited until they drove off, and when he couldn’t hear them anymore, he began to look for his wife and children.

To be continued next week…

Swim, Breathe, Live

2011-04-20T14:50:00.000-07:00

Eduardo hated the water, even as a child in Guatemala. He would wade in the sea on family trips to the Pacific beach, but never immerse himself fully as the rest of his family did. He never learned to swim. When he was twelve, his father left the family, and his mother couldn’t afford the trips to the beach anymore. When he left the country for the US in 1988, he was 21 years of age. Riding on a bus that passed through Mexico, he was already discouraged to the point of thinking of turning back. Then the coyote, or “smuggler,” brought his group of mostly Mexicans, to the Rio Grande. “Swim,” the coyote said, “We will all swim. The river is slow and not very deep here.”

“No boat, no raft?” Eduardo asked.

His answer was a snort. “Cowards are never going to make it.”

Eduardo was the last of the group of twelve to enter the water. He waded a long way out, almost three-fourths of the way to the other side. The water was no more than thigh-high and the current was sluggish, but the water slowly rose to his waist, then to the middle of his chest. He grabbed a big branch floating by and hugged it; he tried to keep walking but couldn’t. His feet left the river bed, and then his head went under. He came up, and tried to hurl himself on top of the branch, but it slipped out of his hands. He went under. He clawed at the water and came up again. He tried to shout but his mouth was full of water. He went under again, thrashing desperately he tried to make it back up, but couldn’t.

Then, something around his chest pulled him up and his head was out. Someone was towing him to shore with an arm across his chest, swimming alongside of him. When they reached the shallows, the man dragged him up to the sand and said, “Breathe, man. Breathe.” Eduardo breathed. The man crouching beside him, middle-aged, stocky, and pock-marked, smiled. He was not part of their group. “You’ll make it,” he said. Eduardo closed his eyes. He heard the coyote calling to the others so he got to his feet and staggered up the river bank. He looked around him for the man, but he was gone.

For years Eduardo kept looking for the man who saved his life. He looked for him in every face, but has yet to find him. Now, he is a US citizen and he lives his life in gratitude. He has decided to behave as if everyone he meets could be that man and as a result of this, he is known for his great generosity.

I'm gonna call Immigration on you!

2011-03-22T20:07:00.000-07:00

Some immigration stories involve unbelievable abuse, including violence against children. One story in particular is especially gut-wrenching. Aime and her daughter Sara, the subjects of this story, show immense courage. Aime survived horrific abuse and lived to become a loving woman, despite it. May it be true for her daughter.

Aime Cruz was born and raised in Bolivia. Aime Cruz’s father raped her repeatedly from the time she was 10 until she was 14. He only stopped because she ran away from home. There was nothing to do about it; the whole family was terrified of her father. There were no social services in Bolivia, and no 911; no one to inform, no one to stop him.

Aime found a boyfriend at age 15 and had two children with him by the time she was 18. He beat her, but she didn’t know how to provide for herself or the kids without him. She couldn’t go back to her family; her father said he’d kill her for running away.

Her boyfriend got more violent when he couldn’t get enough money for drugs; that happened more and more frequently. He threw her son, age 1, on the floor; the baby was on his father’s side of the bed. When Aime scolded him and tried to pick up the baby, he slugged her and broke her jaw. The next day, while he was out, Aime took both children and a few clothes, and went to the only place she could think of for help: a women’s jail near her apartment.

The warden took pity on her and gave her a cell and food, and called the jail’s doctor to treat her jaw. The doctor found Aime a temporary shelter at a Maryknoll mission school, where she helped with the cooking and cleaning for a few weeks. Aime mad a good impression on a school benefactor who learned her story and asked how she could help her. Instead of asking for work in the benefactor’s household, Aime surprised herself by asking for an air ticket to Tijuana, and help to get a Mexican visa. The kids were young enough to sit on her lap. And the benefactor surprised herself as well, by agreeing.

Aime got the visa, and arrived in Tijuana with the phone number of the Maryknoll mission there. She stayed a few months, cooking and cleaning for her keep. When she was ready, when she felt she knew enough, she walked over the border, without a coyote’s (smuggler’s) help, and was not caught.

She was 20 years old then, and strong. She found a shelter in San Diego, learned that she could get fish processing work in Seattle, and cadged a bus ticket from San Diego to Seattle. She arrived, very hungry and the kids even hungrier, and walked in downtown Seattle until she found a women’s shelter for the homeless. That very night, a volunteer took her to a women and children’s shelter.

She didn’t stay long at the shelter. She got a job at a fish processing plant, and within three months had an apartment in a heavily Hispanic complex in Burien, with a neighbor to watch her children.

After a few years, when the kids were in school, she met a co-worker, Kerry, a U.S. citizen, and moved in with him. He was a gentle man, she thought, and he took care of the kids when she was working at night in her new housecleaning business. She was saving money for a house, and worked nearly 14 hours a day.

In the evenings, though, before Aime came home at 11 pm, Kerry was raping 9-year-old Sara, nearly every night. “Stay quiet”, Kerry told her. “Remember if you say anything, I’ll have to call immigration and report that your mom is here illegal.” Sara kept quiet for nearly a year, until she got a severe bladder infection and her mother took her to a doctor. The doctor discovered the sexual abuse.

Sara screamed that the doctor could not tell anyone because her mother would be deported. Aime told her daughter, “It’s okay, Chica. If I’m deported, I will come back. I’ll never leave you alone.”

Aime took her daughter to a shelter, at the clinic’s suggestion, and then went to get her son from school. From the shelter, she made the call to the police. Kerry was arrested that night. He was charged with three counts of first-degree child molestation, found guilty, and sentenced to twenty-four years in prison.

After she made the call, Aime waited for Immigration to pick her up, but that didn’t happen. Shelter staff told her that she should see an immigration attorney. She did, and learned that she could apply for a visa to allow her and her children to stay in the U.S. The U visa is available to the undocumented who can prove they are victims of serious crime, and have helped the police or prosecutor in the investigation or prosecution of the crime.

Today, she has the U Visa, as do her children. In a few years, they can apply for legal residence. They do have the house Aime was saving for. Sara is still in therapy.