Advocates urge immigrants to get affairs in order
By KATE BRUMBACK
September 16, 2008
Associated Press
CHAMBLEE, Ga. (AP) — Fear rippled through a group of Latino parents in suburban Atlanta when a friend was deported to Mexico and temporarily separated from her two young U.S.-born children. The kids weren't able to immediately join her because she and her husband hadn't gotten passports for them.
More than nine months later, anxiety about being taken from their children is still palpable among the members of the support group for Spanish-speaking parents — most of them undocumented — of children with Down syndrome.
To guard against such separations — a widely decried effect of recent large-scale workplace raids — social workers and activists are urging undocumented immigrants to put together emergency kits similar to the kind emergency officials encourage people to keep in case of fire or natural disaster.
"Information is power," said Sonia Parras Konrad, a lawyer in Iowa who helped undocumented immigrants in the wake of a raid at the nation's largest kosher meatpacking plant in May. "If they know their rights and are prepared, they can be more in control of their lives and what happens to them."
The immigrants' kits include passports for U.S.-born children, contact info for an attorney, information on their legal rights and other material that can keep families together or help relatives retrieve a last paycheck.
Susy Martorell, a social worker and president of the board of the Hispanic Health Coalition of Georgia who has run the Down syndrome group for about 10 years, said the group's members are constantly preoccupied with their legal status. That prompted her to depart from the group's main focus on health issues once or twice a year to bring in an immigration lawyer.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iFIWAbgk3TDSVy2NGdNjzxzEq-fwD937BL1G0
