ICE: 38 people arrested at construction site

By David A. Johnson, Lyxan Toledanes and Sarah Mueller contributed to this report
The ODESSA AMERICAN
May 17, 2011

An upscale apartment complex still under construction in northeast Odessa was the site of an immigration raid Tuesday morning that led to the arrest of 38 people.

The Tuscany at Faudree apartments, 4001 Faudree Road, was surrounded by Odessa police and Midland County sheriff's deputies, as well as at least one K-9 unit from the Andrews County sheriff's office.

The land lies just at the edge of Ector County, but still within Odessa city limits.

A helicopter circled the air above the apartment and nearby fields for more than half an hour, apparently looking for anyone who might have escaped the perimeter of what an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman from El Paso confirmed was a search warrant executed by their agents. Attempts to get a copy of the probable cause affidavit for the search warrant were unsuccessful Tuesday.

The spokeswoman said 37 men and 1 woman were arrested in the raid on immigration violations, which she said was an administrative charge, so their names wouldn’t be released, and they wouldn’t go through federal courts before being deported.

The spokeswoman said it was an ongoing investigation, therefore nothing more could be released.

A September 2008 ICE raid resulted in 15 men being taken into custody at the Dorado Ranch apartments located at 3601 Faudree Road, less than a mile south of Tuscany. Some workers taken into custody, while others were deported to their home countries. Part of Dorado Ranch had opened a month earlier, while part remained under construction at the time of the raid.

Marc McDougal, president of the McDougal Land Team based in Lubbock, said he has never had problems with illegal immigrants on past constructions sites.

Around 200 to 300 people work at the construction site every day and McDougal said most of those workers are employed by around 30 subcontractors. As of Tuesday afternoon, McDougal said none of the subcontractors have been fined.

“That’s one of the things we’ll be looking into as far as who was picked up and for what,” McDougal said. “We’ll address that with our subs (subcontractors) and we’ll replace those subs (who are fined).”

McDougal said there are no delays on construction on the 325-unit complex, which had an original building permit in July 2010 for $26.4 million in construction. Apartmentfinder.com gave the prices as ranging from $1,155 per month for 762-square-foot one bedroom/one bathrooms units to $1,925 for 1,330 square-foot three bedroom/two bathroom units.

Mike Tennison, who works for an electric contractor out of Lubbock, said work on the site starts at 7 a.m. each day. The 25-year-old said the first thing he saw recognizing it was a raid was the helicopter. Then he saw the officers on foot.

"They just came to us and told us to put our hands behind our head," Tennison said, although he said officers weren't threatening about it. Then Tennison said they patted him down and moved him to holding where everyone was having their immigration and warrant status checked. A little after 9 a.m., he was able to drive out in his work van.

At about 9:20 a.m., 60-year-old Baltazar Garcia was cleared to walk out, along with several other people, directed to wait at the Tractor Supply Store, 7800 E. Highway 191. The 60-year-old plaster worker said about six of the 30 people in his crew were taken, although he had guessed about 10 of the cleaning women had also been taken.

Garcia said he'd been at other immigration raids in the past, but they were different.

"They just took two of three guys at a time," Garcia said.

Garcia said that it used to be, everybody just went inside during raids.

"Now, they check every room," Garcia said.

Later, Garcia wondered if, when everyone was paid at the end of the week, Tuesday’s wages would be included.

http://www.oaoa.com/news/complex-65461-apartment-authorities.html

Texas Republicans Take Harder Line On Immigration

By Wade Goodwyn
NPR
March 29, 2011

In Texas, the Republican Party is changing its tactics on illegal immigration.

The relatively welcoming, tolerant attitude embraced by George W. Bush when he was governor is waning. It has been overtaken by a flood of Arizona-style get-tough measures, with nearly 100 immigration bills written or filed.

And while legal challenges will surely follow if many of those measures pass, the debate in Texas is clearly shifting.

The Bush Strategy

The state is now more than ever in the nation's conservative vanguard. Among its most conservative leaders is state Rep. Leo Berman from northeast Texas. Though Berman's district is far from the Mexico border, he's leading the charge on immigration. One of his bills would "stop giving automatic citizenship to children born in Texas."

There's also a voter ID bill; a bill that would require elementary school children to prove their citizenship upon enrolling — data that would then be turned over to state and federal authorities; and another Berman bill that would make English the official state language.

"That will shut off the state printing anything in any language but English," he says, "and that's going to save millions of dollars right there."

This is a significant change in strategy for the Texas GOP. In the mid '90s, Texas Republicans watched as their counterparts in California went on an anti-illegal immigration crusade and lost control of the state.

But in Texas, the economy was booming; the suburbs of Dallas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio were exploding; and thousands of illegal immigrants sat astride 2-by-4s, nail guns in hand, building those neighborhoods.

So, then-Gov. Bush and his man Karl Rove crafted a different strategy from their California colleagues: Hispanic-friendly.

The result? In 1998, George W. Bush crushed his Democratic opponent, getting nearly half the Hispanic vote — a triumph that placed him on the path to the presidency one year later.

The young governor learned his political style at his father's knee. Not only was George H.W. Bush a former president of the United States; he was a Texas oilman. And for generations, those independent oil producers, along with farmers and Texas ranchers, have employed inexpensive, hard-working Mexican laborers.

'Throwing Away Their Future'?

But in the halls of the Texas Capitol in 2011, Bush's approach is considered insufficiently conservative by most Republicans. The one powerful interest group that still thinks Bush had it right is the Texas Association of Business.

"If suddenly all the undocumented workers [in the state] were simply to go back to their home of origin, it would be disastrous for the Texas economy," says Bill Hammond, president of the group.

It is no exaggeration to say the membership of Hammond's group supplies the Texas Republican Party with a large measure of its fiscal lifeblood. On behalf of his clients, the thousands of big- and small-business owners in Texas, Hammond roams the state Capitol, trying to impart a bit of reality about the Lone Star State's economy.

"The impact on the Texas state economy of immigrant labor is about $17 billion a year," he says. "That's an enormous segment of our economy, and we simply would not be able to function without these people."

Until this year, Hammond and his Republican allies in the Texas Legislature have been able to kill most immigration bills in committee. Hammond would like to expand the immigration pipeline to allow more workers to legally enter the state. That proposal currently has zero chance.

"Today, 56 percent of Texans under the age of 25 are minorities. The growth in the population has been largely Hispanic over the last 10 years," he says. "I believe the Republican Party is throwing away their future."

A Plea To Tone Down The Rhetoric

Republican state Rep. Aaron Pena represents the border city of Hidalgo. "The tone of the debate is basically saying, 'We don't want you. ... This is a war over our culture. These people bring diseases into our country.' "

He says the six Hispanic Republicans in the Texas House have been trying to persuade some of their colleagues to tone down the anti-Hispanic rhetoric.

"Many times, you won't see our handiwork out in public," he says. "It's done behind the scenes."

Pena says there are plenty of Texas Republicans who quietly share his concerns about the tone of the debate and its long-term effect on Hispanic voters.

But now, there are plenty who don't, including Berman. "Most Hispanics right now do vote Democrat; there's no question about it," Berman says. "So what vote are we going after? We're going after a vote that doesn't vote Republican anyway."

It's too early to tell how many of the dozens of bills will become law. While the Texas House seems hot for immigration bills, the Senate seems less so. It's distracted by a $27 billion budget deficit that's threatening to gut the state.

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134956690/texas-republicans-take-harder-line-on-immigration

Woman Raised in Texas Faces Deportation After Traffic Infraction

By Emily Lopez
Fox News Latino
March 17, 2011

A young woman raised in North Texas now faces deportation to the same city in Mexico where an American immigration agent was murdered.

Twenty-year-old Olga Zanella was brought to the country illegally by her parents when she was a young child.

“I was a baby when I came over here. I was 6 years old,” she said.

She graduated from an Irving high school and has been taking classes to become a dental hygienist.

Zanella does not have a criminal record, but started having trouble with the Department of Homeland Security in February 2009 after being pulled over for a traffic violation.

“That’s when they asked me to get off and that’s when they handcuffed me,” Zanella said.

She was arrested for driving without a license. She admits she never tried to get a Texas driver’s license because she was undocumented.

Zanella spent three days in an Irving jail cell before police turned her over to immigration authorities. They released her on bond and she went back home.

“That was the first time I saw my dad cry,” she said.

Zanella admits that before her arrest neither she nor her parents tried to become legal residents of the United States. But for the past two years, she’s been trying to do what is needed to remain in the country.

She’s gone through a series of court hearings and legal problems. She has exhausted her appeals, and now she faces an uncertain future.

Zanella would be deported to San Luis Potosi, a Mexican city with a violent reputation following the death of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata at the hands of the drug cartel members. She will live with distant relatives she’s never met.

“Right now, if Olga is not helped the alternative is her parents will see her come back to the United States in a body bag because she is not going to make it in Mexico,” said Ralph Isenberg, an activist who is helping Zanella through the murky waters of immigration law.

Isenberg has appealed to the Department of Homeland Security in Washington D.C. and filed a complaint against the director of ICE in Dallas.

The Department of Homeland Security did not return phone calls.

The local ICE office confirmed that a federal immigration judge initially issued deportation orders for Zanella. A spokesman also said Dallas ICE field office director has the authority to stop the deportation process, but that is not appropriate in this case.

Zanella is waiting in fear of the day when she will have to leave her family.

“I’ve never been apart from them," she said. "We’ve always been a close family.”

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2011/03/17/woman-raised-texas-faces-deportation-traffic-infraction/

Proposed Texas law to immigrants: Keep out ... or clean my house

By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
Special to CNN
March 10, 2011

A lot of Americans don't like illegal immigration. But what they like even less is the idea of having to live without the labor provided by illegal immigrants.

There you have the great contradiction that lies at the heart of the U.S. immigration debate -- one that must be confronted and reconciled if it is ever going to be resolved.

Speaking of solutions, I heard a whopper a while back. I had just given a speech to a group of retirees in a well-to-do town near San Diego. After complaining that Mexican immigrants were hurting the quality of life and changing the culture, a woman suggested a high-speed rail that could, every morning, carry men and women from Tijuana, Mexico, 20 miles into San Diego County, where they would work as nannies, housekeepers and gardeners in wealthy neighborhoods before boarding the train at dusk to head back into Mexico.

It was a goofy and obscene idea. But I was glad to hear it because it illustrates clearly how some Americans see Mexico as a giant temp agency that exists to make their lives easier.

Now, a Texas state representative offers more clarity. Republican Debbie Riddle has proposed a bill that creates harsh punishments for those who hire illegal immigrants. House Bill 1202 calls for up to two years in prison and up to $10,000 in fines.

So far, so good. We'll never stop illegal immigration until we start tackling it at the root by going after U.S. employers.

But wait. There's a loophole in Riddle's bill: The person doing the hiring has to be acting "intentionally, knowingly or recklessly." That's too many adverbs for me. You'll note that hiring an illegal immigrant is already a federal offense under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, but one of the reasons that the law's employer sanctions are rarely enforced is because -- under the statute -- an employer has to act "knowingly," and that's hard for a prosecutor to prove.

So, for 25 years, employers caught red-handed hiring illegal immigrants have claimed not to know what they were doing.

And, in the provision of Riddle's proposal that is causing the most outrage, there is also an odd exemption: The person hiring an illegal immigrant is in the clear if he or she is doing so "for the purpose of obtaining labor or other work to be performed exclusively or primarily at a single-family residence."

Come again? So people who own businesses -- restaurants, homeowners, hotels, farms, construction firms, etc -- can't hire illegal immigrants, but homeowners, housewives or soccer dads can hire as many as they like.

Why the exemption? Riddle has said it's only fair since -- unlike businesses -- homeowners don't have access to E-Verify, the controversial U.S. government-run database that supposedly helps employers determine whether prospective employees are legally eligible to work in the United States.

But even some Texas Republicans insist there is another reason: reality. One of them told CNN that if the law passed without the exemption, "a large segment of the Texas population would end up in prison."

And why is that? It's because America is addicted to the same illegal immigrants about whom Americans love to complain.

It's as if the United States has two neon signs on the U.S.-Mexico border: "Keep Out" and "Help Wanted." Americans can't decide what they want to protect more -- the border or their standard of living. Usually, the latter wins out.

Our national schizophrenia must be awfully confusing to the immigrants themselves. At the border, they see walls, agents, floodlights and barbed wire. But an hour's drive north, as they wait in front of a neighborhood big-box store, they see a much different sight -- homeowners and soccer moms rushing to the curb to pick up two or three of them at a time to do the kind of household chores that our teenagers used to do before the precious little darlings discovered they were the center of the universe and too good to dirty their hands with such tasks.

That reminds me. Let's have a word about illegal immigrant labor. The myth persists that the only reason Americans hire illegal immigrants is because the undocumented will work for lower wages than American workers demand to do the same jobs. It's a popular narrative because it makes U.S. natives seem almost noble, as if they won't let themselves be exploited.

But, in truth, it's only half the reason that illegal immigrants are in such great demand in the United States. There is also the little-discussed fact that they're dependable and work hard, qualities that many Americans have unfortunately long since abandoned.

Talk to the friend of mine in Austin, Texas, who needed to hire a few guys to build a fence. He called three or four handymen who either never got back to him or promised to show up but didn't. And then he settled on immigrant labor. Don't ask him if the workers were undocumented. I don't think he knows because, like millions of Americans, he doesn't want to know.

Now, a bill in the Texas Legislature makes it plain that lawmakers don't want to know either.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Ruben Navarrette Jr.

http://articles.cnn.com/2011-03-10/opinion/navarrette.texas.immigration_1_illegal-immigrants-immigration-debate-immigration-reform?_s=PM:OPINION

ICE strikes with raids

By LAURA B. MARTINEZ and JACQUELINE ARMENDARIZ
The Brownsville Herald
March 2, 2011

An early morning raid led to the arrest Wednesday of several Brownsville residents accused of drug trafficking and money laundering.

Arturo Gomez, 31, Magda Zendejas, 28, Reyna Ceballos, 21, Julio Gonzalez, 45, David Alcala, 30, Vanessa Weaver, 28, and Sonia Garcia-Medina, 26, were arrested in a federal investigation dubbed “Operation Stained Glass,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office reported.

During Wednesday’s arrest, federal authorities seized $524,000 in cash and 2 kilograms or 5 pounds of cocaine at a residence located at the 500 block of Salvatierra in the vicinity of the Brownsville Country Club.

The group will appear this morning before U.S. Magistrate Felix Recio on the charges. The United States will request that they remain held without bail pending further investigation, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reported.

The residents are named in a four-count federal indictment that was unsealed Wednesday. It charges Gomez, Zendejas, Ceballos, Gonzalez and Alcala with conspiring over a two-year period to possess and distribute more than 5 kilograms or more than 10 pounds of cocaine.

Gomez is also charged with a count of money laundering and another count of attempting to smuggle $47,205 in cash. It alleges Gomez was trying to transfer the money to Mexico.

According the indictment, the government intends to seek a money judgment against Gomez for $1 million, which is the amount of money that was allegedly laundered.

Weaver is also charged with a count of attempting to smuggle $16,530 in cash possibly to Mexico as well.

Garcia-Medina is charged with a separate criminal complaint with being illegally in the United States after being deported.

Nina Pruneda, spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, declined to say whether Wednesday’s arrest was related to the ongoing investigation of the murder of ICE Special Agent Jaime Jorge Zapata, referring comments to ICE Director John Morton.

Zapata, 32, a native of Brownsville who worked for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was killed last month in Mexico in an attack by members of the Zetas criminal organization while traveling along Highway 57 in the San Luis Potosí state, according to U.S. officials. A fellow agent, Victor Avila, was wounded in the attack.

Pruneda said the FBI is the lead agency in the Zapata killing and that ICE, as Morton said, would continue to work with its law enforcement partners in Mexico for a quick resolution of the investigation.

“I can’t speak to what’s going on in the South Texas area as being anything connected to that," she said of the Zapata investigation and Wednesday’s arrests. "I think that would be irresponsible of me to comment on something like that.”

Wednesday’s arrests occurred in at least six different locations in the Brownsville area both within and outside the city limits.

The Brownsville Police Department assisted, she said, along with other law enforcement agencies. Police spokesman Eddie Garcia said K-9 units from the department were present and that he had no other details to give.

"It started off as a federal search warrant based on an ongoing investigation that we have that is connected to money laundering and narcotics smuggling," Pruneda said, noting that the investigations supported the agency’s public safety mission.

The arrests were conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement-Homeland Security Investigations (ICE-HSI), the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigations (IRS-CI), the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Marshals Service.

© Copyright 2011 Freedom Communications. All Rights Reserved.

Local immigration activists plan march on City Hall

By KENS 5
February 22, 2011

SAN ANTONIO -- Ex-employees of the Lone Star Bakery along with community activists are planning to march on City Hall.

The business laid off 300 of workers suspected of being in the country illegally.

In response, the Cesar Chavez Legacy and Educational Foundation says it plans to hold a demonstration, calling on President Obama to stop deportations of illegal immigrants until reform is passed.

Organizers say more than 1,200 working families are deported every day.

http://www.kens5.com/news/Local-immigration-activists-plan-march-on-City-Hall-116703399.html

Perry Puts Immigration Atop Session’s Agenda

By ROSS RAMSEY
The New York Times
January 15, 2011

Ross Ramsey, the managing editor of The Texas Tribune, writes a regular column.

Three reasons Gov. Rick Perry declared sanctuary cities an “emergency item” for the Texas Legislature: A nativist electorate, a reluctance to mimic Arizona on immigration law and the closing commercial in his campaign for re-election last year.

Here’s one more: The first 60 days of a legislative session offer the governor a moment of control over the agenda, and he has decided to point the spotlight, for now, on immigration and property rights, the second issue he declared to be an emergency. He hasn’t done it yet, but passing voter photo ID is a good bet for the next act in the center ring.

The governor is, in effect, alone on the stage. Lawmakers can’t deliberate on bills for the first 60 days of the 140-day session unless he says so, by declaring emergencies. They don’t have to be emergencies, necessarily, but the process allows lawmakers to handle pressing business, while letting the governor drive the agenda during the session’s first weeks. For Mr. Perry, it’s a chance to deal with immigration matters before the budget, redistricting and other issues claim the limelight.

Mr. Perry’s focus on sanctuary cities — those that do not allow their police officers to enforce federal immigration laws — could offer him safe passage through the contentious immigration debate. Arizona wants its police to question the immigration status of anyone they suspect is in the country illegally. Mr. Perry wouldn’t require police to ask, but would allow it.

It’s a fine distinction for a Republican Party trying to win favor with Hispanics while quelling a rebellion from nativist conservatives. Mr. Perry wants to answer the anger of the second group without stoking it in the first.

In the governor’s race, he and Bill White battled over whether Houston was a sanctuary city while Mr. White was mayor. Houston never had an official edict from its City Council or mayor, but the police followed a general order against asking about the citizenship of people who hadn’t been arrested (they did run immigration checks after arrests).

Some, including many police chiefs, argue that asking for papers all the time gets in the way of regular police work and makes it harder for officers to win the trust of citizens whose help is needed to fight crime. Mr. Perry hit that note in a statement last April, rejecting the Arizona standard because “some aspects of the law turn law enforcement officers into immigration officials by requiring them to determine immigration status during any lawful contact with a suspected alien, taking them away from their existing law enforcement duties, which are critical to keeping citizens safe.” The Texas Department of Public Safety’s policy under Mr. Perry is remarkably similar to Houston’s and other big cities in the state.

The argument stopped there, for a while. Then Mr. Perry closed his campaign with a television ad featuring Sgt. Joslyn Johnson, a Houston police officer whose husband, Rodney, also a police officer, was killed by an illegal immigrant during a traffic stop. This being a political ad, it blamed Mr. White’s policies as mayor for that death.

While Mr. Perry doesn’t want to copy Arizona’s immigration law, he said during the campaign that he understood the sentiment that led to it, and that Texas should step in and protect its borders if the federal government won’t. So the policy and the politics don’t exactly match up. He has got to do something — he campaigned on it — but doesn’t want to do what Arizona did.

If he doesn’t jump in, the Legislature surely will. By the end of the week, lawmakers had already filed 30 bills with the word “immigration” in them, including legislation that would require police officers to inquire into the immigration status of people they’ve arrested. That’s before you get to the goodies like anchor babies, state services for non-citizens, immigration records of public school students and sanctuary cities; this, along with the budget and redistricting, is front and center this session.

Mr. Perry and his aides can’t or won’t name any sanctuary cities, but the governor said he was going to make it illegal to be one. He said last week that there were cities that had “made decisions to be havens for those who are either in conflict with federal immigration laws, or state laws, and we’re going to prohibit that.

“We’ll have a good and open discussion about what we’re going to prohibit,” he said, “and if the shoe is fitting you, then you might not want to be wearing it.”

It’s a potentially treacherous issue, and for now, that’s as specific as he’s going to get.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/us/16ttramsey.html

Texas bar owners sentenced for hiring illegal alien barmaids/prostitutes

By David Gibson
The Examiner
January 11th, 2011

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Randy Crane sentenced Tereso Olivo, 54, to 15 months in federal prison without parole and two years of supervised release on human smuggling charges.

In Spanish, Nancy Olivo, 43, then implored the judge: “I ask, your honor, to have leniency on me for the sake of my children. I know I was wrong.”

She was sentenced to two years of probation with six months of house arrest. An illegal alien herself, Olivo is scheduled for deportation proceedings after she serves her sentence.

Three months ago, the couple pleaded guilty to harboring illegal aliens who worked as barmaids and prostitutes at their bar (El Centenario) just outside Mission, Texas.

Last April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Texas Alcohol Beverage Commission agents raided the bar, after receiving a tip that the couple was smuggling women and forcing them into prostitution.

According to investigators, at least eight illegal aliens worked at the bar, with three of them living at an apartment owned by the Olivos.

All of the illegal alien barmaids/prostitutes have been deported back to Mexico.

According to Jerry Robinette, the head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement in South Texas, human trafficking for the purpose of prostitution is on the rise in the region.

In September, Beleal Garcia Gonzalez was found guilty on three counts of sex trafficking and conspiracy and six counts of harboring illegal aliens.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Gonzalez lured three Honduran minors here to work in his Mission bar, promising them waitress jobs at a salary of $700 a week.

However, upon arrival, the girls-- ages 14, 15, and 17--were forced to sit in the bar with older men, and have sex with them. Gonzalez then informed them that they would only be paid $120 a week for their services, and that each of them owed him $4,500 in smuggling fees.

The girls were forced to split their time between the Bar El Paraiso and a nearby stash house.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents found the teenagers walking home from the bar one morning in January 2010, wearing skimpy clothing, and took them into custody.

Thanks to an unprotected border, we now have prostitution rings engaging in kidnapping and human trafficking operating throughout the in U.S.

http://www.examiner.com/immigration-reform-in-national/texas-bar-owners-sentenced-for-hiring-illegal-alien-barmaids-prostitutes#ixzz1AkgMZQvz

Read more about this growing problem: http://www.examiner.com/immigration-reform-in-national/illegal-alien-sex-slavery-operation-discovered-south-carolina

College student's hopes ride on DREAM Act; He's facing deportation as an illegal immigrant

By SUSAN CARROLL
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Dec. 13, 2010

NACOGDOCHES — Mario Perez, a mathematics and statistics major at Stephen F. Austin State University, sent out a mass text message to all of his fraternity brothers after being stopped by a police officer for rolling through a stop sign near campus.

"Hey Bruhs," the 22-year-old typed with his thumbs as the red-and-and blue lights of a police car whirled behind him on a spring night. "I just got pulled over."

If Perez were any other member of Alpha Phi Alpha, a predominantly African-American fraternity with the highest cumulative GPA on campus, the traffic stop and text message wouldn't have been cause for alarm.

But Perez's fraternity brothers knew his secret, the one he hadn't even shared with his girlfriend of four years, a nursing student at SFA whom he'd proposed to on bended knee. Perez, a gregarious student leader and talented tuba player who scored 1640 on his SATs, is an illegal immigrant.

After the officer told Perez he had two unpaid traffic tickets and asked him to step out of the car that night on April 12, his world started to collapse. Perez was transferred from the local jail to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Houston and put into deportation proceedings.

Frat brothers helping

Laterrious Starks, then the fraternity president, made phone call after phone call trying to find out what happened to Perez, and how they could help stop his deportation. They used their alumni network to find a Houston immigration attorney to take Perez's case pro bono, going en masse to the law offices of attorney Jacob Monty to ask him to take the case. Monty said he was moved by their devotion.

"I've never seen friends act like brothers like that before," Monty said.

They paid Perez's $1,500 immigration bond, and wrote and called the mayor, state lawmakers and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. This spring, Starks, Perez and his girlfriend attended a rally for the DREAM Act, a bill that would grant legal status to illegal immigrants like Perez who came to the U.S. as children or teenagers and stayed in school and out of trouble. The legislation recently passed the House, but it is unclear if sponsors have enough votes to get it through the Senate.

Perez, whose parents brought him to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 5 years old, graduated from Thurgood Marshall High School in Missouri City. When applying for colleges he learned he had no Social Security number and was in the country illegally.

"A lot of people really don't understand what undocumented students go through, and what they might go through if they were deported," Starks said. "You're changing their lives. They're already socialized into American culture. At least for students who went to high school here, you could at least give these individuals a chance to make it in our society."

But critics say the legislation is a form of amnesty because it offers legal status to illegal immigrants. U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith from Texas has called it a "nightmare for the American people."

High-level support

With prospects for the legislation unsure, Monty said he is hoping federal prosecutors will exercise discretion and allow Perez to stay in the U.S. He has letters of support for his upcoming court hearing from the president of the university, the dean of student affairs, teachers, advisors and mentors.

"From what I have seen he's a very lovable person," wrote Dr. Baker Patillo, the university president. "He is in good academic standing and has never been in trouble with the university."

Marcell Owens, a 23-year-old graduate student in communications and fellow fraternity member, said he was shocked to learn Perez was in the country illegally when he joined the fraternity, mainly because Perez didn't fit with the stereotypical image of an illegal immigrant portrayed by the media.

"It didn't change my opinion of him. I know the situation was beyond his control. The foundation of our fraternity is brotherhood. I have a twin brother, and there is nothing I would do for my brother that I wouldn't do for Mario. I wouldn't judge him or belittle him in any form."

Friends and family members said Perez, in his third year at the university, seems to be in denial about his situation and the possibility he could be ordered to leave the country in March.

"I try to avoid thinking about it, because every time I do it brings me down. I just try to focus on my schoolwork."

Starks said he struggles with the idea that Perez could be deported. "We probably would never see him again," he said. "It would be like losing a brother."

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/immigration/7336418.html

Children of the Exodus: What becomes of kids who are deported without their families?

By Melissa del Bosque
Texas Observer
Thursday, November 04, 2010

On the Hildago-Reynosa International Bridge, there is a small white room tucked inside the Mexican immigration office where children, apprehended and then released by the U.S. Border Patrol, file in day after day and wait for a family member to claim them.

The office is run by Mexico’s social services agency called the Desarrollo Integral de la Familia, or DIF. It receives dozens of repatriated children every week ranging from infants a few days old to 18-year-olds. As the children wait, they peer out, unseen, through a mirrored, plate-glass window at passing motorists. The children arrive with T-shirts covered in mud and the cuffs of their torn jeans still damp from the Rio Grande. Some have cuts and scrapes from running through thorny mesquite groves and cacti, trying to evade U.S. border agents. Others have angry red wounds from snakebites or puncture marks from an IV drip after being rescued from heat exhaustion in the desert. Then there are the marks you can’t see: having been kidnapped or raped by traffickers, or having witnessed the death of a family member or friend during their journeys.

The children clutch their belongings in small, clear plastic bags with Department of Homeland Security tags attached. They carry remarkably little for such a perilous journey. Inside the plastic bags there might be a cell phone, shoe laces, (removed for their protection while in U.S. custody), and maybe a rosary, or some wadded-up American cash, or a few pesos. They appear downtrodden, exhausted yet resolute: With few exceptions they’ll cross again because their parents or loved ones are en el otro lado and on the other side of the Rio Grande there is hope. Hope to study, to work, or to just hug their mothers or fathers again.

The teenagers act tough and stare at the wall or the floor while they wait to be claimed. Sometimes they crack jokes so the younger kids won’t cry. The little kids can’t hide their grief. They cry for their parents or their abuelos, which makes it harder for the older kids. A 29-year-old woman with the unlikely name of Agatha Christie Cano (her father is a mystery buff) is the sole employee at the DIF office on the bridge. She sits behind a small wooden desk, a pink daisy pen with a smiley face in a pencil holder by her side. Each morning she fans out on her desk the questionnaires that she’ll fill out during her interviews with the children. Cano is cheerful, but then she has only been working at the DIF for six weeks. As soon as she finishes nursing school next year, she says, she plans to apply for work in the United States.

Cano must piece together a child’s history with information from the Mexican Consulate in McAllen. The consulate conducts an initial interview to make sure the children’s rights have not been violated before U.S. Border agents send them back to Mexico. Cano helps figure out who will claim the children once they’ve been returned, which is more difficult than it might seem. Every child’s family is scarred by death, divorce or migration to the United States. They also share poverty and few opportunities for work or education.

Two brothers from Zacatecas, Armando, 17, and José, 13, arrive on a Thursday afternoon. Border Patrol apprehended them Wednesday morning near Roma, Texas, after the brothers walked several hours in 103-degree heat. Cano listens intently as Armando, the eldest, tells their story, his face impassive as his younger brother starts to cry. After seven hours of walking, their mother had collapsed. The coyote and the rest of the group kept walking. Armando went for help while José stayed behind with their mother. He walked to a highway and flagged down a truck driver who called Border Patrol. By the time he returned with the agents, their mother was dead, and his brother was nearly unconscious. The agents inserted an IV and pumped fluids into his arm, which saved his life. José sobs quietly as his brother speaks. Cano offers him a tissue. “We never wanted to go,” Armando tells her. “We were doing fine where we were.” Cano nods. His mother had left them with their grandmother and crossed illegally several years ago, he tells her. She lived in Chicago, remarried, and had a 3-year-old son in the United States. After their grandmother died, problems started among the family members in Zacatecas.

“My mother wanted us all to be together again,” Armando says. “She said we could live together
in Chicago.”

“Do you have anyone, an uncle or an aunt who can come for you?” Cano asks. “Does your father know you’re here?”

“We haven’t seen him in years,” Armando says, shaking his head.

Cano fills out the questionnaire. The boys watch blankly. “Isn’t there anyone who can come for you?” she presses Armando. The room is quiet except for the sound of José crying.

After a few hours of waiting for a relative, José, Armando and four other teenage boys are herded into a van and driven to a larger DIF shelter for repatriated children in downtown Reynosa. A lone policeman guards the entrance. The shelter is in a tough, rundown neighborhood near the railroad tracks. Surrounded by a stucco wall, it has tall iron gates and iron bars over the windows.

There is a funereal pall over the city, worsened by the searing August heat and the ongoing drug war. Everyone seems wary, hunkered down. No one goes out after dark. A week earlier, thugs threw a grenade at the city hall. The mayor was rumored to be living with his family in McAllen for his own protection. A DIF employee mentions that his office downtown was strafed with bullets two weeks earlier. He and the other employees hid under their desks until the gun battle was over.

Even with the military Humvees circling the city’s plaza, the children keep coming. The number of unaccompanied children passing through here remains constant despite the spiraling violence. As of mid-August, 800 children had come through the shelter since January, according to Eleuterio Valdez, the shelter’s director. In 2008, there were 1,550 children, and in 2009, Valdez housed 1,670 kids.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and Valdez is busy. He fans himself with a notebook; there’s no AC at the shelter. A hysterical woman is on the phone from Florida. She paid a man in Reynosa to smuggle her 3-year-old-son to Florida. She hasn’t heard from the smuggler in a week. Valdez assures her he’ll call if the toddler is brought in. As he hangs up the phone, the six boys file in, sent from Cano’s small DIF office on the bridge. Armando and José, who lost their mother the previous afternoon, look as if they’re still in shock. Valdez tells me the shelter provides psychological counseling if it’s needed. In the lobby, there is a door marked “psychologist,” but I never see anyone there during the course of a week.

The other boys are sullen. Valdez and the policeman pat them down for weapons, and Valdez takes their belts and meager belongings, which they still carry in the plastic Homeland Security bags. He places their things in yellow manila envelopes. “This is for your safety,” he says. “You’ll get your things back when your relatives come.” The boys watch, downcast, as he places their belongings in a file cabinet, then locks it.

At least 80 percent of the children who pass through here are boys. They are housed in a separate dorm on the other side of the walled compound from the girls. Valdez keeps the boys locked inside when they’re not in the cafeteria. “The boys are a lot more adventurous,” he says.

Inside the dorm room crammed with bunk beds, a lanky teenager named Pedro, 16, sits on the couch watching a soccer match on television. His mother and four siblings live 35 miles away in Harlingen, Texas. From the Mexican side of the river, he can see the traffic signs pointing the way home. He’s been trying to get there for six months.

This is his second time at the DIF shelter, he says. Last night a Border Patrol helicopter spotted him and seven others on the U.S. side of the river. They were chased through the brush. An agent tackled Pedro. He spent the night in a freezing holding cell. Today he’s back in Reynosa. When he was 5 years old, his mother smuggled him across the river. He attended elementary and middle schools in Harlingen. Then his grandmother became ill in Michoacán. His mother decided Pedro, the eldest at 13, should return to Mexico to help care for his grandmother, which he did until she passed away. Now he’s stuck in Reynosa trying to get back to his family. He nearly drowned once already, he says, floating on an inner tube across the swollen river choked with branches and refuse from upstream. The Rio Grande is at its highest level in 30 years. The McAllen newspaper is full of reports of migrants’ bodies being fished out of the river by Border Patrol agents on the U.S. side of the garbage-strewn riverbank.

Pedro is burning through his family’s savings, having already paid smugglers hundreds of dollars. It’s impossible to cross without paying the Gulf cartel, which keeps tight control over the Mexican side of the river. Just to float an inner tube to McAllen costs $400. “My stepfather gives me the money,” Pedro says. His mother is remarried to a U.S. citizen. Every time Pedro’s apprehended, his stepfather drives to Reynosa and bails him out. Then he gives Pedro more money to pay another smuggler. Pedro wonders how much longer his stepfather will keep coming. “I want to go back to school in Harlingen,” he says. “There isn’t anything left for me in Michoacán.”

His mother can’t become legal in the United States. In 1996, Congress stiffened immigration laws so that anyone who entered illegally and married a U.S. citizen could no longer pay a fine to become legal. Instead, his mother would have to return to Mexico, wait years then reapply to enter. These days, the U.S. government isn’t inclined to allow anyone to re-enter once they’ve admitted to entering illegally. It’s a Catch-22.

Valdez, like every DIF official I speak to, assures me that before a child is released to anyone, DIF makes sure they are related. A battery of documentation is required, including birth certificates and a photo ID from the relative with a surname matching the child’s. They say they always reunite the children with their families and send them home. But what happens if home is on the other side of the Rio Grande? Or if there is no home?

I arrange an interview with the head of the DIF in Matamoros, Marisa Castañeda de Silva, the mayor’s wife. (Every mayor’s wife is obliged to run the city’s DIF office, while the governor’s wife oversees DIF for the entire state.) After 20 minutes of waiting in the lobby, I am ushered into a conference room with soft light, scented candles and plates of cookies. Castañeda plies me with cookies and thanks me for coming. In 2008, a Mexican congressional committee reported 90,000 children had been sent back by U.S. authorities to border cities like hers. At least 13,500 were never claimed. I ask Castañeda whether children are being abandoned in her city and what happens to them after they leave the DIF? She begins reading from scripted answers on index cards handed to her by a public relations employee. “The shelter is always ready. We provide blankets and clothes for the children,” she smiles. “We work closely with the church to raise money for food and clothes for the shelter.” I wait politely, and then ask again. The public relations employee scribbles furiously on an index card, then hands it to her. “We work to reunite children with their parents,” she says, then refers me to Lilia Orizaga, who runs the shelter. Her assistant sends me on my way with a bag of cookies.

Matamoros receives about half the children that Reynosa does at its shelter—324 children from January to mid-August of this year, says Orizaga. A city of 450,000, Matamoros is smaller than Reynosa and not as desirable a place to cross. In Reynosa, it’s a straight shot to San Antonio and Interstate 35, then on to any destination in the United States. Pass through Matamoros to Brownsville, and just north of the city you reach vast and barren ranchland, which is probably why Border Patrol has sent 14-year-old Susana here. This is her fifth failed attempt to reach the United States in a month. Susana arrived at the Matamoros shelter an hour ago. She clutches a small, black duffel bag as if she might be leaving at any moment. She was in the Reynosa DIF already, Orizaga says, but a cousin bailed her out. Susana says they crossed that night in an inflatable boat. The boat became trapped among broken tree limbs and debris. They were lost for five hours, until Border Patrol agents fished them out.

Her goal is to make it to Kansas, where her father works. “I haven’t seen him in five years,” she says. It costs $2,500 to get to there. “My father pays half in Reynosa and the other half when I arrive in McAllen,” she says. She’s been caught three times by Border Patrol: once on a bus in Houston, the second time at the San Antonio bus station, the third time on the river. She just spent two days in a Border Patrol holding cell, where she says she was scared at first because she was alone, “but then the cell filled with at least 10 other children, and we were all together.” She doesn’t know what happened to her cousin, she says. “The smugglers separated us before we crossed.” Susana says she’s ready to go home. “I don’t want to stay here. I’m tired of fighting,” she says.

Orizaga says the Reynosa shelter should never have released Susana to her cousin. “This time it will have to be a parent,” she says. But Susana is doubtful that either parent will come to Matamoros. “I don’t believe my father will come for me, and the truth is, I don’t think my mother will, either, because she has to take care of my younger brothers and sisters,” she says.

Susana is one of three kids who say they’ll go home once they leave the shelter. The other two are Armando and José, who never wanted to cross in the first place. After two days, an uncle materializes at the Reynosa shelter to drive the boys back to Zacatecas. They are the exceptions. Dozens of other kids I interview over two weeks in Matamoros and Reynosa say they’ll cross again as soon as they have the money.

They cycle through the shelters again and again. On the Reynosa bridge, Cano says in the six weeks she’s worked for the DIF, she’s seen some kids multiple times already. “The children from Reynosa and the other border cities will come through five, seven, even 11 times,” she says. Cano refers kids who pass though repeatedly to another government program downtown that offers computer courses and vocational training. The hope is that the children will go back to school or find work instead of crossing the river. “But I’m not sure they actually go,” she says.

The only lucrative employment in Reynosa these days seems to be smuggling humans or contraband. There are people in Reynosa poised to help anyone who wants to cross the Rio Grande, providing they pay a price. There are pateros (human smugglers) at the plaza, the bus station or just milling around downtown, a man who works with the migrant community says. He asks to remain anonymous because he fears retribution from the cartel. “Back in the ’90s, being a patero was a trade, and there were rules,” he says. “You paid your money, and they delivered you to the other side.” Now cartel thugs and organized crime dominate the business. What can’t be made in contraband is recouped smuggling migrants. If the children are lucky, they’ll find a smuggler who plays by the old rules, and they’ll make it safely to their destination. With the Gulf cartel in charge of the river and the security gauntlet on the U.S. side, the chances of crossing safely grow increasingly slim.

Sometimes the kids are paid by smugglers to be caminantes (walkers) accompanying migrants through the remote South Texas ranches. They get from $10 to $20 a head for every migrant they guide through the rough terrain, he says. Others are paid or intimidated by the cartels to smuggle drug loads in backpacks. “These children are like uncut diamonds. Criminals can mold them any way they want,” the man says. “With all of the security problems we have now, a lot of children are being taken for many different things, and it’s a very, very big problem.” Minors are seldom charged with crimes in the United States. Instead, Border Patrol returns them to Mexico, where they are placed in a DIF shelter.

“The children are dumped back in Reynosa like packages,” says Rebeca Rodriguez, director of Reynosa’s nonprofit center for human rights, Centro Estudios Fronterizos y Derechos Humanos. Rodriguez used to work for the DIF in the neighboring city of Rio Bravo in the mid-’90s. A social worker, she left the agency after a year and says the experience left her frustrated. “I’m sure DIF told you that a relative with an ID and documents must come to pick the child up, but the documents can be forged. And they don’t monitor the children after they’ve gone. They just give them back and say ‘bye bye,’ ” she says. “With all of the technology we have, they should be able to monitor them for at least three months.”

I try to investigate what happens to the kids once they leave the shelter, but I underestimate the fear and paranoia fueled by drug violence in Reynosa. Several journalists have been kidnapped or killed, so there’s no media coverage about the cartels or organized crime. There’s no official information from the city government, either. The city is rife with rumors—some true, some not. Among other things, I hear that the Gulf cartel is the de facto authority in the city. I hear that migrants, including children, are being kidnapped at the bus station and that the local police are involved. The police also keep an eye on the river for the cartel. No city official will talk about the impact of organized crime on the children. Every time I ask about los malos (the bad people), as people refer to them here, the officials change the subject. When I discreetly ask some of the children whether they’re afraid or have had encounters with los malos, they look at me blankly or stare at the floor. On the Reynosa bridge, a lanky 15-year-old boy insists I leave the office while he speaks to Cano alone. “It’s something very serious,” he says. Later, she tells me the boy begged her not to contact his mother because he’s afraid she’ll be kidnapped at the bus station.

After I pester a DIF official in Reynosa for days, he finally opens up. He says he’ll talk anonymously about organized crime. He furtively glances both ways down the hallway in front of his office, then gestures for me to come inside. He closes and locks both doors. “Look, I know what’s happening,” he says, mopping his brow with a tissue, “because we talk to the children.” The man confirms that children are kidnapped at the bus station and that police are involved. “These are very well-known secrets,” he says. “But we cannot talk about it openly because we live here, and it’s very, very delicate. There are people in uniform and people without uniforms watching all the time.” He means that if you say something publicly that might enrage organized crime, a group of armed men might show up at your door one morning, maybe with a police escort, march you to their SUV at gunpoint, and your family will never see you again. Someday, he tells me, when things get better, he’ll write a book about it.

Many kidnapped children don’t fall under the jurisdiction of the DIF because they’re not Mexican, the official says. They come from Central and South America and are waiting to “jump to the other side,” as he puts it. From January to August of this year, Mexican immigration had deported 44,918 children to Central and South America. The migrant advocate in Reynosa tells me the kidnappings and extortions have been plaguing the city at least since 2004. “In the last three years, things have gotten really horrible,” he says. “The migrants are terrified. They don’t want to denounce the crimes anymore. They just want to go home.” There are safe houses all over the city, he says, where migrants are being held for ransom. It’s the worst for migrants with relatives in the United States because they are perceived to have more money.

Two weeks later, the massacre of 72 migrants at a ranch near Matamoros makes international headlines. It’s discovered that they were Central and South American migrants too poor to pay the Zeta cartel’s ransom. The only confirmed survivor is an 18-year-old boy from Ecuador.

The kids are too frightened to talk about their experiences, but at a shelter run by Catholic nuns, I speak with a slight, 27-year-old Guatemalan man with the face of a teenager. Speaking in a whisper, he says he asked a man on the street for directions to a money-changing house. Instead, the man tied his hands with rope, took his shoes, and threw him into a dark room with several other bound men. The kidnappers had taken $250 from him and were trying to extort his poverty-stricken family for more. He’s lucky, he says, because he escaped. He takes his baseball cap off, and I notice a fresh scar across his eyebrow. He wants to be deported to Guatemala, but he’s terrified to leave the shelter. The kidnappers are outside, he says, waiting. The nuns can do nothing to prevent it.

As I leave the shelter, I see a group of men in baseball caps and jeans standing across the street. Three men propped against the wall of the shelter smoke a joint. Their eyes are red. They stare emptily back at me. I look up, and a line of men sits watching from a building ledge overlooking the shelter. Dressed in black T-shirts, they remind me of vultures.

Back at Agatha Christie cano’s office on the Reynosa bridge, three teenage boys file into the small office and wait. Chances are, the motorists chatting on their cell phones or listening to their radios on the bridge will never notice what goes on below them. On the Rio Grande, people are also on the move, hundreds of them, day after day, covered in the mud and muck of the river. A mud-encrusted, wide-eyed teen is marched past me by two uniformed immigration officers. He’s Central American, Cano says. Since he’s not Mexican, he’s out of her jurisdiction. The immigration officials won’t do interviews. The topic of immigration has become too politically sensitive, one of them says. The boy is whisked away.

If government leaders could rise above the divisive politics, they could stop this humanitarian crisis. Mexico and the United States have binational accords and a repatriation program to protect migrant children, yet neither country ensures they’re safely returned home. The U.S. Border Patrol and the DIF could set up a database to monitor children at risk to prevent them from ending up on the streets. The U.S. Congress could pass comprehensive immigration reform that includes a family reunification process to prevent children from being dumped in Mexican shelters. The Border Patrol already has a congressional mandate to screen for vulnerable kids and refer them to U.S. agencies that can help, yet advocates say it’s not being done. One thing is for certain: Until politicians on both sides of the river eradicate the poverty that uproots these families, children won’t stop coming. Even if the United States puts soldiers on the border and spends billions on fences and high-tech equipment, they’re not going to stop the exodus.

At least not until there’s something to hope for at home. A skinny 15-year-old from the mountains of Veracruz slumps in an office chair in front of Cano’s desk. She picks up a pen and begins filling out the paperwork. He has nothing but a Catholic rosary. The cuffs of his jeans are tattered and still damp from the river. “Aren’t you afraid of being killed?” Cano asks the boy. “Wouldn’t it be better to go back home?” He shakes his head, “No.” His father is dead, he says. His mother and three younger brothers and sisters are at home waiting for him to send money if he makes it. “Where I come from,” he says, “we’re not afraid to die.”

Support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

Deportation Program Grows; Texas Fully Adopts Much-Debated Federal Plan Aimed at All Counties by 2013

By ANA CAMPOY
The Wall Street Journal
October 18, 2010

AUSTIN, Texas—A federal program that scans local jails for illegal immigrants is being expanded across the state, the latest front in the nation's battle over immigration policy.

In the past two weeks, Texas became the first border state to fully deploy the Department of Homeland Security program, which is scheduled to be rolled out to all U.S. counties by 2013. The program automatically routes prisoners' fingerprints to the department, which tries to determine whether they are allowed to be in the U.S.

Known as Secure Communities, the program is designed to intercept and remove illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes such as homicide, rape and kidnapping, immigration officials say.

But immigrant groups and lawyers argue it is also singling out immigrants with no serious criminal record, clogging up the courts. Political analysts say Secure Communities and related programs are alienating Democratic-leaning Hispanic voters from the Obama administration.

"Why are we wasting funds to deport people who aren't even supposed to be targets of the program?" said Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, which provides legal assistance to low-income people.

Proponents of stricter immigration controls contend Secure Communities is a step in the right direction to protect the nation from dangerous illegal immigrants.

"Every day, we have murders and serious crimes committed against citizens and legal immigrants," said Janice Kephart, national-security policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors curbing all immigration to the U.S. "It is a public-safety issue."

The expanded program comes at a time when a national debate is raging over Arizona's immigration law, which would require local police to check the immigration status of people stopped for other possible violations.

The federal government has successfully blocked that law in court so far, arguing it shifts responsibility for immigration enforcement from federal to local officials.

Unlike the Arizona law, Secure Communities doesn't require local law enforcement to perform any additional tasks. Using fingerprints the police already have collected for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it merges those records with Homeland Security's database, which contains all legal and some illegal entrants into the U.S. That assists the department in identifying criminal suspects in violation of immigration laws. If the fingerprints don't match any record, Homeland Security can deploy immigration officers to the jail to investigate further.

Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano touted the success of the program, saying Secure Communities contributed to a 70% increase since 2008 in deportations of criminal suspects who were illegal immigrants.

But many in the Hispanic community are frustrated over Secure Communities and related Obama administration programs, which they see as a step-up in deportations without addressing other facets of the immigration debate, such as whether there will be a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

"Not only are they not helping to solve the issue, but they are criminalizing more immigrants," said union organizer Ben Monterroso of Secure Communities.

As head of a multistate campaign to boost Latino turnout, he is trying to persuade Latinos to put their frustration aside and go to the polls.

A recent poll by the Pew Hispanic Center shows that Latinos are less motivated than other voters to go to the polls in November.

In Arlington, Va., and Santa Clara County, Calif., local officials recently passed resolutions to opt out from Secure Communities in response to community concerns that the program would make immigrants afraid of the police and result in the deportation of non-criminals.

Since 2008, when Secure Communities was launched in individual counties around the nation, more than a quarter of the illegal immigrants identified by the program and sent back to their countries of origin were non-criminals, government statistics show.

In Travis County, Texas, where Austin sits, about 1,000 immigrants have been removed since Secure Communities was deployed in the county in 2009. More than 30% had no criminal record.

In San Antonio, the nearest immigration court, the number of pending cases has grown to about 4,800 so far this year, compared with 1,821 in 2008, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Noe Jimenez Ruano, a day laborer from Guatemala, was arrested for criminal trespassing in July while standing outside an Austin business looking for work, according to his lawyer and the director of the shelter where he lived.

A magistrate judge found no probable cause for the arrest, but immigration officials learned he was in the country illegally through the booking process and deported him last month.

Nicole True, Mr. Jimenez Ruano's lawyer, said, "People forget that the way someone ends up in jail is based on a human being making a decision."

Homeland Security has said that while Secure Communities focuses on dangerous criminals, the agency has the authority to remove anyone who enters the U.S. illegally.

An agency official said some immigrants categorized as non-criminal have lengthy rap sheets of charges and arrests but have never been convicted.

Write to Ana Campoy at ana.campoy@dowjones.com

More Deportations?

By Marci Izard
KIAH
September 29, 2010

HOUSTON - When people get arrested, their fingerprints used to only be checked against the FBI's criminal history records.

But now, the federally-mandated Secure Communities program also checks fingerprints against immigration records maintained by the Department of Homeland Security.

If matches are found, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is alerted and that person could be deported.

"This allows the law enforcement agency and ICE the opportunity to identify aliens who have been identified for criminal activity" says Kenneth Landgrebe, Field Office Director for ICE.

Many jails across the country and in Texas have already started following the program.

ICE officials said the program has already led to more than 41,000 deportations. In Harris County, where it's been in effect since 2008, more than 8,000 illegal immigrants have been removed.

While many people agree the program is necessary, opponents like attorney Randall Kallinen worry about abuses of the system and the fear the program may negatively affect hard-working, law-abiding immigrants.

"Everybody in this country is innocent until proven guilty and to take someone's immigration status and figure that into someone's custody is improper because that takes something that is not related to guilt or innocence and it subjects someone to additional scrutiny," Kallinen said.

Kallinen said when the economy is sluggish, immigration becomes an especially contentious topic.

The Barack Obama administration wants Secure Communities to be enforced nationwide by 2013. Texas is the first state to have it implemented statewide.

http://www.39online.com/news/local/kiah-secure-communities-story,0,2817375.story

Family Fight, Border Patrol Raid, Baby Deported

By ADAM LIPTAK
The New York Times
September 20, 2010

A few days before her daughter Rosa’s first birthday, Monica Castro and the girl’s father had a violent argument in the trailer they all shared near Lubbock, Tex. Ms. Castro fled, leaving her daughter behind.

Ms. Castro, a fourth-generation American citizen, went to the local Border Patrol station. She said she would give the agents there information about the girl’s father, a Mexican in the country illegally, in exchange for help recovering her daughter.

Ms. Castro lived up to her side of the deal. But the federal government ended up deporting little Rosa, an American citizen, along with her father, Omar Gallardo. Ms. Castro would not see her daughter again for three years.

On the morning of Dec. 3, 2003, agents raided the trailer and seized Mr. Gallardo, who was wanted for questioning as a witness to a murder. They also took Rosa. Then they told Ms. Castro she had until that afternoon to get a court order if she wanted to keep her daughter.

A frantic lawyer rushed to court, and she called to plead for more time. But there was no court order yet when the government van arrived around 3 p.m., and agents hustled father and daughter into it for the long ride to the border.

Ms. Castro later sued the government, saying the agents had no legal authority to detain, much less deport, her daughter. Nor should Border Patrol agents, she said, take the place of family-court judges in making custody decisions.

The last court to rule in the case, the full United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, rejected Ms. Castro’s arguments, over the dissents of three judges.

The brief unsigned majority decision, echoing that of the trial judge, said the appeals court did not “condone the Border Patrol’s actions or the choices it made.” But, the decision went on, Ms. Castro could not sue the government because the agents had been entitled to use their discretion in the matter.

Ms. Castro’s lawyers last month asked the United States Supreme Court to hear the case, in a petition bristling with restrained incredulity.

The agents themselves have rejected the assertion that they may have acted a little rashly.

Holding Mr. Gallardo and the girl overnight, long enough for an American court to sort things out, would have involved “a tremendous amount of money,” Gregory L. Kurupas, the agent in charge of the Lubbock and Amarillo stations at the time, testified in a 2006 deposition.

Asked to quantify the daunting sum, Agent Kurupas replied, “Well over $200 plus.”

The American government gave Ms. Castro no help in finding Rosa beyond identifying the city in Mexico to which she had been delivered. That news did not comfort Ms. Castro.

“She was sent to Juárez, which is now the most dangerous city on the face of the planet,” said Susan L. Watson, one of Ms. Castro’s lawyers.

Mr. Gallardo was in time again arrested for entering the United States illegally. As part of his plea arrangement, he agreed to return Rosa, who had lived with his relatives in Mexico. He was once again deported, and my efforts to find him were unsuccessful.

The mother and child reunion, at the United States Consulate in Ciudad Juárez in 2006, was rocky. Rosa, then 4, did not recognize her mother and did not want to leave her other relatives.

“She was crying,” Ms. Castro recalled. “I started talking to her in Spanish, and she started yelling. She would hit me with her doll. She kicked me. She didn’t want anything to do with me. She wanted to be with her grandmother.”

Like the appeals court, the trial judge, Janis Graham Jack of Federal District Court in Corpus Christi, expressed some uneasiness about the case. Judge Jack said the agents might not have chosen “the optimal course of action.”

Judge Jerry E. Smith of the Fifth Circuit, who was in dissent when a three-judge panel of the court first heard the case and in the majority when the full court revisited it, agreed that the situation was not a happy one.

“No one is pleased,” Judge Smith wrote in his dissent, “that Castro did not see her daughter for three years.”

Things are much better these days, Ms. Castro said. Rosa is a happy, thriving 7-year-old in Corpus Christi. “She’s a straight-A honor roll student, in second grade now,” Ms. Castro said.

Ms. Castro added that the Supreme Court “should do something about the Border Patrol,” and perhaps the court will. The patrol did, after all, send an American infant to Ciudad Juárez with a man mixed up in a murder to save a couple of hundred dollars.

Or perhaps Ms. Castro will have to make do with the muted murmurs of sympathy she has received from judges who have heard her case so far. They do not condone what happened, are not pleased by it and, if pressed, are willing to say that the entire affair was “not optimal.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/us/21bar.html?_r=2&hpw

Houston native wrongly deported for 85 days

Immigration attorney says his client 'is not an anchor baby'
By SUSAN CARROLL
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Sept. 13, 2010

Nearly three months after U.S. immigration officials dumped Luis Alberto Delgado in Mexico despite his insistence that he is a U.S. citizen, the 19-year-old was permitted to re-enter the country last weekend with the U.S. government's blessing.

Delgado said U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents cleared him to return to the United States on Friday, roughly 85 days after he was detained by immigration officials and pressured to sign papers that cleared the way for his removal to Mexico.

Steven Cribby, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, declined to comment on Delgado's case.

On Monday in Houston, Delgado said he was pondering a lawsuit against the U.S. government, calling his case "an injustice."

U.S. Border Patrol agents detained Delgado after a traffic stop in South Texas on June 17 and held him for eight hours, questioning him about his citizenship.

Delgado said he gave immigration agents a copy of his birth certificate showing he was born at Houston's Ben Taub Hospital, a state of Texas identification card and a Social Security card.

Lack of fluency

But Delgado, who was raised in Mexico after his parents divorced, said immigration agents were suspicious of him because he did not speak English well, and insisted the paperwork he carried belonged to someone else.

Delgado said he eventually signed paperwork that resulted in his removal to Mexico because he wanted to be released from immigration custody, and thought he could fight his case from Houston.

"I believe (the agents) discriminated against me because I didn't speak English," he said. "If you don't speak very well, I think they just assume you're Mexican."

Isaias Torres, a Houston immigration attorney who took Delgado's case pro bono, said he believes the U.S. government was "at best, very negligent" in its handling of the case.

U.S. immigration officials have faced scrutiny in recent years over allegations that they have deported U.S. citizens, including a high-profile case of a mentally disabled Los Angeles man who was lost for months in Mexico in 2007.

Estimates of the number of U.S. citizens deported from the U.S. vary widely, and such statistics are not officially tracked by U.S. immigration officials, who recently adopted guidelines designed to prevent such deportations.

Torres said the government should not tolerate discrimination against U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who do not speak English fluently.

"I don't believe this is an isolated incident," Torres said.

He said such cases will become increasingly common because the U.S. government is deporting parents with U.S.-born children. Between 1998 and 2007, the United States removed 108,434 illegal immigrants with U.S. citizen children, according to a 2009 Department of Homeland Security report.

Delgado said he does not speak English well because he and his brother moved to Mexico with their mother after she divorced their father, who lived in Dallas. Delgado moved back to Houston about three years ago.

"This is not an anchor baby," Torres said. "He was born here and his mother moved back to Mexico."

Mother interviewed

Torres said he decided not to file a formal lawsuit after Delgado was removed in June because he was concerned that it would slow down the case. Instead, Torres and attorney Lionel Perez worked with U.S. officials to resolve the case administratively.

Delgado's mother, who lives in Michoacan, Mexico, came up to the border on Thursday for an interview with U.S. immigration officials and provided them with extra paperwork, including a copy of her own Mexican birth certificate.

Job is lost

Delgado said immigration officials told him Friday that he was cleared to return to the United States.

The next day, he packed up his clothes at his cousin's home in Reynosa and crossed the border through the Hidalgo port of entry.

He arrived at the Houston apartment he shares with his brother to learn that his construction job is gone, he said.

Now Delgado is searching for work, he said, and hoping to take classes to improve his English.

susan.carroll@chron.com

Dallas jail guard arrested, faces deportation

By The Associated Press
July 9, 2010

DALLAS — A Dallas County jail guard is facing deportation for allegedly being in the country illegally.

Officials say federal immigration officers arrested 34-year-old Maria Elvia Ross on Friday after a background check revealed her status.

Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price says Ross has been working for the department since 2001 and was trying to become a sheriff's deputy. He says a background check revealed her status.

He says finding out was a "shock" and the department should have caught it when she was first hired.

Sheriff spokeswoman Kim Leach says the matter is under investigation.

The Associated Press could not find a phone listing for Ross, and no attorney information was available from authorities.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/7101728.html

E-mails show ex-Farmers Branch official warned of expensive fight over immigration ordinance

By DIANNE SOLÍS
The Dallas Morning News
July 6, 2010

The Farmers Branch City Council was warned by its former city manager that litigation over its immigration ordinance would be costly and that similar issues were already being litigated by the city of Hazleton, Pa., "with somebody else's money," according to e-mails disclosed in lawsuits against the city.

Since September 2006, Farmers Branch has paid $3.4 million to fight civil suits in federal and state courts over its renter ordinances aimed at barring illegal immigrants from housing in the Dallas suburb.

In addition, two teams of lawyers have submitted $2 million in bills as the winning side in the federal suit in which a judge ruled in March that immigration regulation to be "exclusively a federal power." The city plans to appeal, and city officials said that effectively puts a hold on any payout to the law firms.

Farmers Branch was first sued in December 2006 in state court by resident Guillermo Ramos. The city was sued two more times when the City Council enacted replacement ordinances. Each time, Ramos and his attorneys alleged violations of the Texas Open Meetings Act. The e-mails and other documents were obtained through discovery proceedings in that suit by the Bickel & Brewer Storefront representing Ramos.

The city has denied violating the law and fought disclosure.

"There was no discussion of the substance of that ordinance in any executive session," said Michael Yung, the city's outside counsel and an attorney with the Strasburger & Price law firm of Dallas.

"It was considered by council in open session and debated in open session and voted in open session."

No court hearings have been scheduled. About a dozen depositions were taken this year. The city continues to fight release of certain documents it considers privileged.

Plaintiff's attorney Bill Brewer said proof of the court's concern over whether violations had occurred was the appointment of a special master in December 2008 to oversee the release of city records. The special master was the state district court judge himself, Bruce Priddy.

"It was an extraordinary step ... an example of their failure to comply," Brewer said.

Houston lawyer Margaret Maddox, who assists with a legal hotline run by the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, agreed that a judge appointing himself a special master is "somewhat unusual" but said it does happen.

"Then, it won't be filtered through someone else," Maddox said. "In my opinion, that is good for the state."

The documents revealed in the lawsuit include an e-mail from City Manager Linda Groomer to council member Ben Robinson in August 2006 in which she wrote that the city's insurance wouldn't cover litigation. She also noted that a similar legal fight was under way in Hazleton, Pa.

"Therefore, the city would have to assume 100 percent of its legal costs," she wrote. "In the meantime, the very same issues are being litigated by somebody else with somebody else's money, namely Hazleton. I strongly recommend against spending local FB tax dollars to join a legal battle that will continue with or without Farmers Branch dollars."

Groomer also urged that certain code enforcement and police citation materials be printed in English and Spanish "if compliance and assimilation are the goals."

Groomer, who left the city in 2007, declined to comment.

Robinson, the Farmers Branch council member with the longest tenure, said he continues to support defense of the ordinance despite financial costs. He pointed out that residents voted in a 2007 referendum to continue the fight.

"The other issue in going forward is if we are successful in the Court of Appeals, that removes the claim that the other lawyers have for compensation" of $2 million, Robinson said.

Hazleton, a city of about 25,000, is awaiting a decision from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia on an ordinance that, like the ones in Farmers Branch, was struck down by a lower court.

Other records that are part of the lawsuit discovery detail the involvement of Kris Kobach, a law school professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and senior counsel with the legal affiliate of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. Kobach has assisted states and cities in drafting or defending anti-illegal immigration ordinances and laws, including recent work in Arizona and Fremont, Neb.

At a May forum in Dallas, FAIR's president, Dan Stein, praised Farmers Branch for its role in a "national movement" that challenges federal authority over immigration law and brings balance to its administration.

Other documents show:

• As early as October 2006, Kobach was discussing legal points related to the renters ordinance in Farmers Branch. Later invoices detail the payment to Kobach on such items as the "draft ordinance" by the Strasburger & Price legal firm working for the city of Farmers Branch. And the legal affiliate's general counsel has sat in on two depositions.

• An e-mail from 2006 from Farmers Branch Mayor Tim O'Hare – who was a council member at the time – requesting that "we immediately pass an ordinance prohibiting any country's flag from being displayed other than our own."

Groomer responded, "I don't think that's constitutional."

Bob Phelps, who was mayor at the time, responded only to Groomer: "I don't think it is either. Just another instance of ??????? Bob."

It isn't clear how much of the city's legal fees are related to the state suits over the Open Meetings Act or the federal suits. At a recent town hall meeting in Farmers Branch, O'Hare said that "by far," the state suits have been most costly. City finance director Charles Cox said he bundles all costs related to immigration into a single line item.

Under state law, deliberations among elected officials must be public, with few exceptions. Among them are discussions of purchase or lease of property, personnel matters, economic development, certain homeland security matters and pending or contemplated litigation.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/city/carrollton/stories/DN-fbopen_06met.ART.State.Edition1.2943e44.html

Immigration: Irving vs. ICE tensions

By Katherine Leal Unmuth
Jun 30, 2010
Dallas Morning News

This dispatch is from reporter Leigh Munsil:

The City of Irving is facing off against federal officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the city's Criminal Alien Program, which has drawn national attention and given Irving a reputation for being especially tough on illegal immigration. At the Irving City Council work session last Wednesday, Mayor Herbert Gears suggested that the federal government is trying to tamper with the program, which is unique in the country and has resulted in more immigration holds than any other city, he said. The program allows federal authorities to check the immigration status of inmates in the city's jail, and has turned over more than 5,600 people for deportation since it began in 2006.

Irving Police Chief Larry Boyd said in the work session that ICE notified the Irving PD in September 2009 that it would no longer be accepting prisoners arrested for Class C misdemeanors, which resulted in a dramatic drop in immigration holds. However, in a previous story, ICE officials said that their program had not changed; instead, Irving stopped recommending some inmates for immigration holds.

ICE officials "called us a liar" in the story, Gears said, because the city continues to "rigorously enforce the program."

"There seems to be no rhyme or reason to why they choose to accept some [inmates] and don't accept others," said Boyd, pointing to October 2009 as an example -- out of 27 prisoners referred, ICE refused to process 18, he said.

But since the story ran last Monday, Boyd said, ICE officials have not refused to process a single Class C offender.

http://irvingblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2010/06/immigration-irving-vs-ice.html

Border killing a symbol of failed policy

By Tony Payan
Special to CNN
June 11, 2010

* Tony Payan says shooting of a teen by U.S. border agent is metaphor for broken system

* As U.S.-Mexico grapple with immigration, drugs, they begin to face each other as enemies

* Increased militarization at border doesn't help, but feeds potential for violence, he says

* Payan: Is this what we want for border? Countries must tackle immigration, border policies

Editor's note: Tony Payan is an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas at El Paso. He teaches border studies, Mexican politics and U.S.-Mexico relations on the U.S.-Mexico border. He is the author of "Cops, Soldiers and Diplomats: Explaining Agency Behavior in the War on Drugs" and The Three U.S.-Mexico Border Wars: Drugs, Immigration and Homeland Security. His current research focuses on the violence in Ciudad Juárez.

El Paso, Texas (CNN) -- On Monday, a U.S. Border Patrol officer shot and killed a 14-year-old boy, Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca, under one of the international bridges that connects or, these days, divides, El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.

The boy lay dead on the Mexican side and the Border Patrol agent was removed from the scene by U.S. officials. American officials say it was a case of self-defense. Mexican authorities condemned the killing as the use of excessive force.

The facts are still coming out, but based on the English and the Spanish news reports, it is easy to see that the two sides do not agree on the particulars, much less on their interpretation.

To people across the two nations who see reports of the death on TV or in the papers, it's a dramatic news story -- a boy with a bullet in his head and an agent under investigation. But here at the border, the scene, the actors, the act -- as if carefully choreographed, chosen and scripted -- read like an up-close metaphor for everything that is broken with our border and with immigration.

At a basic level, the incident at the Black Bridge seems to reveal two nations moving ever further from acknowledging our inevitable common destiny. As the two countries face the economic call-and-response of illegal immigration and the drug trade, we seem to cast each other increasingly as enemies. In this context it becomes justified to deal with each other with violence: throwing rocks and shooting bullets.

One could say that that boy represents the aspirations of many Mexican people because -- whether, as some reports have suggested, he intended to cross the border or as others have said, was being used as a decoy for others to make a run -- the spot where he died is known as a place where people try to cross illegally in search of work and a better life.

At the same time, a dehumanization plays out at the border, where some lives are worth more than others -- a calculus that usually runs along wealth lines, as those with money can afford visas to cross over the bridge and the poor have to stay out or risk their lives by crossing under it.

Additionally, the episode highlights the blunt instrument -- barriers and increased militarization -- that the United States has chosen to deal with the countries' 2,000-mile border.

Thousands of Border Patrol agents have been added in the past few years alone, and last month President Obama promised to send an additional 1,200 National Guard troops. An ineffectual fence stretches in fits and starts along about 30 percent of the border; it has been breached thousands of times, according to the Government Accountability Office, and costs thousands more to patch.

More fences, more walls, more armored vehicles and the National Guard, more helicopters and drones, more sensors and infrared goggles, more cameras and guns, and thousands of increasingly armed agents are all part of the border's choreography. From October 1 through May 31, Custom and Border Protection agents have used their firearms 31 times, a spokesman told CNN. In these circumstances, it is only a matter of time before more deaths occur.

In this incident lies the inability of the Mexican authorities to protect their people and the apparently questionable practices of our own Border Patrol, which, for one thing, sends bike-patrol officers to a well-known trouble spot and for another seems unclear about whether they can or cannot shoot across the borderline.

Neither side seems to believe that we deserve much more than these poorly pieced-together strategies, which reflect failures of both the Obama and the Calderón administrations. Mr. Calderón has been unable to face squarely the inequalities of his people: More than one in three Mexicans would leave the country and move in search of a better life, according to data collected for a Pew Global Attitudes Project report.

And the event speaks to the political inability of President Obama to coax Congress toward immigration reform -- to include an orderly flow of low-skilled workers, easing the pressure on the border itself and thereby acknowledging the continued integration of the two countries' labor markets.

Now a Border Patrol officer will have to live with the idea of having cut short the life of a young boy whose death, regardless of what he was doing at the bridge, means pain and sorrow for a family likely under the stress of 30 months of outrageous drug-related violence in Ciudad Juárez.

It is mindboggling to think that $50 billion a year in trade makes its way back and forth over the bridges that divide El Paso and Juárez, but bullets and rocks are now traded right under them.

So, we have to ask: Is that what we want the future of our border to be? An incident such as this should not spur us to finger pointing but to acknowledging that we have a problem; that we desperately need to sit down to order and shape our interactions and take joint control of our future.

If we forget or justify this incident, we will be condemning ourselves to many more like it.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Tony Payan.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/06/10/payan.border.shooting/index.html

Advocates question choice to halt deportations into Mexican border city

By David Agren
Catholic News Service
Thursday, May 13, 2010

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (CNS) -- The Ciudad Juarez Migrant Shelter used to fill beyond capacity on the days that U.S. officials would send deportees back across the Rio Grande.

However, the shelter has often been empty since early March. That is when the U.S. government stopped discharging large numbers of deportees into Ciudad Juarez, where a turf war between drug cartels and their affiliated gangs has claimed at least 750 lives this year.

But the shelter director, Dominican Brother Gerardo Arias, and others working with migrants say that even with the rampant violence, discharging deportees into Ciudad Juarez is not an entirely foolish proposition -- especially since other ports of entry to the southeast such as Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa and Matamoros can be more dangerous for migrants.

"In many ways, Juarez is a safe city for migrants," said Brother Arias, director of the Ciudad Juarez Migrant Shelter. In his city, he added, criminal gangs are not kidnapping and extorting migrants.

The March decision to stop discharging so many deportees into Ciudad Juarez was meant to spare migrants any exposure to the ongoing violence, but it came after intense lobbying from the municipal government and Mexican officials.

Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz blamed the influx of deportees -- many of whom had been in U.S. prisons -- for aggravating the city's crime problem by ending up in either one of the warring cartels or the gangs carrying out such crimes as extortion, robberies and kidnappings.

"Previously Ciudad Juarez was the destination for all those leaving (U.S.) prisons," said Mauricio Rodriguez, spokesman for the Ciudad Juarez municipal government.

Rodriguez was unable to say if the crime rate had diminished since deportations were scaled back.

Reyes told reporters in late March that the number of deportees fell by 80 percent to as few as 6 per day -- mostly migrants caught trying to pass into El Paso without the proper documents.

Organizations working with deportees and migrants in Ciudad Juarez reject claims from the municipal government that those being sent back to Mexico join gangs in especially large numbers. Brother Arias said most of the deportees with U.S. criminal records were sent back for nonviolent crimes such as illegally entering the United States or driving without a license.

However, he agreed with the mayor that an influx of returning migrants had been straining resources.

His shelter welcomed approximately 2,000 guests in 2008. Arias says the figure exploded to approximately 7,000 guests in 2009 -- a result of increased deportations and a focus on discharging deportees into Ciudad Juarez. In 2010, the figure reached 1,700 before the change of policy, he said.

Others working with migrants say the city -- despite the violence -- has an established migrant-support infrastructure such as shelters, while a municipal program would provide those anxious to leave the city with money to travel home.

"The federal government has said it wants to have safe and orderly deportations for the young migrants," said Diana Rodriguez, director of a human rights center affiliated with the shelter.

"We definitely don't believe that they're doing it securely or orderly if they're sending (migrants) to other border crossings that are just as dangerous or worse than here," she said.

Rodriguez cited the border crossing at Ojinaga, Mexico -- which borders Presidio, near the Big Bend region of Texas -- as a municipality that lacks a migrant shelter and other services, although it is receiving deportees.

Further east, in Nuevo Laredo, Father Gianantonio Baggio, director of the Nazareth Migrant Shelter, has noticed a change in the type of migrants passing through northeastern Mexico.

Father Baggio said his shelter now serves a diminishing number of Central American migrants -- who are avoiding northeastern Mexico because of the rampant kidnappings and violence -- while the number of deportees has doubled over the past two months.

"The dangers of the journey (north) and the border have increased," Father Baggio said.

The northeastern border region of Mexico "is just as dangerous" as Ciudad Juarez, he added.

Father Baggio said the Mexican and local governments have attempted to make deportations safer in his part of the country by having more deportees quickly transported away from the border region to either their hometowns or the north-central city of San Luis Potosi, a nine-hour drive south of Nuevo Laredo.

"This help a lot," Father Baggio said, but he added, "there isn't enough money" to return all the migrants to their hometowns.

Copyright © 2010 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops