Deportations leave families in anguish

Thousands of illegal
immigrants have been
deported this year.

WASHINGTON POST

It was 5 a.m. when immigration agents knocked on the door of the Diaz family’s neatly kept house in Baltimore County, with the twin plaid couches and the Lord’s Supper woodcut over the kitchen table. Edwin, 13, and Cynthia, 8, woke up just in time to see their mother put into a van and driven away. The moment several months ago changed almost everything about their quiet, close-knit life.

“Since that day, nothing has been the same,” said Miguel Diaz, 42, a construction worker and labor union representative from El Salvador. “I know my wife made a mistake all those years ago, but we have worked hard, lived decently and never caused any trouble. Shouldn’t the punishment fit the crime? Her place is here with us, with her children. What kind of society is this that would suddenly take her away?”

Edwin, listening somberly on the sofa, said it was especially hard having his mother gone at Christmastime. She was not here last week to hear him sing “Jingle Bells” in the school chorus or to arrange her ceramic manger tableau of animals and wise men. “She always did it a certain way,” he said. “In the end, we decided not to put it up.”

Fidelia Diaz is one of thousands of illegal immigrants and longtime residents who have been deported this year — cornered by complicated pasts that caught up with them long after they thought the overburdened immigration system had conveniently forgotten or magically forgiven them.

“I know this is a politically sensitive issue, an emotional issue. But we have to enforce the law, and the law is very clear,” said Michael Keegan, an ICE spokesman. “It states simply that if an individual is out of status, having a U.S.-born child does not qualify the parent to gain legal status. Even if they have relatives who are U.S. citizens, the law doesn’t bleed over to give them the same rights.”

Immigration judges have limited discretion to consider family circumstances and homeland conditions, but if a deportation order has been issued — no matter how long ago — and the illegal immigrant has failed to appear for the hearing, that person is considered to have already had a “day in court” and is not eligible for special consideration.

In some cases, an immigrant’s past catches up with him at an especially difficult moment. Samir Saleh, an Israeli hairdresser, came to the United States in the 1990s as a tourist and married a young American woman in what was later ruled a case of immigration fraud. He appealed the ruling but eventually divorced, remarried and settled in Cleveland.

Last April, Saleh was deported to Israel for immigration fraud, just as his second wife learned she had terminal cancer. His attorney, Philip Eichorn, said he filed for a temporary visa on humanitarian grounds so they could be together for the holidays, but it was denied last week. His wife, now bald from chemotherapy, made a decision.

“She told me, ‘I am done with this country. I have a little time left, and I want to spend it with him,’ ” Eichorn said in a telephone interview Saturday. “They were really in love. You couldn’t stage the joy on her face in their wedding photos. She left for Israel yesterday.”

For illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes, deportation is both legally automatic and more efficiently enforced than in the past. Immigration officials say they are working with every federal prison and many state and local prisons to ensure such inmates are deported after serving their sentences. In 2007, about 89,000 such people were deported, Keegan said.