New York Times
By Lizette Alvarez
May 12, 2014,
TALLAHASSEE,
Fla. — After living nearly a half century in the United States —
marrying and raising a family here, paying taxes and working for decades
for the federal
government — Mario Hernandez made a discovery recently that rattled him
to his core: He is not an American citizen. In fact, he is not even a
United States resident.
Nobody
had ever told him. Not his mother or his grandparents. Not the United
States Army, where he served for three years in the 1970s. Not the
election supervisors in
four states who tallied his votes in every major election since Jimmy
Carter won the White House. Not the two state agencies where he was
employed, one in Washington State and the other in Florida. And not the
two federal agencies, including the Justice Department,
where he spent most of his career as a prison supervisor handling
notorious inmates and undergoing thorough background checks every five
years. Citizenship is a requirement for the job.
The
revelation came only after Mr. Hernandez and his wife, Bonita, started
planning a trip to celebrate his recent retirement from the Bureau of
Prisons after 22 years.
The two had settled on a Caribbean cruise, which would have been Mr.
Hernandez’s first time out of the country since arriving in 1965 as a
Cuban refugee. On a cruise line website, he found out that a United
States passport was a requirement. He did not have
one and wondered whether he even had naturalization papers.
“I
thought I was a citizen — I’ve always been proud of being a citizen,”
said Mr. Hernandez, 58, the father of two grown children, one an
engineer who is an Afghan war
veteran. “This has really messed with my head.”
At
a time when immigration overhaul remains on the table in Congress, Mr.
Hernandez’s plight is the latest example, and one of the more extreme,
of how large federal bureaucracies
can stumble when it comes to identifying who is here legally, illegally
or somewhere in between. With so many immigrants in the country under
so many varying rules, keeping track can sometimes pose monumental
challenges.
For
Mr. Hernandez, the consequences are worrisome. Deportation is not
something he would face as a Cuban refugee and military veteran. But he
can no longer vote, and he
cannot leave the country. And he could face prison and fines for having
falsely claimed citizenship and for voting.
At
the moment, he exists in immigration limbo — not fully legal or
illegal. After he attended an immigration interview in March, his
request for citizenship was denied.
It should not have been, said his lawyer, Elizabeth Ricci, from
Tallahassee. Mr. Hernandez was entitled to citizenship, she said,
because he had served in the Army during a “designated period of
hostility” at the end of the Vietnam War era.
A
second letter from the immigration service followed. It said the case
would be reopened but asked for more information, including why he had
claimed to be a citizen,
had registered to vote and had voted.
Sharon
Scheidhauer, a spokeswoman for United States Citizenship and
Immigration Services, said the agency could not comment on individual
cases.
“I
think they are gravely embarrassed,” Ms. Ricci said, “and are trying to
shift the burden on him now to make him look like a criminal.”
Not
only did Mr. Hernandez work for the Bureau of Prisons (and before that
the Bureau of Indian Affairs), but he had been a supervisor, overseeing
day-to-day operations,
detainees and inmates, including terrorists.
By
the time he retired, he had a desk full of commendations. In 1995, he
personally kept watch over the two Oklahoma City bombers, Terry Nichols
and Timothy McVeigh, keeping
an eye on each in their isolation cells for 12 hours a day on separate
weeks over the course of a month. When Willie Falcon, the notorious
cocaine trafficker from Miami, had to change prisons, Mr. Hernandez was
in charge of the transfer — one of several he
oversaw involving high-profile prisoners.
By
all accounts, Mr. Hernandez is a make-the-best-of-it kind of man who
was taught to be self-reliant at an early age. But he is unnerved by the
turn of events.
“It’s
like I’m living a bad dream,” he said as he sat in his comfortable home
decorated with Holstein cow knickknacks and dozens of framed
photographs of his children
and grandchildren. “This cannot be real; I’ve been living here 49
years. This is the only country I’ve ever known.”
Elizabeth
C. Pines, a longtime immigration lawyer in Miami, said she had run
across a handful of similar cases but none as extreme as this one.
“It
goes to show you how broken the system is for a federal and a state
agency to have not even checked his background — his criminal
background, yes, but not his immigration
background,” she said.
The
only immigration document Mr. Hernandez has is a parole document, which
he received as a 9-year-old when he arrived at Miami’s Freedom Tower
with his family. The paper
allowed him to remain in the United States indefinitely.
Cuban
citizens are granted special immigration privileges when they flee Cuba
and arrive in the United States. First, they are granted parole. After a
year, unless they
are criminals, they can become United States residents. Five years
later, they can become American citizens. The only hitch is that the
paperwork must be filed, which Mr. Hernandez’s parents never did on his
behalf.
Growing
up in Fullerton, Calif., Mr. Hernandez always assumed that all of this
had been done for him as a child. Nobody ever mentioned his immigration
status at home —
less a topic of conversation in those days, particularly for Cuban
refugees, Mr. Hernandez said. He never thought to ask, he added.
Jobs
came easily. As a parolee, Mr. Hernandez says, he was given an
unrestricted Social Security number, which he has had since childhood.
Later, he got a driver’s license.
When
he enlisted in the Army in 1975 as a teenager, he said he remembered,
he handed officials his parole document and taking some kind of oath.
That he may not have been
an American citizen crossed his mind then, he said, but the oath he
took — a citizenship oath, in his mind — allayed any doubts.
Decades
later, worried about his lack of citizenship papers, Mr. Hernandez met
with Ms. Ricci. Ms. Ricci said she was stunned at how long he had lived
in limbo. She said
she was baffled why the Bureau of Prisons had never flagged his lack of citizenship, particularly since Mr. Hernandez did the opposite of
remain in the shadows.
“It’s a classic example of government inefficiency,” said Ms. Ricci, who has taken his case pro bono.
Passionate
about America and its privileges, Mr. Hernandez said he took his
citizenship responsibilities to heart. When Leon County election
officials here recently stripped
his name from the voter rolls, “I broke down crying,” he said. He could
not even tell a friend about it as they pumped gas.
“It
was just overwhelming to him,” said Brenda Salvas, the friend and a
former colleague. “He said he would call me later on the phone and tell
me. That’s the kind of
person he is. He cares.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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