Los Angeles Times
By Joseph Tanfani
March 11, 2016
When
Wildin David Guillen Acosta left his apartment to head to high school
one chilly morning in January, two immigration agents were waiting.
Acosta,
19, immediately threw himself on the ground and yelled for help. As his
father watched from the window of their garden apartment in a scruffy
southeast Durham neighborhood, he was
handcuffed and taken to jail. Now he’s trying to avoid deportation to
his native Honduras, where, he said, he’s afraid he might be killed by
gangs.
“These
people are crazy,” he said in a phone interview this week from Stewart
Detention Center in Georgia. “One of them killed my uncle. That’s why I
don’t want to go back to my country.
I want to stay with my mother and my father; all my family is here in
the U.S.”
Acosta
was one of 336 young people snared in raids this year, an attempt by
U.S. immigration officials to send a message of deterrence to Central
America and avoid a repeat of the 2014 crisis
when tens of thousands of children from Honduras, El Salvador and
Guatemala arrived at the U.S. border.
But
this small operation, which also netted 121 family members, touched off
a giant uproar, spawning fierce protests from the administration’s
allies on immigration and a new wave of fear
in immigrant neighborhoods here and across the country.
The
arrests also became an issue in the Democratic presidential primary
debate in Miami on Wednesday. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders
sparred over who has better defended immigrants,
but ultimately agreed they did not support the recent arrests.
“Children fled that part of the world to try … maybe, to meet up with
their family members, taking a route that was horrific, trying to start a
new life,” Sanders said, adding that President Obama
is “wrong on the issue of deportation.”
Here
in Durham, in a muddy yard across from a Catholic school, Latino
parents and kids gathered one recent Sunday to buy pupusas and tortillas
cooked on outdoor griddles, in a monthly benefit
for a man who needs a lung transplant, and discussed their new fears of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“When
ICE comes to your neighborhood … it’s not just terrible for the kids
but for the whole community,” said Ivan Almonte, who’s worked as an
immigration advocate here for 15 years. “As
you can see here, it’s a family. We come together for things like
this.”
Since
the arrests, residents say, false rumors about ICE sweeps have swept
through the city: Agents are at Wal-Mart, coming to schools, spotted
lurking in apartment parking lots. At Riverside
High School, where Wildin Acosta was a senior, teachers noticed many
empty desks right after the raids, as students here illegally stayed
home.
“People,
when they visit us, we say you have to call us before you come,” said
Luz Romero, 17, a friend of Acosta’s. She and her parents are in the
country illegally, though the teenager
is one of the young “Dreamers” who have received temporary protection
from deportation.
“Now we live in fear of opening the door, or stepping one foot outside the door,” she said.
For
many, scenes of agents arresting mothers and grabbing young adults on
their way to school marked a grim return to a tougher era of immigration
enforcement.
In
West Mecklenburg, N.C., Yefry Sorto, 18, also was arrested after he
left for school, spurring outraged protests when his family claimed he
was grabbed at a bus stop. An ICE spokesman said
Sorto was picked up before he reached the stop.
In
Atlanta, Kimberly Pineda Chavez, 19, was in a car with her aunt and
cousin, heading to Collins Hill High School, when agents pulled over the
car and took her into custody. She too is in
jail, and fighting plans to send her back to Honduras.
In
Thomasville, N.C., Alexander Josue Soriano-Cortez was pulled out of the
apartment he shares with his brother and a friend. He was sent to the
U.S. by his parents, paying smugglers $5,000
for the trip, after dodging bullets and death threats from gangs while
in El Salvador, said his older brother, Elman Soriano, who remembers his
sibling “shaking” when he was picked up.
“He tells me, ‘If I return to my country, I am sure I am going to my death.’”
::
The
administration said the arrests were in line with Obama’s stated
intention to focus on sending back those who have come to the U.S. since
the start of 2014.
The
administration has tried to stem the tide from Central America,
launching publicity campaigns about the dangers of the trip and working
with Mexican authorities to stop children. More
than 68,500 arrived in 2014; after declining through most of 2015, the
numbers of unaccompanied children began to increase again last fall.
More than 20,000 came in the four months ending Jan. 31, double the
number a year earlier.
Under
a 2008 law, minors from Central America must be admitted to the U.S.
and get a chance to plead for asylum in immigration court.
Many
of the students say they are fleeing murderous gangs in countries with
some of the highest rates of violence in the world. But their fears are
often not enough to win an asylum claim.
All of the young people arrested had reached the age of 18 and were ordered deported by a judge.
“They
were admitted here to make their case,” said Bryan Cox, a spokesman for
ICE. “In these particular cases, the judges found against them. ICE is
the enforcement arm, and we’re executing
those removals.”
But
no law requires these applicants have a lawyer; of 18,600 Central
American families who received deportation notices, about 85% didn’t
have attorneys. Some, like Soriano-Cortez, say they
never got notice of hearings. Acosta skipped his because a lawyer told
him he had little chance of success; statistics show that at least 7,000
children were ordered deported without going to court.
Immigration
officials believe the operation succeeded; the numbers of kids crossing
has dropped since the operations began, Jeh Johnson, secretary of
Homeland Security, said at a recent news
conference.
“I
know this has made a lot of people I respect very unhappy,” Johnson
said of advocates and lawmakers angered over the raids. “But we must
enforce the law in accordance with our priorities.”
::
Some
of the recent arrivals from Central America ended up in North Carolina.
Once the center of America’s tobacco industry, Durham, home to Duke
University, is being transformed by a continuing
influx of Latinos. The Latino population was 14% in 2010, and many more
have come since. Businesses catering to Latinos have cropped up around
the city, including the Latino Credit Union, which has 11 branches.
A
bastion of liberalism in purple-state North Carolina, Durham had a
reputation as a so-called sanctuary city, where police have avoided
cooperation with ICE, until the North Carolina Legislature
outlawed that practice last fall.
After
Acosta’s arrest Jan. 28, the news spread quickly through the student
body at Riverside, a sprawling school where 30% of students are Latino.
“I fear what’s going to happen, that other
Hispanics will be taken out of this country by force,” said Bryan
Escoto, a 10th-grader at Riverside, whose parents also are from
Honduras. “They just came here to be safe.”
Official
Durham also rose in outrage. Acosta’s arrest was condemned by the
school board, the teachers union and the Human Relations Commission,
which called for an end of the raids and for
the jailed young people to be released. Teachers staged an event to say
they were sending Acosta’s homework to jail.
“I
never thought the president, our president, would do that,” said Pilar
Rocha-Goldberg, president of Centro Hispano, a Latino advocacy and
service organization in Durham, said of Obama.
“In some ways, I understand, of course … but going after kids, it was
very unexpected.”
In
suburban Washington, school attendance in Prince Georges County, Md.,
dipped in January, after news of the arrests began, and leaders in
Montgomery County declared that police wouldn’t
cooperate.
Soon
after the arrests began, about two dozen immigration advocates
confronted Homeland Security officials about the policies. “I’ve never
been to a meeting like this. People were crying,
they were so angry,” said one attendee, who spoke on condition her name
not be used. The language became heated, she said: “‘This is shameful,
this is unconscionable; families are in hiding.’”
At
the same time, Republicans, both on the campaign trail and in Congress,
have pressed the Obama administration to get more aggressive about
immigration enforcement.
So-called
interior removals, detentions of people who aren’t captured on the
border, have plummeted – fewer than 70,000 in 2015, less than a third
than in the peak year of 2012. For years,
the agency has focused on arresting people with criminal records; they
accounted for more than 90% of interior removals last year.
No
new arrests have surfaced in the last few weeks, though Johnson said
this week that the actions will continue. Meanwhile, the young people
remain locked up and could be returned at any
time. Lawyers are pressing for new hearings, or for ICE officials to
simply grant their discretion and allow them to stay in the U.S. Elman
Soriano and Dilsia Acosta, Wildin’s mother, came to Washington to ask
members of Congress to intervene.
In
the case of Josue Soriano-Cortez, his brother says they never received
notice of a court hearing – just the final order of deportation. Lawyers
sent officials copies of police reports
from Honduras, where Josue reported a shooting and police did nothing,
his brother said. The threats followed him to North Carolina, he said,
with texts on his phone from members of the MS gang. “You’re dead,” one
said. “The MS is going to take you to hell.”
“We are very close, and there’s a lot of trust,” said his brother.
“He says, 'I’m very afraid. I know you will do something.’”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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