wantmygcnow
Volunteer Moderator
Carla Harr is a great attorney in the washington d.c area. Read how she helped a immigrant stay here.
Setting Out, Alone
By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 23, 2006; A01
Julio Argueta was a dime a dozen. One more kid from a miserable place with a dead-end future slipping across the border for a better life and getting caught.
Karla Harr, his no-nonsense immigration attorney, remembers standing in the Arlington County courtroom at his deportation hearing that October and thinking that the scene was all too familiar: Julio's godmother silently weeping; Julio, then 16, looking confused.
She studied Julio's arms and shoulders, sturdy and broad from years of cutting corn and laying bricks in El Salvador. She caught herself musing, "If only he were a little girl . . . "
The most she could do for him, she thought, was to ask for a voluntary departure order and send him back.
That way, if Congress ever changed the laws, if the mood of the country ever softened, he could try to come again, she reasoned. If he went underground and was caught, he'd be barred from returning for 10 years or face prison if he tried to come illegally again.
Julio had crossed the border alone, yet another "unaccompanied juvenile" walking north carrying a plastic bag of clothes. He swam the Rio Grande in full view of a bridge and, minutes later, resting on a rock, got busted. The Border Patrol caught 7,000 kids like Julio last year, mostly teenage boys. Who knows how many more make it through undetected.
The immigration judge asked Harr what she planned to do.
Julio looked up at Harr with terrified eyes. He was so innocent, she thought. A child, really.
In that instant, she decided to try.
The tide of unaccompanied juveniles washing into the United States is growing, and with it the backlash. Anti-illegal immigration groups are raising an alarm, for most are released to relatives, then disappear into the underground economy, attending school, mowing lawns or joining gangs.
Julio chose to go legal. It's a choice against almost insurmountable odds.
These days, you have slim to no chance unless you are closely related to a U.S. citizen, have a special skill, fit a unique profile or are from a country with historically low rates of immigration to the United States, say, Armenia or Burundi, and win a lottery slot. Legal residents can bring their children in, but the wait can last seven years; for a brother or sister, twice that.
None of that applied to Julio: He was an orphan.
He had landed in Virginia because his godmother, who is his cousin and closest relative, lives in Springfield. A cousin doesn't count.
But Julio made it.
Setting Out, Alone
Julio's immigration case file is mostly death certificates. His father, a farmer, died at 7:15 a.m. Oct. 20, 1989, shot by a wealthy landowner. Julio was a year old. His mother died at 7:30 a.m. June 11, 1998, " a consecuencia de fiebre sin asistencia medica " -- of fever without medical care. Julio was 8. Then his grandfather died. Then his Aunt Rufina. She died at 11 a.m. Dec. 11, 2003. The only explanation is "shock."
He doesn't remember his father. All he remembers of his mother is that she taught him to fetch firewood, cook fried eggs and tortillas, and chase chickens out of the house.
Once she died, Aunt Rufina became like his mother. She sent him to school, but after two years, he quit to earn $1 and $2 a day in the fields.
After she died, when Julio was 15, "I wanted to die, too," he recalls, in Spanish.
Distant relatives took his younger sister to their home in the country. She could work for them. "They said they felt bad, but there was no room for me," he said. He has not heard from her since.
Julio was alone. The rest of his family had long before moved to Springfield and Alexandria.
When Rufina died, her daughter -- Julio's cousin and godmother in Springfield -- came to the small town of Corinto for the funeral. The cousin, Vilma Rivera, took Julio to the doctor and got him tranquilizers. She wanted to help him, but she didn't know how.
She considered adopting him, but he was too old. Under U.S. immigration law, all adoption paperwork must be completed before a child's 16th birthday. For Julio, that was just three months away. Paying someone to smuggle him in -- coyotes charge up to $6,000 -- is a felony.
Vilma flew home.
A few weeks later, on March 12, 2004, his 16th birthday, he decided to follow her on his own.
When he was caught, he was sent to a detention facility in Texas, where caseworkers searched for relatives.
A few years ago, Julio's surroundings might have resembled a jail. But a lawsuit over substandard conditions, long stays and housing children with criminals prompted federal legislation. Now children are released to relatives, regardless of the relatives' legal status, and "strongly encouraged" to appear at their deportation hearings. Most don't.
One Department of Justice study in 2001 found that as many as 68 percent of unaccompanied juveniles do not show up for the hearings. The same study found that of 173 who did, most of whom had no attorney, only two were granted legal status.
Now anti-immigration groups argue that lenient policies encourage more teenagers to make the illegal crossing.
The numbers are growing. But immigration advocates have a different explanation: They say these are the children whose parents came to the States years ago and are working illegally or have a temporary legal status that prohibits them from bringing their children into the country legally. Many could be legal, but they have been waiting for years on the bureaucracy. For these families, advocates argue, the desire to be together outweighs the risks of an illegal, dangerous crossing.
In June 2004, after a two-month detention, Julio arrived at Vilma Rivera's doorstep, a tidy brick ranch house with cornstalks and radishes growing in the back yard in the shadow of the Mixing Bowl.
Vilma was 15 when she set out for the United States, just months after she held Julio in her arms at his christening. She crossed the border the same way. So did her husband, Jose Ramon. So did his eight brothers and sisters. And her seven.
But they came in the 1980s, when the brutal 12-year civil war was tearing El Salvador apart and hundreds of thousands fled. In 1991, the United States granted them Temporary Protected Status. Both Vilma and Jose Ramon are now U.S. citizens. She works two jobs, running a licensed home day care by day and cleaning office buildings by night. He works in construction.
The immigration laws changed in 1996. After 9/11, so did the times.
"This is your home now," Vilma told Julio.
That night, in the tiny half-attic room where he sleeps with Vilma's 11-year-old son, Julio began to pray.
"I just kept saying: 'Please, God, don't send me back. Don't send me back.' "
Keeping a Low Profile
Vilma found Harr, the immigration lawyer, in a Spanish phone book.
Harr told them that most unaccompanied juveniles have two, maybe three slim chances to keep from being deported:
· Get Immigration and Customs Enforcement to "administratively close" a case because a child is underage, which buys time. ICE refused Harr's request without saying why. She suspected it was because he was a teenage boy, too old to be a helpless child.
· Ask for asylum. Children rarely win that, immigration lawyers say.
· Apply for a Special Immigrant Juvenile visa, awarded to children who prove they've been "abused, abandoned or neglected." Fewer than 500 are granted each year. The visa requires a ruling from state family courts that a child is "eligible for long-term foster care"; many state judges have been reluctant to further burden that system.
She worried that Julio was too shy to tell his story well to a judge. Convincing a judge that he deserved to stay required that he dredge up his past, and whenever the subject came up, Julio shut down.
In the meantime, Julio was beginning to feel at home. He saw the ocean for the first time and took a carnival ride on a family trip to Ocean City. He discovered pretzels at 7-Eleven and the miracle of a wave pool, bobbing on an inner tube and learning how to swim.
He went to school every day at Robert E. Lee High, mastering slang like "in your dreams."
His ESOL teachers said he was always the first to come to class, never missed a day and was quick to shout, "English only!" when classmates began speaking their home languages.
He kept his story to himself. His teachers just assumed Vilma and Jose were his parents. At Lee, like any other high school with many immigrant students, ESOL counselors explained, there is a hierarchy: U.S.-born children of immigrants at the top, immigrants with legal status next, undocumented students last. Best to keep your head low and off the radar of the gang recruiters who seek out the vulnerable in virtually every high school in the area.
Vilma started calling Julio her son.
Still, the wall on his side of the small room he shared with Vilma's son, Noel, was bare, his closet neat and nearly empty, as if he were trying not to take up too much space. Noel slept under a comfortable rumple of clothes, glossy posters and family photos.
Julio addressed Vilma and Jose Ramon in Spanish with the formal " usted " -- out of respect, he said, and to keep his distance in case he must wake up from this American dream.
'This Was a Fluke'
By March last year, Harr felt like more than Julio's immigration attorney. She had become protective, worrying that he was too naive to thrive in a U.S. high school, worrying that junk food was making his face break out. She would no longer accept payment. She worried about losing his case, about how he would become easy prey for the gangs in El Salvador if he went back.
And that gave her an idea. She decided to gamble and file an asylum application for Julio based on fear of gang violence. Not here. But back in El Salvador.
Gangs operate throughout El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. One judge there testified that 30,000 gang members operate in the country, pitted against only 17,000 police officers.
Fear of gang persecution is a new kind of asylum claim. Only a handful have been granted, and Harr had never filed one.
To win any asylum claim, attorneys must prove that immigrants have a well-founded fear of persecution because of a political opinion, religious belief, nationality, ethnic origin or membership in a social group. To win a gang asylum case, an attorney must prove that teenage boys in El Salvador unwilling to join a gang constitute a social group.
In two virtually identical cases, two teenage boys were harassed at gunpoint or beaten and shot for refusing to join gangs and fled to the United States. One was granted asylum in San Antonio. The other was denied -- in Arlington by Judge Wayne R. Iskra, the same judge who had Julio's deportation case.
The pressure was on. The only option left was the Special Immigrant Juvenile visa. Harr needed to secure it before Julio turned 18, and the system was notoriously slow. So slow some children "aged out."
The first hurdle was family court in Fairfax.
Julio was an orphan, so proving he'd been "abandoned or neglected" shouldn't be difficult. The catch was getting the judge to declare him eligible for long-term foster care: He didn't need it -- Vilma and Jose Ramon already had legal custody -- but the paperwork would never go through without it.
Last August, Harr assembled a team to present the case.
It didn't go well.
The Fairfax judge's reaction: "I don't know what you're doing here."
Julio drove with Vilma and Jose Ramon back to Springfield. "Don't cry," Vilma, 32, hushed her godson. "Boys don't cry."
She mixed flour and water and began patting perfectly round tortillas for dinner. "If it is illegal for me to help him, then put me in jail," she sighed to the ceiling.
They went back in September. Harr's friend, family court lawyer Mina Ketchie, and a court-appointed guardian ad litem, Nader Hasan, pleaded Julio's case, encouraging the judge "to override legal technicalities."
The judge agreed.
In December, Julio made it to the next step: He was granted an interview with the Citizenship and Immigration Service. Harr was stunned. She has had other clients waiting since 2000 just to get this interview. "This was a fluke," Harr said.
Julio then was fingerprinted, vaccinated and had a physical exam.
One day in January, his visa arrived, unheralded, in the mail.
An Abundance of Dreams
It was time to go back to immigration court, to get the deportation order dropped and his illegal status "adjusted."
On Feb. 27, with his 18th birthday barely two weeks away, Julio walked home from school and changed into the first formal clothes he'd worn in his life. Vilma Rivera bought them for his first Holy Communion, which he'll receive next month.
Vilma put on her best suit. They passed the Supermercado on Backlick Road and the Korean Church on Columbia Pike on their way to immigration court in Arlington.
Harr rushed in. By this time, she had six other juvenile clients with stories like Julio's -- one a 16-year-old Guatemalan who'd come north to work for his family because his father was ill, and the rest youths younger than 16 whose parents have had Temporary Protected Status since 1999 and no way of bringing them into the United States legally.
But they didn't have the one thing that wound up making Julio legal. "They're not orphans," Harr said. "They were coming north to reunite with their parents." All, she said, most likely will be deported.
In the small immigration courtroom, adorned with posters of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, Julio took the stand. He dutifully recounted the deaths in his life.
Then the government attorney, Rafael Choi, asked whether he liked school. "Very much so."
He asked what Julio would like to do with his life. "My dream is to finish high school, go to a university and have a career."
The attorney paused. Julio, his ears red, his face hopeful, hunched on the stand.
"Feel free to dream, sir," Choi said finally. "I have no further questions."
In 2011, Julio Argueta may apply for U.S. citizenship.
Setting Out, Alone
By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 23, 2006; A01
Julio Argueta was a dime a dozen. One more kid from a miserable place with a dead-end future slipping across the border for a better life and getting caught.
Karla Harr, his no-nonsense immigration attorney, remembers standing in the Arlington County courtroom at his deportation hearing that October and thinking that the scene was all too familiar: Julio's godmother silently weeping; Julio, then 16, looking confused.
She studied Julio's arms and shoulders, sturdy and broad from years of cutting corn and laying bricks in El Salvador. She caught herself musing, "If only he were a little girl . . . "
The most she could do for him, she thought, was to ask for a voluntary departure order and send him back.
That way, if Congress ever changed the laws, if the mood of the country ever softened, he could try to come again, she reasoned. If he went underground and was caught, he'd be barred from returning for 10 years or face prison if he tried to come illegally again.
Julio had crossed the border alone, yet another "unaccompanied juvenile" walking north carrying a plastic bag of clothes. He swam the Rio Grande in full view of a bridge and, minutes later, resting on a rock, got busted. The Border Patrol caught 7,000 kids like Julio last year, mostly teenage boys. Who knows how many more make it through undetected.
The immigration judge asked Harr what she planned to do.
Julio looked up at Harr with terrified eyes. He was so innocent, she thought. A child, really.
In that instant, she decided to try.
The tide of unaccompanied juveniles washing into the United States is growing, and with it the backlash. Anti-illegal immigration groups are raising an alarm, for most are released to relatives, then disappear into the underground economy, attending school, mowing lawns or joining gangs.
Julio chose to go legal. It's a choice against almost insurmountable odds.
These days, you have slim to no chance unless you are closely related to a U.S. citizen, have a special skill, fit a unique profile or are from a country with historically low rates of immigration to the United States, say, Armenia or Burundi, and win a lottery slot. Legal residents can bring their children in, but the wait can last seven years; for a brother or sister, twice that.
None of that applied to Julio: He was an orphan.
He had landed in Virginia because his godmother, who is his cousin and closest relative, lives in Springfield. A cousin doesn't count.
But Julio made it.
Setting Out, Alone
Julio's immigration case file is mostly death certificates. His father, a farmer, died at 7:15 a.m. Oct. 20, 1989, shot by a wealthy landowner. Julio was a year old. His mother died at 7:30 a.m. June 11, 1998, " a consecuencia de fiebre sin asistencia medica " -- of fever without medical care. Julio was 8. Then his grandfather died. Then his Aunt Rufina. She died at 11 a.m. Dec. 11, 2003. The only explanation is "shock."
He doesn't remember his father. All he remembers of his mother is that she taught him to fetch firewood, cook fried eggs and tortillas, and chase chickens out of the house.
Once she died, Aunt Rufina became like his mother. She sent him to school, but after two years, he quit to earn $1 and $2 a day in the fields.
After she died, when Julio was 15, "I wanted to die, too," he recalls, in Spanish.
Distant relatives took his younger sister to their home in the country. She could work for them. "They said they felt bad, but there was no room for me," he said. He has not heard from her since.
Julio was alone. The rest of his family had long before moved to Springfield and Alexandria.
When Rufina died, her daughter -- Julio's cousin and godmother in Springfield -- came to the small town of Corinto for the funeral. The cousin, Vilma Rivera, took Julio to the doctor and got him tranquilizers. She wanted to help him, but she didn't know how.
She considered adopting him, but he was too old. Under U.S. immigration law, all adoption paperwork must be completed before a child's 16th birthday. For Julio, that was just three months away. Paying someone to smuggle him in -- coyotes charge up to $6,000 -- is a felony.
Vilma flew home.
A few weeks later, on March 12, 2004, his 16th birthday, he decided to follow her on his own.
When he was caught, he was sent to a detention facility in Texas, where caseworkers searched for relatives.
A few years ago, Julio's surroundings might have resembled a jail. But a lawsuit over substandard conditions, long stays and housing children with criminals prompted federal legislation. Now children are released to relatives, regardless of the relatives' legal status, and "strongly encouraged" to appear at their deportation hearings. Most don't.
One Department of Justice study in 2001 found that as many as 68 percent of unaccompanied juveniles do not show up for the hearings. The same study found that of 173 who did, most of whom had no attorney, only two were granted legal status.
Now anti-immigration groups argue that lenient policies encourage more teenagers to make the illegal crossing.
The numbers are growing. But immigration advocates have a different explanation: They say these are the children whose parents came to the States years ago and are working illegally or have a temporary legal status that prohibits them from bringing their children into the country legally. Many could be legal, but they have been waiting for years on the bureaucracy. For these families, advocates argue, the desire to be together outweighs the risks of an illegal, dangerous crossing.
In June 2004, after a two-month detention, Julio arrived at Vilma Rivera's doorstep, a tidy brick ranch house with cornstalks and radishes growing in the back yard in the shadow of the Mixing Bowl.
Vilma was 15 when she set out for the United States, just months after she held Julio in her arms at his christening. She crossed the border the same way. So did her husband, Jose Ramon. So did his eight brothers and sisters. And her seven.
But they came in the 1980s, when the brutal 12-year civil war was tearing El Salvador apart and hundreds of thousands fled. In 1991, the United States granted them Temporary Protected Status. Both Vilma and Jose Ramon are now U.S. citizens. She works two jobs, running a licensed home day care by day and cleaning office buildings by night. He works in construction.
The immigration laws changed in 1996. After 9/11, so did the times.
"This is your home now," Vilma told Julio.
That night, in the tiny half-attic room where he sleeps with Vilma's 11-year-old son, Julio began to pray.
"I just kept saying: 'Please, God, don't send me back. Don't send me back.' "
Keeping a Low Profile
Vilma found Harr, the immigration lawyer, in a Spanish phone book.
Harr told them that most unaccompanied juveniles have two, maybe three slim chances to keep from being deported:
· Get Immigration and Customs Enforcement to "administratively close" a case because a child is underage, which buys time. ICE refused Harr's request without saying why. She suspected it was because he was a teenage boy, too old to be a helpless child.
· Ask for asylum. Children rarely win that, immigration lawyers say.
· Apply for a Special Immigrant Juvenile visa, awarded to children who prove they've been "abused, abandoned or neglected." Fewer than 500 are granted each year. The visa requires a ruling from state family courts that a child is "eligible for long-term foster care"; many state judges have been reluctant to further burden that system.
She worried that Julio was too shy to tell his story well to a judge. Convincing a judge that he deserved to stay required that he dredge up his past, and whenever the subject came up, Julio shut down.
In the meantime, Julio was beginning to feel at home. He saw the ocean for the first time and took a carnival ride on a family trip to Ocean City. He discovered pretzels at 7-Eleven and the miracle of a wave pool, bobbing on an inner tube and learning how to swim.
He went to school every day at Robert E. Lee High, mastering slang like "in your dreams."
His ESOL teachers said he was always the first to come to class, never missed a day and was quick to shout, "English only!" when classmates began speaking their home languages.
He kept his story to himself. His teachers just assumed Vilma and Jose were his parents. At Lee, like any other high school with many immigrant students, ESOL counselors explained, there is a hierarchy: U.S.-born children of immigrants at the top, immigrants with legal status next, undocumented students last. Best to keep your head low and off the radar of the gang recruiters who seek out the vulnerable in virtually every high school in the area.
Vilma started calling Julio her son.
Still, the wall on his side of the small room he shared with Vilma's son, Noel, was bare, his closet neat and nearly empty, as if he were trying not to take up too much space. Noel slept under a comfortable rumple of clothes, glossy posters and family photos.
Julio addressed Vilma and Jose Ramon in Spanish with the formal " usted " -- out of respect, he said, and to keep his distance in case he must wake up from this American dream.
'This Was a Fluke'
By March last year, Harr felt like more than Julio's immigration attorney. She had become protective, worrying that he was too naive to thrive in a U.S. high school, worrying that junk food was making his face break out. She would no longer accept payment. She worried about losing his case, about how he would become easy prey for the gangs in El Salvador if he went back.
And that gave her an idea. She decided to gamble and file an asylum application for Julio based on fear of gang violence. Not here. But back in El Salvador.
Gangs operate throughout El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. One judge there testified that 30,000 gang members operate in the country, pitted against only 17,000 police officers.
Fear of gang persecution is a new kind of asylum claim. Only a handful have been granted, and Harr had never filed one.
To win any asylum claim, attorneys must prove that immigrants have a well-founded fear of persecution because of a political opinion, religious belief, nationality, ethnic origin or membership in a social group. To win a gang asylum case, an attorney must prove that teenage boys in El Salvador unwilling to join a gang constitute a social group.
In two virtually identical cases, two teenage boys were harassed at gunpoint or beaten and shot for refusing to join gangs and fled to the United States. One was granted asylum in San Antonio. The other was denied -- in Arlington by Judge Wayne R. Iskra, the same judge who had Julio's deportation case.
The pressure was on. The only option left was the Special Immigrant Juvenile visa. Harr needed to secure it before Julio turned 18, and the system was notoriously slow. So slow some children "aged out."
The first hurdle was family court in Fairfax.
Julio was an orphan, so proving he'd been "abandoned or neglected" shouldn't be difficult. The catch was getting the judge to declare him eligible for long-term foster care: He didn't need it -- Vilma and Jose Ramon already had legal custody -- but the paperwork would never go through without it.
Last August, Harr assembled a team to present the case.
It didn't go well.
The Fairfax judge's reaction: "I don't know what you're doing here."
Julio drove with Vilma and Jose Ramon back to Springfield. "Don't cry," Vilma, 32, hushed her godson. "Boys don't cry."
She mixed flour and water and began patting perfectly round tortillas for dinner. "If it is illegal for me to help him, then put me in jail," she sighed to the ceiling.
They went back in September. Harr's friend, family court lawyer Mina Ketchie, and a court-appointed guardian ad litem, Nader Hasan, pleaded Julio's case, encouraging the judge "to override legal technicalities."
The judge agreed.
In December, Julio made it to the next step: He was granted an interview with the Citizenship and Immigration Service. Harr was stunned. She has had other clients waiting since 2000 just to get this interview. "This was a fluke," Harr said.
Julio then was fingerprinted, vaccinated and had a physical exam.
One day in January, his visa arrived, unheralded, in the mail.
An Abundance of Dreams
It was time to go back to immigration court, to get the deportation order dropped and his illegal status "adjusted."
On Feb. 27, with his 18th birthday barely two weeks away, Julio walked home from school and changed into the first formal clothes he'd worn in his life. Vilma Rivera bought them for his first Holy Communion, which he'll receive next month.
Vilma put on her best suit. They passed the Supermercado on Backlick Road and the Korean Church on Columbia Pike on their way to immigration court in Arlington.
Harr rushed in. By this time, she had six other juvenile clients with stories like Julio's -- one a 16-year-old Guatemalan who'd come north to work for his family because his father was ill, and the rest youths younger than 16 whose parents have had Temporary Protected Status since 1999 and no way of bringing them into the United States legally.
But they didn't have the one thing that wound up making Julio legal. "They're not orphans," Harr said. "They were coming north to reunite with their parents." All, she said, most likely will be deported.
In the small immigration courtroom, adorned with posters of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, Julio took the stand. He dutifully recounted the deaths in his life.
Then the government attorney, Rafael Choi, asked whether he liked school. "Very much so."
He asked what Julio would like to do with his life. "My dream is to finish high school, go to a university and have a career."
The attorney paused. Julio, his ears red, his face hopeful, hunched on the stand.
"Feel free to dream, sir," Choi said finally. "I have no further questions."
In 2011, Julio Argueta may apply for U.S. citizenship.