I had to copy and post .Well I did not know that just when you think your troubles are over and all you are waiting for GC in the mail ,things can turn ugly becouse you missed apointment with immigration officer.
In the year 2004 IG isued over 1,000,000, that's right one Million "Order of deportations " but not all was remuved,I gues it's big country out there.
Mother Defends Girl Swept Up in an Immigration Raid, Amid Terror Claims
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
The sister and mother of a 16-year-old Guinean girl who is being held by the authorities. F.B.I. agents have called her "an imminent threat."
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: April 15, 2005
Correction Appended
The tiny store is more like a corridor off the sidewalk than a shop, and its dangling wares - $3 scarves, trinkets, cellphone covers - shiver each time the subway rumbles by. At the store, in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, a 16-year-old Guinean girl named by the government as a potential suicide bomber helped her father make a living when she was not in school or caring for younger siblings in her family's apartment in East Harlem, the family says.
"She's a good girl, she's a family girl," her mother, 38, said, speaking in Fula through a translator on Wednesday evening as she struggled to serve customers and tend to her 6-month-old son.
The government suggests otherwise. The girl was seized along with her father in a dawn immigration raid on March 24 at their home. A popular 10th grader at Heritage High School in Manhattan, she is now in a maximum-security juvenile detention center in Berks County, Pa., officially as a result of an outstanding deportation order against her father, immigration officials say.
But according to a government document, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have asserted that she and a 16-year-old Bangladeshi girl arrested in Queens the same day are "an imminent threat to the security of the United States based on evidence that they plan to be suicide bombers." No evidence was cited in that document.
Federal officials will not comment on either case, and under an order of silence issued by an immigration judge, lawyers for the girls are not allowed to discuss any evidence disclosed to them by the government. The names of the girls are not being published because they are minors who have not been charged with a crime.
The girl's lawyer defended her as a cooperative witness who was not a terrorist.
"She was 18 months old when she came to America, and she was here, too, during 9/11," said Natasha Pierre, who was hired by Guinean immigrants two weeks after the girl's arrest to represent her. "She's just as concerned and scared of terrorists as the rest of us are."
Of her parents, who have been here for 15 years, Ms. Pierre added, "These are just hard-working, simple immigrants who are trying to make it in this country." Even their immigration troubles could be resolved, she maintained. Though neither the lawyer nor officials gave details, the Guinean girl's mother said that the father had been granted political asylum and that he might have missed an appointment as he was awaiting his green card. An immigration official acknowledged that if he had inadvertently missed an appointment, his case would have been closed as abandoned, and a deportation order eventually issued.
Representative Charles B. Rangel, a Democrat whose district includes Harlem, is demanding more information about the girl's case from Michael J. Garcia, who heads Immigration and Customs Enforcement, within the Department of Homeland Security. "No evidence has been given to justify her removal from the community," Mr. Rangel wrote in a letter to Mr. Garcia this week.
Among the unanswered questions is why the Pennsylvania center was chosen to hold the girls, who were roommates in their first weeks there but who had not met before their arrest, according to Troy Mattes, a lawyer for the Bangladeshi girl.
The detention center lost its federal contract to care for unaccompanied immigrant minors last year, after newspaper articles and a report by Amnesty International criticized the conditions as too punitive for young asylum-seekers who entered the United States without parents. Since 2002, such immigrants must be transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of Health and Human Services, for placement in foster care or with relatives.
But John McCormack, superintendent of the Berks County juvenile detention center, most of whose inmates have been accused of delinquency, said that the center is now also detaining some immigrant juveniles who do not fall into the "unaccompanied" category, under a contract with the Department of Homeland Security. He would not say how many such juveniles were being held at the center, which has 78 beds.
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Find more results for Immigration and Refugees and Children and Youth
In the year 2004 IG isued over 1,000,000, that's right one Million "Order of deportations " but not all was remuved,I gues it's big country out there.
Mother Defends Girl Swept Up in an Immigration Raid, Amid Terror Claims
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
The sister and mother of a 16-year-old Guinean girl who is being held by the authorities. F.B.I. agents have called her "an imminent threat."
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: April 15, 2005
Correction Appended
The tiny store is more like a corridor off the sidewalk than a shop, and its dangling wares - $3 scarves, trinkets, cellphone covers - shiver each time the subway rumbles by. At the store, in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, a 16-year-old Guinean girl named by the government as a potential suicide bomber helped her father make a living when she was not in school or caring for younger siblings in her family's apartment in East Harlem, the family says.
"She's a good girl, she's a family girl," her mother, 38, said, speaking in Fula through a translator on Wednesday evening as she struggled to serve customers and tend to her 6-month-old son.
The government suggests otherwise. The girl was seized along with her father in a dawn immigration raid on March 24 at their home. A popular 10th grader at Heritage High School in Manhattan, she is now in a maximum-security juvenile detention center in Berks County, Pa., officially as a result of an outstanding deportation order against her father, immigration officials say.
But according to a government document, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have asserted that she and a 16-year-old Bangladeshi girl arrested in Queens the same day are "an imminent threat to the security of the United States based on evidence that they plan to be suicide bombers." No evidence was cited in that document.
Federal officials will not comment on either case, and under an order of silence issued by an immigration judge, lawyers for the girls are not allowed to discuss any evidence disclosed to them by the government. The names of the girls are not being published because they are minors who have not been charged with a crime.
The girl's lawyer defended her as a cooperative witness who was not a terrorist.
"She was 18 months old when she came to America, and she was here, too, during 9/11," said Natasha Pierre, who was hired by Guinean immigrants two weeks after the girl's arrest to represent her. "She's just as concerned and scared of terrorists as the rest of us are."
Of her parents, who have been here for 15 years, Ms. Pierre added, "These are just hard-working, simple immigrants who are trying to make it in this country." Even their immigration troubles could be resolved, she maintained. Though neither the lawyer nor officials gave details, the Guinean girl's mother said that the father had been granted political asylum and that he might have missed an appointment as he was awaiting his green card. An immigration official acknowledged that if he had inadvertently missed an appointment, his case would have been closed as abandoned, and a deportation order eventually issued.
Representative Charles B. Rangel, a Democrat whose district includes Harlem, is demanding more information about the girl's case from Michael J. Garcia, who heads Immigration and Customs Enforcement, within the Department of Homeland Security. "No evidence has been given to justify her removal from the community," Mr. Rangel wrote in a letter to Mr. Garcia this week.
Among the unanswered questions is why the Pennsylvania center was chosen to hold the girls, who were roommates in their first weeks there but who had not met before their arrest, according to Troy Mattes, a lawyer for the Bangladeshi girl.
The detention center lost its federal contract to care for unaccompanied immigrant minors last year, after newspaper articles and a report by Amnesty International criticized the conditions as too punitive for young asylum-seekers who entered the United States without parents. Since 2002, such immigrants must be transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of Health and Human Services, for placement in foster care or with relatives.
But John McCormack, superintendent of the Berks County juvenile detention center, most of whose inmates have been accused of delinquency, said that the center is now also detaining some immigrant juveniles who do not fall into the "unaccompanied" category, under a contract with the Department of Homeland Security. He would not say how many such juveniles were being held at the center, which has 78 beds.
The New York Times Online Edition Special Offer: 1 Week Free
Continued
1 | 2 | Next>>
RELATED ARTICLES
A Mother Deported, and a Child Left Behind (November 24, 2004) $
World Briefing | Africa: Liberia: Refugees Start To Return (October 1, 2004)
Worst Violence in 2 Years Kills 28 Arabs and 3 Israelis (October 1, 2004) $
National Briefing | South: Florida: Suit On Elián Gonzalez Raid (August 26, 2004)
Find more results for Immigration and Refugees and Children and Youth