Monday, December 21, 2009
ICE Agents' Ruse Operations
By Jacqueline Stevens December 17, 2009
Guatemalans in the Boston area are seeing spies infiltrating factories, buses with tinted windows taking away unidentifiable co-workers, and men with guns grabbing their neighbors. For these survivors of state violence, it's a traumatic reminder of the very thing they thought they had left behind. Twenty-six-year-old Julia, arrested in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid, said, "If they are taking children away and everything, then for me, that's a second war." She told her story in interviews with Professors Brinton Lykes and Dan Kanstroom of Boston College's Post-Deportation Human Rights Project.
Thirteen of the fifteen Guatemalans in the town of Chimaltenango who had organized a group on behalf of loved ones picked up by ICE in the US could not locate them. These Guatemalans, in meetings with Lykes and Kanstroom, also spontaneously brought up the decades-long civil war that ended in 1996, during which 200,000 were killed and thousands vanished. A woman who lost her son and husband in the war and who was desperate to find her grandson asked the two professors, "Are they being disappeared?"The US government is not sending out death squads. But the Guatemalans are onto something. According to an unnamed ICE official responding to questions sent by e-mail, ICE agents regularly impersonate civilians and rely on other tricks, some of which are illegal, in order to arrest longtime US residents who have no criminal history. I found incidents in which ICE agents posed as OSHA inspectors, insurance agents and religious workers. The effect is to corrode trust in the government, neighbors--and even Mormons.
Last summer, a woman came to the office of Marina Lowe, an ACLU attorney in Salt Lake City, saying she believed that ICE agents dressing as Mormon missionaries had been to her house. Lowe's client noticed that the missionaries lacked the black name-tags she'd always seen them wear, and behaved in other ways inconsistent with missionary protocol, including entering her home while her husband was absent. After she confirmed that he lived there, they left. The next day, ICE agents arrived and arrested her husband.
Lowe realized that the woman's husband had been in the sights of ICE undercover agents when she called a phone number the woman gave her. The woman told Lowe that a man purporting to be an insurance investigator had left the number with her earlier. The man who picked up the phone when Lowe called told her he worked for the federal government. When Lowe asked why the federal government had an interest in insurance, the caller admitted to being an ICE agent. As for the missionaries, Lowe said that a colleague of hers described similar ICE missionary disguises, reported in community meetings in Utah County, about an hour south.
When Aaron Tarin, the immigration attorney now representing the husband of the woman who came to see Lowe, called the local ICE office, the ICE supervisor's exonerating evidence against the accusation was that such an action would be "political suicide" and "stupid." Tarin, himself a Mormon, said, "If this gets out it could have a catastrophic effect on missionaries' work in Utah, and it can really put missionaries in danger. Aliens could get hostile and offensive."
In response to a question about whether it was consistent with government policy for ICE agents to impersonate religious workers, the anonymously written ICE e-mail explained that impersonating religious officials is part of "ruse operations" and justified this as a "tool that enhances officer safety."
But "this is unconstitutional. It is a direct interference with the First Amendment rights of people to freely practice their religion," said Jennie Pasquarella, an ACLU staff attorney in Los Angeles, who cited a 1989 Ninth Circuit decision holding that it was unconstitutional for federal agents to infiltrate churches in their efforts to thwart the sanctuary movement. Among the attorneys suing the government, she pointed out, was Janet Napolitano, now Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
A ruse operation about five years ago still rankles Kentucky attorney Julia Thorne. Thorne received a phone call from a man saying he was with a courier service, wanting to confirm her address. Shortly after that, one of her clients, a Polish horse teaser living in the area since 1993, received a call from a man who identified himself as "Bill, the new guy in Julia's office" and asked the client to stop by Thorne's office and sign some papers--despite the fact that Thorne works alone. Two ICE agents were waiting and arrested him in the lobby. Thorne, eight floors above, had no idea until she received a call from her client in ICE custody.
When Thorne complained to the Louisville ICE office, she was told, "No, your client's making that up. We said we were a courier service." When she asked, "How did he happen to show up in my lobby when you were there?" they said it didn't happen.
Thorne worried about the effect on her practice: "What if this gets out? People will say, 'Don't go to that attorney. ICE stands in her lobby waiting for clients to come in,'" but didn't pursue it. "If I gave them too much trouble they could go through my client list. Who knows what they would do? They're lying through their teeth, and there's nothing I can do about it. I'm powerless because they could hurt people that I'm supposed to be taking care of. I felt so violated that they would use me to get my clients." (Thorne now works for the Presbyterian Church and no longer has this concern.)
The anonymously written ICE e-mail stated that impersonating attorneys is also consistent with ICE "ruse operations," but claimed this particular ruse is not used routinely. Ruses, the official wrote, "prevent violators from fleeing, thereby allowing for a safe arrest that does not place the violator, the arresting officers or innocent bystanders at risk."
At other times, immigration law enforcement agents deceptively rely on the authority of their uniforms to conduct interrogations even though people aren't obligated to answer. On August 31, 2009, Border Patrol agents marched onto a Greyhound bus in Twin Falls, Idaho, 450 miles from Canada, and pulled off for questioning "only those who looked brown," Aaron Tarin explained, after which they "unlawfully interrogated them and locked them up in a facility thousands of miles away from home."
According to Mark Qualia, a Border Patrol agent and spokesperson, agents are routinely conducting "transportation checks" across the country. He mentioned Abilene, Texas (400 miles from Mexico), and Albuquerque, New Mexico (266 miles from Mexico), as other examples. Qualia justified these checks by comparing a bus station in Twin Falls, Idaho, to the St. Louis airport as a destination for international flights. He said that the sites are selected based on reports of "undocumented aliens living in this location," not recent arrivals. Spokesperson Mike Emge said Border Patrol agents in Twin Falls picked buses for inspection that were scheduled to be in the station for at least thirty minutes.
These actions are "clearly illegal," said Nancy Morawetz, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University Law School. She explained that border patrol agents are only authorized to search for people who have "just entered," adding, "It's bad enough they're doing this 100 miles from the border, but I haven't heard of them doing this 450 miles from the border."
Under the Obama administration, ICE is moving away from workplace raids, popular among anti-immigrant activists, and relying more heavily on targeted stealth operations. Lykes, the Boston researcher, explained that this decision may seem more politically palatable, but the effect is to "send the operations underground: the door-to-door arrests send a shudder through the immigrant community, but without the dominant community finding out."
http://bit.ly/7xGCci
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Immigrant crimes: Who deserves deportation?
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer Tuesday, December 15, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO -- Courts on two fronts looked for boundaries Monday on an important question of federal immigration law: What crimes are so serious that they require deportation for any noncitizen who commits them?A federal appeals court ruled in a case from Solano County that statutory rape doesn't always require deportation. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to decide whether a legal immigrant in Texas must be deported because of a second misdemeanor conviction for drug possession.
Both cases involve a law signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 that requires deportation of any immigrant, legal or illegal, who commits an "aggravated felony," a category of crimes that courts are still trying to define. It includes some drug and sex crimes that are misdemeanors - punishable by no more than a year in jail - rather than felonies.
If a noncitizen has committed such a crime, "the judge can't take into consideration (U.S.) military service, the effect on a U.S. citizen spouse, parent or kids, or how long (the immigrant has) been here," said Benita Jain of the Immigrant Defense Project, which filed arguments with the Supreme Court in the drug case.
Immigrants convicted of other crimes can be also be deported if a judge decides they are dangerous and do not qualify for exemptions based on such factors as family hardships.
The Solano County case involves Luis Pelayo-Garcia, 42, of Vacaville, who entered the United States illegally from Mexico in 1985 at age 17. He was on the verge of gaining legal residency in 1998 when officials learned that he had recently been convicted of statutory rape.
According to his lawyer, Gloria Martinez-Senftner, Pelayo was working at a restaurant and raising three young children after his wife left him, and took a co-worker into his home along with her husband and daughter.
At age 29, he became involved with the daughter and intended to marry her, believing she was 18, his lawyer said. But when the girl became pregnant, hospital employees learned she was only 15 and called police.
Immigration judges said Pelayo's crime was an aggravated felony and ordered him deported, but they were overruled Monday by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
The federal law defines "sexual abuse of a minor" as an aggravated felony. But California's statutory rape law, prohibiting anyone older than 21 from having sex with a person under 16, does not require proof of physical or psychological abuse for conviction, the court said in a 3-0 ruling.
The Supreme Court case involves Jose Carachuri-Rosendo, who entered the United States with his family as a child and has been a legal resident since 1993. He pleaded guilty in Texas to misdemeanor marijuana possession in 2004 and pleaded no contest a year later to misdemeanor possession of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax without a prescription.
A federal appeals court ordered Carachuri deported, citing a federal law that allows any repeat drug offender to be prosecuted as a recidivist, which is defined as an aggravated felony even if the crimes were misdemeanors.
Carachuri, who was not charged as a recidivist in Texas, appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to decide his case by June.
The case is Carachuri-Rosendo vs. Holder, 09-60. E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
Agency, advocates assail ICE on detainee transfers
By SUSAN CARROLL Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Alejandro Sibaja and his wife, Iris Lopez-Sibaja. Now a legal resident of the U.S., he spent 15 months in the ICE system.
After Alejandro Sibaja was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Houston 15 months ago, he was transferred six times and finally ended up in Haskell, north of Abilene.
By the time an immigration judge in Dallas granted Sibaja a green card last Wednesday, his wife, Iris Lopez-Sibaja said she had spent countless hours trying to track him through the nation's troubled immigration detention network, which faced criticism on Wednesday from government auditors and immigrant rights advocates for resulting in haphazard detainee transfers.
“It was tough. It was harder on my kids, though,” Lopez-Sibaja said. “They were the ones always asking where their dad was.”
In separate reports released Wednesday, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security and the nonprofit organization Human Rights Watch criticized the controversial and increasingly common practice of transferring immigration detainees to detention centers far from their families and attorneys.
The OIG report found that ICE frequently fails to follow its own established procedures for detainee transfers, creating hardships for immigration detainees. The shuffling of immigration detainees from center to center, frequently because of a lack of bed space, has resulted in errors, delays and confusion for detainees, their attorneys, their relatives and the immigration court system, auditors found.
Cases, families hurt
ICE officials issued a statement Wednesday saying the agency is in the process of overhauling the immigration detention system and plans to make reforms that will reduce the number of detainee transfers.
The Human Rights Watch report, which was based on data obtained from ICE through a Freedom of Information Act request, found that the agency made 1.4 million detainee transfers from 1999 through 2008, with the numbers growing significantly in the past few years.
Texas, which houses the largest share of the nation's immigration detainees, led the U.S. both in terms of sending and receiving immigrant detainees, accounting for more than 334,000 total transfers, the report found.
Alison Parker, deputy director for Human Rights Watch in the U.S., said the transfers often jeopardize detainees' court cases, separating them from their attorneys and frequently sending them to remote locations, such as rural Texas, where they have a slimmer chance of finding an immigration lawyer to represent them.
The court cases also may suffer because detainees are separated from the evidence or witnesses they may need for deportation or asylum hearings, Parker said.
Attorneys and immigrant advocates conceded that some transfers are inevitable and may be necessary to meet the specialized needs of detainees or to prepare immigrants for removal from the U.S. But some expressed concern about the growth of transfers based on a lack of bed space.
Timothy Hart, a Houston immigration attorney, said he recently had a client transferred from Houston to Oakdale, La. Several clients in the past year were sent to Atlanta, and one ended up in Pennsylvania, he said.
Houston immigration attorney Steven Villarreal said he had to stop representing Sibaja after he was transferred from Houston and ended up in Haskell.
“I told the family it would be too expensive,” Villarreal said, factoring in the plane tickets and hotel bills for hearings and the trial. “I had to refer him to another attorney up there.”
“It happens all the time,” Villarreal said of the transfers.
Sibaja, 33, was picked up in Houston on a bad check warrant in August 2008 and turned over to immigration officials, who found he had a conviction as a teenager for aggravated robbery. Sibaja, who came to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 12 or 13 years old, was put into removal proceedings.
Moved again and again
He was transferred first from Houston to Conroe, then from Conroe to Mississippi just before Hurricane Ike hit. Then Sibaja was sent back to Houston before being transferred to Amarillo and then to Big Spring. Eventually, he ended up in Haskell, and his case was assigned to the immigration court in Dallas.
At first, Sibaja's wife made the seven-hour drive to visit him every other week. But with two kids and a house slipping into foreclosure in Houston, she said she eventually cut the visits back to once a month, and then to once every other month.
Lopez-Sibaja said her husband's detention was hardest on their son, who was 3 when his father was first detained, and their daughter, who celebrated her sixth and seventh birthdays without him.
On Nov. 25, an immigration judge granted Sibaja lawful permanent resident status based on his seven-year marriage to Lopez-Sibaja, a U.S. citizen, and the hardship his deportation would cause for his children. He was home in Houston in time for a Thanksgiving turkey dinner.
“It was a long, emotional and tough journey,” Lopez-Sibaja said. “Sometimes now when I look at him, I can't believe he's here.”
http://bit.ly/7ZNUpc
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Immigration Detention System Lapses Detailed
Growing numbers of noncitizens, including legal immigrants, are held unnecessarily and transferred heedlessly in an expensive immigration detention system that denies many of them basic fairness, a bipartisan study group and a human rights organization concluded in reports released jointly on Wednesday.
Confirmation of some of their critical conclusions came separately from the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general, in an investigation that found detainee transfers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement were so haphazard that some detainees arrived at a new detention center without having been served a notice of why they were being held, or despite a high probability of being granted bond, or with pending criminal prosecutions or arrest warrants in the previous jurisdiction.
The bipartisan group, the Constitution Project, whose members include Asa Hutchinson, a former under secretary of homeland security, called for sweeping changes in agency policies and amendments to immigration law, including new access to government-appointed counsel for many of those facing deportation.
In its report, the human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, revealed government data showing 1.4 million detainee transfers from 1999 to 2008, most of them since 2006. The transfers are accelerating, the report found, with tens of thousands of longtime residents of cities like Philadelphia and Los Angeles being sent to remote immigration jails in Texas and Louisiana, far from legal counsel and the evidence that might help them win release.
“ICE is increasingly subjecting detainees to a chaotic game of musical chairs, and it’s a game with dire consequences,” said Alison Parker, deputy director in the United States for the human rights group, and author of its report. The data underlying the report was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of Syracuse University, which issued its own report.
The inspector general’s investigation found that the consequences of haphazard transfers include a loss of access to legal counsel and relevant evidence; additional time in detention; and “errors, delays and confusion for detainees, their families, legal representatives” and the immigration courts.
Some detainees were transferred with files lacking a photo and a security classification, field inspectors found in work conducted from October 2008 to February.
Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of Homeland Security, said the agency would issue advisories reminding field offices of 10-year-old national detention standards that require a review of a detainee’s “alien file” before any transfer, and reinforcing the need to coordinate with immigration courts.
In August, the Obama administration announced ambitious plans to overhaul immigration detention, a disjointed network that relies heavily on private prisons and county jails. But taken together, the three reports underscore the gap between the plans and the problems on the ground in a system that, according to the inspector general, is estimated to be detaining more than 442,000 people a year — more than double the number in 2003, ICE’s first year of operation.
John T. Morton, director of the immigration agency, envisions a “truly civil detention system” shaped by more centralized agency control. In contrast, the Constitution Project recommends shrinking the use of detention, in part by adding more constitutional safeguards required in the criminal justice system.
“None of the recommendations being made should in any way compromise national security,” Mr. Hutchinson said Wednesday in an interview before he presented the report at the National Press Club in Washington. “It simply allows for a more humane and more efficient system.”
Immigration law is complex, and the deprivation of liberty is quite similar to the situation in other settings that require court-appointed counsel for the indigent. But 60 percent of noncitizens face deportation without a lawyer, and transfers compound the problem, the reports said.
The immigration agency has said it uses transfers to deal with an imbalance in the number of detention beds at various locations. But the TRAC analysis shows that the number of transfers has grown much more rapidly than the detention population. It found that in the first six months of the 2008 fiscal year, 53 percent of detainees were transferred at least once, and that one in four were transferred multiple times, a fivefold increase since 1999.
Though transfers occur in almost every state, the data show that the jurisdiction receiving the most transferred detainees is the Federal Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, covering Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — which is widely known for decisions hostile to the rights of noncitizens and has the worst ratio of immigration lawyers to detainees, the human rights report said.
A strong case against deportation sometimes simply evaporates in such a transfer, the report said. It cited a Jamaican New Yorker transferred to Texas after three months in detention in New York and New Jersey.
Immigration authorities contended that he should be deported based on two prior convictions for drug possession.
In New York, his drug misdemeanors were not considered an “aggravated felony,” and based on the man’s 22 years of legal residency and strong family relationships in the United States, he would have been eligible for “cancellation of removal,” a form of relief from deportation. In Texas, he was barred from relief based on Fifth Circuit rulings, and deported.
The bipartisan group said the agency makes it too hard for people to avoid detention while challenging deportation. It recommended a significant easing in the burden of proof, and a hardship waiver from mandatory detention for lawful permanent residents.
In what it called “an aspirational goal,” it recommended that where free counsel is not available, all indigent noncitizens in standard deportation proceedings have access to a government-paid lawyer. It also urged Congress to give immigration judges discretion to appoint counsel, and to require a lawyer in certain cases, including those involving unaccompanied children and the mentally ill.
Mr. Hutchinson said that the immigration agency could make many other changes immediately, including some that would “correct some potential unfairness in the system” unintentionally left by his own efforts when he was in office.
According to the Human Rights Watch report, a memorandum Mr. Hutchinson issued in 2004 is now used as a loophole to hold detainees for weeks without giving them notice of why the government is seeking to deport them. “This can certainly be tightened up and narrowed,” Mr. Hutchinson said.
http://bit.ly/6lwqxC
Start-up Visas Can Jump-Start the Economy
Immigrant entrepreneurs are an engine of jobs and growth. We need more of them.
By PAUL KEDROSKY AND BRAD FELD
While fast-growing companies have long been the main source of new jobs and innovation, this country makes it outrageously difficult for immigrants to launch new companies here. This doesn't make any sense. After all, Google, Pfizer, Intel, Yahoo, DuPont, eBay and Procter & Gamble are all former start-ups founded by immigrants. Where would this country be today without their world-changing innovations?
Immigrants have not only founded big, well-known companies. Foreign-born residents made up just 12.5% of the U.S. population in 2008. But nearly 40% of technology company founders and 52% of founders of companies in Silicon Valley.
Yet we don't seem to care. We send recent, foreign-born university science and engineering graduates back to their own countries after their student visas expire—unless these creative sorts are willing to spend some of the most entrepreneurial years of their lives working in a big company under an H-1B visa after they finish their studies.
For those who studied elsewhere, but who nonetheless want to bring their job-creating ideas here, American policies treat them—the job-creating, trouble-making innovators that they are—as a cross between deadbeats and queue-jumpers. Why can't they wait in line like everyone else to get a visa in five years or so? What's their hurry?
Their hurry is Joseph Schumpeter's hurry: They want to hustle out and disrupt markets when the opportunity arises.
In the 21st century those opportunities don't wait for our interminable, employment-based visa programs. As a result rather than saying "Come and create jobs here" we, in effect, tell them to shove off. Come back when you have a few million in sales— at which point they will be rooted elsewhere and creating jobs somewhere else.
That needs to end now. Immigrants who come here to create companies create jobs. We need the jobs.
One good idea to make this process easier is to create a new visa for entrepreneurs, something that is increasingly being called by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and angel investors a "start-up visa." It might work like this: If immigrant entrepreneurs want to start a company in the U.S. and are able to raise a moderate amount of money (perhaps as little as $125,000) from an accredited U.S.-based venture capital firm or qualified U.S.-based angel investors, we should let them start a company here. It could be a couple of founders with an idea—that's it. We would give visas to the founders and welcome them in to our country.
Would it work every time? Of course not. It would fail more often than not. Start-ups often fail.
But having failed, the immigrant entrepreneurs could try again, and again. And as long as they are trying, raising money, creating jobs, and making sales, we would let them stay here. Founders of new companies are precious for a vibrant economy, and we should welcome them. Indeed, the country would be better served to find more of them.
Some will say a start-up visa program will be abused. They will say that it will become a way to end-run immigration rules, to jump the queue if you have money.
There are at least two answers to these objections. First, to get such a visa you would have to raise money from real investors. Second, Canada and other countries already allow entrepreneurs to start a company in their country. Shouldn't the U.S. stop worrying so much about keeping these people out, and start worrying about bringing them in?
We also think science and engineering graduates should get visas stapled to their diplomas. You complete your higher education here, you get to stay so that you can get out and create jobs, innovate, and grow the economy. Uncle Sam wants you, if you're a prospective entrepreneur.
The U.S. remains one of the most attractive countries for entrepreneurs. It has a culture of risk taking, capital formation, and an economic dynamism that is the envy of the world. This gives us a competitive edge that we should not let slip through our fingers.
Mr. Kedrosky is a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation and an investor. Mr. Feld is a managing director at Foundry Group, a Boulder, Colo.,-based venture capital firm that invests in start-up companies in the U.S.
http://tinyurl.com/ykwoazj
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Student group fights deportation of peers
By DANIEL SHOER ROTH
The students' efforts were so quick and efficient that after just a few days of being held at an immigration detention center, brothers Jesús and Guillermo Reyes were set free.
With the help of digital technology and a spirit of solidarity, this group of students -- U.S. citizens and immigrants alike, with or without documents -- showed how unity can be stronger than a judge's order in the cause of justice.
In Miami, where activism for one's convictions is scarce -- and youth are pigeonholed, often for good reason, as superficial and materialistic -- the group Students Working for Equal Rights (SWER), which was behind the effort to free the Reyes brothers, gives one hope.
As in the case of Colombian brothers Juan and Alex Gómez, who almost were deported in 2007, the student friends of the undocumented Reyes brothers organized the community to pressure immigration officials and South Florida's members of Congress.
This time, fortunately, they achieved results quickly.
``We focus our strategy on community colleges that are open to everyone, immigrants and citizens alike,'' said SWER organizer José Luis Marante. ``For us, it's unsettling to know that there are young people who talk just like we do, have the same ambitions, but they can't move up in society. That's the paradox.''
Marante, a 26-year-old Cuban American, is part of what sociologists have classified as the Millennial Generation, born between 1980 and 1995, well-versed in digital technology and supportive of progressive ideas.
These young people rally to the cause of their undocumented classmates because they see them as equals and not as violators of the law, since they came to this country as young children with their parents, grow up here and speak English fluently.
SWER is part of the Florida Immigrant Coalition and was founded in 2005 when its members could be counted on one hand and they would meet in friends' homes. Now the student group has 13 college chapters in Florida.
One of the founders is Gaby Pacheco.
Pacheco is a 24-year-old Ecuadoran with a student visa whose family was detained in 2006 for not having their paperwork in order.
On Nov. 14 Pacheco received a call telling her a student from Miami Dade College had been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The next day, Sunday, she found out her friend Jesús Reyes, who like her had been student president at Miami Dade College's Kendall campus, was the one in trouble.
With experience earned in other cases the group has tackled, Pacheco and her SWER companions started a Facebook page to collect signatures.
In the process they found out that Kelly Vargas, a childhood friend of the Reyes brothers, had collected 600 signatures at El Rey Jesús (Christ the King) church in Tamiami.
``Monday and Tuesday we didn't do much because the priority was to get a lawyer who would represent the brothers,'' Pacheco said.
The Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami took charge of the case and won a reprieve: a one-year deferral of the brothers' removal order.
By Wednesday, ``we stopped our lives,'' Pacheco said, to organize a demonstration held Thursday, which was followed by an evening vigil.
``This is a group with positive energy. We don't work for our ego, because we know that what we're doing is more important than our own selves,'' she said.
When Guillermo and Jesús, Venezuelans ages 21 and 25, were free to leave detention on Friday, our community -- and especially their classmates -- celebrated another victory.
http://bit.ly/7rDben
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