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Monday, February 22, 2010
Friday, February 5, 2010
Monday, February 1, 2010
Undocumented Immigrants and Health Care: A Hard Choice for a Wife and Mother
Norma Angelica, who asked that her face not be shown, and her daughter Nicole. (Photo: Valeria Fernández)
PHOENIX, Arizona — Living as an undocumented immigrant in Arizona sometimes means making difficult choices.
Norma Angelica, an undocumented migrant who asked that her last name be withheld, knows this firsthand. She faces one of those life-changing decisions – should she stay in Arizona, where her four children were born, or should she go back to Mexico and care for her ailing husband?
Tragedy struck Norma’s family at a vulnerable time.
It began when her husband Martin, 43, had a stroke. He had suffered from high blood pressure all his life, but lately he’d been working more as a landscaper, trying to save money. He was sick with the flu, and one day Norma found him on the floor, paralyzed.
On January 5, Martin was admitted to the Maricopa Medical Center, one of the public hospitals that care for uninsured and low-income residents in central Phoenix.
“They told me the worst: that he could die, or he could stay in a vegetative state,” said Norma, also 43. “They told me to prepare myself.”
But Martin stabilized and regained consciousness. That’s when his wife found out that the hospital could no longer care for him. They told her arrangements would have to be made to send him back to his native Mexico.
“Because he doesn’t have documents and he’s not a citizen, they can’t treat him here,” she said. “Mexico has to take care for him, I’ve been told, because he’s from Mexico.”
Norma is also worried about Martin Jr., their 7-year-old son, who suffers from a birth defect known as spina bifida. It’s a type of neural tube defect that affects the brain and spine, causing paralysis and learning disabilities. Martin Jr. needs constant care and weekly visits to a variety of medical experts including neurologists and orthopedists.
“I feel desperate, in part for him and in part for my son. I don’t want my husband to have to go to Mexico. And I don’t want to bring my son to Mexico,” she said.
Norma and Martin are not legally married, but she considers herself his wife after eight years of living together. They have four children together, all of them born in the U.S.; the oldest is 11, the youngest is a three month old infant.
Social workers at Maricopa Medical Center are working with the family to find alternatives, said spokesman Michael Murphy.
“It’s a very difficult and painful situation,” said Murphy. “We are trying to work on a solution with her.”
Murphy said that Martin will need long term care 24/7 and the hospital is not set up for that type of care. Also, because he doesn’t qualify for health insurance, it’s hard to find a facility that would admit him, he added.
“It’s expensive care, that’s why it’s such a difficult, awful situation,” Murphy said. Sending him back to a hospital in Mexico is one of the options they are contemplating, he acknowledged. But he didn’t know how soon they’ll come to a decision.
The type of treatment that Martin needs is expensive. Norma said that the artificial breathing equipment alone could cost up to $800 per day and requires a $20,000 deposit to rent it. There could be other expenses: for example, if her husband needs to be taken to the emergency room again. These would be difficult costs for her to bear since she has practically no savings.
As the hospital looks for alternatives, Norma weighs her options. When she met with authorities at the Mexican Consulate in Phoenix, they told her the choices are limited. They suggested that the best one would be work with the hospital to arrange Martin’s transfer to a medical facility closer to his relatives in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Martin’s case is not uncommon. When an undocumented immigrant needs emergency care, hospitals in Arizona provide it because it is required under federal law.
But because undocumented immigrants don’t qualify for the state’s subsidized insurance and many employers don’t provide health coverage, the only alternative is to get help from a charity or pay for treatment in a long-term facility.
Hospitals like the Maricopa Medical Center often make arrangements for the patient to be sent to his or her country of origin.
At times, Norma thinks that going to Mexico may be the answer. But her thoughts go back to her son Martin Jr.
“It’s going to be very expensive for me to take care of my child if I go to Mexico,” she said. “What if I have to take him to the emergency room?”
She wishes she could talk to her husband about these things, that she could consult with him at such a difficult time.
He was afraid for a long time that if he were to get sick he might get deported, she said. He feared the laws passed against undocumented immigrants in Arizona and the presence of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose deputies arrest undocumented immigrants.
He was especially concerned about a new law that took effect in November. The bill requires states employees to report undocumented immigrants that request public benefits, but it doesn’t apply to emergency services.
“U.S. politics are to blame for this. Because they’re really putting a lot of roadblocks on us,” she said. “If you are not a citizen you can’t do this and that. If you don’t have documents you can’t come out into the light.”
She’s been working all her life, and paying taxes she can’t claim, she said. She came from the Mexican state of Guerrero in 1977.
“I’ve never asked for anyone to give me anything for free,” Norma said.
Martin is awake now and he communicates with his wife through hand gestures.
“I don’t want to tell him what’s happening,” she said. She has also been at a loss of words to explain it to their children.
A week ago she asked him if he would like to go back to Mexico and he said yes.
Just a few days ago she asked again. And the answer was no.
“I want him to stay here. I wish someone would help me so he’ll stay here. It’s for my children, for nothing else but them. They’re the ones that will suffer,” she said. “It’s very sad for me because I wish we could all stay together.”
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Sunday, January 31, 2010
For Haitians in the U.S. Illegally, Some Help
Stecy Antoine, left, and Reina Boaz, center, work with a Haitian woman at a free legal clinic in New York on Thursday.
Two years ago, at age 17, Stephanie Germain arrived in New York from Haiti, overstayed her tourist visa and slipped into the parallel universe of the illegal immigrant. While she managed to learn English, graduate from high school and enroll in Queensborough Community College, her immigration status ensured that she would have to live largely out of the government’s view.
On Thursday, however, she took her first tentative steps out of the shadows, attending a free legal clinic concerning the special immigration status the Obama administration has offered to Haitians living illegally in the United States.
The new designation, called temporary protected status and announced on Jan. 15, three days after the earthquake in Haiti, protects recipients from deportation for 18 months and allows them to work. The status is offered from time to time to immigrants who are unable to return safely to their home countries because of armed conflict or natural disasters.
Ms. Germain, who has been living with her godfather in Richmond Hill, Queens, and receiving financial support from her parents back in Port-au-Prince, viewed the opportunity as nothing less than a release, albeit temporary, from a kind of imprisonment. “This allows me to live!” she exclaimed happily. “I can work, I can take care of myself, I can go to school.”
The government has estimated that the designation could cover at least 100,000 Haitians believed to be living in the United States illegally, in addition to about 30,000 Haitians who have already been ordered deported.
Legal organizations are organizing free, confidential clinics around the country to help Haitians understand the details of the designation and how to qualify for it. On Friday, Gov. David A. Paterson and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced the creation of the New York Haitian Earthquake Family Resource Center, which will provide support services. And the city will hold a clinic on applying for the special status on Saturday at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn.
The legal clinic on Thursday, sponsored by the City Bar Justice Center and the New York chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, was the largest in the city since the earthquake.
For three hours, dozens of Haitian immigrants filed through the grand foyer of the New York City Bar building in Midtown Manhattan, and up to two large conference rooms. There, more than 180 volunteer lawyers, paralegals and interpreters explained the new designation — in English, French and Creole — and helped fill out applications.
In all, 83 people came seeking help, a lower turnout than expected. Participants wondered whether some immigrants stayed away out of fear that the promise of confidentiality was not airtight; because of the cost of applying (as much as $470), or because of the location, a long commute from the densest concentrations of Haitians in Brooklyn and Queens.
“That was a big, open question for us, whether people would come to this site,” said Lynn Kelly, executive director of the Justice Center. But organizers decided that the Midtown location was most convenient to the greatest number of volunteer lawyers, she said.
Still, many clients who came seemed relieved, even exhilarated, to begin the process. Some said the new status would allow them to find legal work and help support relatives in Haiti. Others said they hoped to apply for government financial aid for college.
Nadia Exantus, 34, said she had been in the United States illegally since 2006, when she had to leave Port-au-Prince because she could not support her family. She left her two children with an aunt, flew to Mexico, and sneaked across the United States border on foot. Detained, then released, by immigration officials, she made her way to New York.
She has since worked as a baby sitter and a hair braider, and received financial help from a brother in New York. Meanwhile, the aunt caring for her children died in the earthquake.
Ms. Exantus said she hoped the new status would give her legal footing to bring the children, now 4 and 6, to the United States. “I’m living on hope,” she said.
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Friday, January 8, 2010
A Special Visa Program Benefits Abused Illegal Immigrants
She was 14 when her mother smuggled her into Los Angeles. She met her future husband, a legal resident, two years later.
A Guatemalan immigrant now has legal United States residency after helping the authorities prosecute her husband for abuse. She asked that her identity be withheld for fear of retaliation.
He had all the cards, and played them cruelly, as she recalls. He would not let her go to school or work, dragged his feet on supporting her citizenship request, and called her fat and ugly after she became pregnant.
She endured it all — until she caught him romancing a 13-year-old girl from their church choir. When she complained, he beat her bloody, tried to rape her, and fled, with the girl, to Arizona, she said in an affidavit that is now part of federal immigration records.
Today, he is in prison, and she is caring for her children in San Francisco, with a driver’s license and a legal job baby-sitting. Her legal status came about through what is known as a U visa — a humanitarian “island of niceness,” as one advocate called it, in a sea of restrictive United States immigration laws.
Victims of domestic violence are often deeply reluctant to press charges, fearing retaliation or simply hoping their abusers will change. The risk of deportation only escalates the aversion to go to the police. That is a main reason that Congress passed legislation in 2000, creating the U visa. It allows immigrants who have endured substantial mental or physical abuse and who cooperate with law enforcement officials to work legally and stay in the United States for up to four years while applying for permanent residence.
After nearly a decade of delays, federal officials began allowing the visas en masse only early last year, after sustained efforts from immigrant rights groups, particularly several based in Oakland and San Francisco. The pace of approvals has since stepped up, as has the controversy, with both defense lawyers and groups opposed to immigration contending that the process invites scams.
For millions of immigrants and their supporters, however, the program is truly an island of niceness, as Catherine Ward-Seitz, the regional immigration coordinator for Bay Area Legal Aid in San Francisco, put it. With a soured economy encouraging hostility at worst and apathy at best toward illegal immigrants, the U visas are a bittersweet consolation prize.
In a compassionate twist on the idea that felons should be imprisoned, victims who can show that guns (or knives or fists) were used against them can be released from the fear of deportation.
While victims of several specified crimes are eligible, at least three-fourths of the applicants for U visas to date, like the Guatemalan baby sitter, who asked that her name not be used for fear of retaliation from her spouse, say they have suffered domestic violence, said Chris Rhatigan, a spokeswoman for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Immigration lawyers said this was largely because of the prevalence of domestic violence in general.
Ending impunity in cases of domestic violence makes whole communities safer, proponents say.
“These are disclosure-driven crimes, meaning people have to come forth and report them; there’s no gunshot to bring it to our attention,” said Lt. Kevin Wiley, commander of the Oakland Police Department’s special victims unit, which certified 153 U visas last year.
“It’s all about building trust,” Lieutenant Wiley said, adding that police certification of the visas was a powerful tool in creating bonds among wary residents who have long been the silent victims of a range of crimes, like the robberies of illegal immigrants known on the streets as “amigo checkings.”
What is more, Lieutenant Wiley said, the police often discover that domestic violence offenders have multiple victims.
Congress approved an annual limit of 10,000 U visas. Yet the regulations that would put the law in force were not made final by the Department of Homeland Security until September 2007.
A few dozen U visas were approved in 2008. Then the pace increased. In the fiscal year ending last September, immigration officials approved 5,825. Another 2,244 were approved in October and November. More than 10,000 applications are pending.
Ms. Rhatigan said the long delay resulted mostly from the complexity of the new rules, although some immigration advocates say the change of administrations in Washington played a part.
Lawyers defending clients on the other side of the visa petitions worry that the incentives of a U visa are creating new wrongs as well as righting old ones.
Marin County’s deputy public defender, Tamara Chellam, argued that the U visas might create irresistible incentives for people to invent or exaggerate offenses. A recent client of Ms. Chellam is married to a woman who applied for a U visa while fighting her spouse for custody of their daughter. The woman testified that in early 2008, the defendant followed her to work at 5 a.m. and broke the window of her car. Although there were no other witnesses, the husband was convicted of stalking and assault. Ms. Chellam said she expected him to be deported on his release from prison.
A decade earlier, the woman had reported that her husband had abused her but subsequently said she wanted to drop charges, Ms. Chellam said. She applied for a U visa in 2007 on the basis of that incident, but court testimony revealed she had worried that it would not suffice because victims are required to cooperate continuously. Ms. Chellam said she suspected that the wife had tailored the 2008 incident to help support her subsequent successful application for a visa.
“The U visa offers a wonderful opportunity when used appropriately, but it can be lopsided and misused,” Ms. Chellam said. “If a person wants to get rid of a spouse fighting for custody, or a rival gang member, these visas are very convenient, while the people on the other side can lose everything: their children, their jobs, their liberty and their right to stay here.”
On the other hand, applicants for U visas tend to be unusually sympathetic, helping to explain why the law creating the visa gained nearly unanimous bipartisan support at the end of the Clinton administration.
“Undocumented immigrants are unbelievably vulnerable to abuse, exploitation and victimization because their fear of detection keeps them from reporting that victimization,” said Susan Bowyer, the managing lawyer for the Oakland office of the International Institute of the Bay Area. “It’s like they’re in a never-ending nightmare, where people kick them while they’re down because they are down.”
While struggling to break the bureaucratic logjam surrounding U visas, immigration lawyers and other advocates in this region, which is rich in both immigrants and immigrant advocates, formed a coalition. The group met regularly and communicated by frequently by e-mail to encourage one another, trade ideas and pressure immigration officials.
Keen pressure was brought in March 2007, when the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law in Los Angeles — joined by three Bay Area advocacy groups — filed a federal lawsuit in San Francisco against Citizenship and Immigration Services. The Bay Area groups included Ms. Bowyer’s team in Oakland, the Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach group in San Francisco and Catholic Charities CYO, also based in San Francisco.
The Bay Area has since taken a prominent position nationwide in winning approvals for visas, with 16 local advocacy groups gaining 773 visas for their clients — more than 12 percent of the national total.
Ms. Bowyer’s office alone claimed 148 approvals. She calls herself a “U-vangelist” and churns out long e-mail messages and reports late into the night.
But not everyone applauds her success.
“The U visa goes beyond what’s necessary — or what should be necessary — to get people’s cooperation,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for Immigration Reform. “Why should we have to provide incentives for people not here legally when we do nothing extra for people who are here legally?”
For the baby sitter from Guatemala, the idea of getting a U visa in return for cooperation played no role in her decision to go to the police. She had done so in 2003, six years before she sought a visa. When she later learned she could apply for the visa, it was more, she suggested, like a gift from a universe that now seemed just a little more kind.
“Of course, I would have preferred another way to stay here,” she said. “But this was the way it happened, and it was worth it.”
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Despite Aiding U.S., Iraqi Is Denied a Green Card
Nada Alkhaddar, shown with her son Mohamed in their North Side apartment, is struggling to get a green card for her husband.
Ahmed Alrais, center with back to camera, in an undated photo from Iraq, where he works as an interpreter for the Army.
CHICAGO — Nada Alkhaddar spends her days at the Muslim Women Resource Center helping refugees and immigrants deal with government and commercial bureaucracies that can make life in the United States seem about as easy as computing the Alternative Minimum Tax.
“We help anyone, Muslims or Christians, from here or anywhere in the city,” Ms. Alkhaddar said as she guided an Eastern European man through a long questionnaire from a local bank. She adjusted her hijab and smiled as she worked in an office overlooking Devon and Western Avenues, an Indo-Pakistani neighborhood just north and west of downtown.
Despite her skills at navigating the obstacles immigrants face, Ms. Alkhaddar cannot seem to help the person closest to her and her three children — her husband, Ahmed Alrais — who is trying to get a green card.
Mr. Alrais came to the United States in the spring of 2008 after his life had been threatened for working as an interpreter for the United States Army in Iraq. Unable to find a job during the recession and without a green card, he returned in February to the country he had fled to work again for the Army through a private contractor.
Federal officials at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, will not give Mr. Alrais credit for the time he has spent on a United States military base overseas so he can fulfill an American residency requirement to get the green card. His application was denied in November.
Mr. Alrais, 51, struggles to understand a system that would have given him a green card if he had stayed in the United States for the full year without a job, instead of working with American forces in Iraq.
“That’s confusing; that’s very confusing,” Mr. Alrais said Wednesday via Skype from northern Iraq. “We get hit by mortars, like, I don’t know, once or twice a month, and when we go out, we don’t know when we are going to be attacked, and sacrificing being here away from our families.”
Despite the turmoil and political controversy over how easily some immigrants enter the United States illegally, Mr. Alrais’s experience shows how formidable the challenges can be for many refugees and immigrants — even those with families in the United States and seemingly solid credentials.
“He serves the country with his life in such a dangerous place,” said Ms. Alkhaddar, 50, who keeps a purple folder full of government papers relating to her husband’s case at her apartment on Chicago’s North Side.
The folder contains documents like their marriage license, as well as letters of recommendation from Mr. Alrais’s military supervisors in Iraq.
“He has been very supportive of our presence, helped our soldiers and has been a loyal friend to us,” said Maj. James B. Phillips of the Army in one letter, which also described Mr. Alrais as “trustworthy and dependable.” Major Phillips worked with Mr. Alrais in 2003.
In an e-mail message this week from Iraq, Major Philips said Mr. Alrais was an outstanding interpreter whom he highly respected.
“The troops and I also liked him because when we first met he had a Mustang that he would drive to work every now and then,” the major said. “It was always nice to see a classic American car while deployed.”
Fred Tsao, policy director at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said Mr. Alrais’s ordeal to secure a green card was “crazy.”
“To go back and face the dangers while serving this country and then be denied a green card seems really unfair,” Mr. Tsao said. “It’s an awful deterrence to making a contribution to the country that took you in. Something is terribly wrong here.”
Ms. Alkhaddar and Mr. Alrais fled their home in Baghdad in 2006 after his work for the United States Army in 2003 and 2004 made him a target for Iraqis angered by the invasion.
“A lot of people were assassinated just because they had a contract working with the U.S. forces,” Mr. Alrais said.
A grocer refused to sell food to his youngest son, Mohamed. “He said, ‘We will never sell anything for you because of your father,’ ” Ms. Alkhaddar said. “He came home crying. They start kidnapping people. For our safety we moved.”
The family went to Egypt for two years, where they lived in a compound called Beverly Hills outside Cairo. They came to the United States as refugees in May 2008, as the recession was hitting the American job market.
Even though Mr. Alrais had the proper documentation for a refugee and was a chef trained in France, he could not find a good job in Chicago to support his family. He left the United States in February to work in Iraq as an interpreter with Global Linguist Solutions, a contractor based in Virginia that provides translators to the American military.
Mr. Alrais’s wife and children stayed behind, planning to apply for citizenship for the family after they had met the residency requirement of one year. May was their one-year anniversary, and Ms. Alkhaddar and the children were given green cards. But Mr. Alrais’s application was denied.
In a letter to Mr. Alrais in November, Donald P. Ferguson, the Chicago field office director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Mr. Alrais had not met the residency requirement because he had not been in the United States for a full year after he arrived. Because of his work with the military in Iraq, he was away from Feb. 19 until Sept. 11, 2009.
Mr. Ferguson wrote that being on an American territory on a military base in Iraq did not count toward residency. “The service is unable to consider your time working in Iraq to fulfill the physical presence requirement for adjustment of status purposes,” he wrote.
Mr. Ferguson cited another problem with the application: Mr. Alrais had given his power of attorney to his wife so she could apply for the green card for him while he was overseas. Ms. Alkhaddar submitted an Internal Revenue Service form showing she held his power of attorney, but the Department of Homeland Security does not accept that form as sufficient proof of power of attorney, Mr. Ferguson said.
Mr. Ferguson did not return phone calls requesting comment. Marilu Cabrera, an agency spokeswoman, said the agency would not comment on any specific cases.
Thomas Ragland, an immigration lawyer in Washington who previously worked for the Department of Justice and the Board of Immigration Appeals, said the immigration system could be impossible for the average person to handle.
“Even some average lawyers out there are not very good at navigating it,” Mr. Ragland said, “even though they charge for it.”
Mr. Ragland said Mr. Alrais, who plans to come to Chicago later this month to plead his case, deserved an advocate to help him get a green card, considering how members of Congress and the military had spoken about the importance of taking care of Iraqis who aid the armed forces.
Ms. Alkhaddar keeps in touch with her husband over her computer at home, telling him how the children are doing.
Their oldest son, Amro, 27, is a mechanic on Chicago’s South Side. Their daughter, Shahad, 21, is an interior design student at Harrington College downtown. Their youngest son, Mohamed, is a sophomore at Mather High School, where he plays football.
Mohamed, 17, dreams of being a Chicago policeman. “For America,” he said.
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