Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Do not pass Go
In post-9/11 America, immigrants can find themselves in jail and even deported for minor paperwork oversights of the sort many of us commit all the time
BY KRISTEN LOMBARDI


SINCE THE TERRORIST attacks of September 11, 2001, the US government is — understandably — ever more suspicious of foreign-born residents and visitors. The most recent example of this is the new US policy of fingerprinting visitors from certain countries, which received front-page coverage earlier this week. The government’s policy toward immigrants, however, flies under the public’s radar screen — yet it is far more pernicious. Just last month, for instance, the US Department of Homeland Security — which oversees the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureau — got slapped with a class-action federal lawsuit after scooping up thousands of immigrants for minor civil violations by unlawfully using a national criminal database to hunt them down. Meanwhile, here in Massachusetts, record numbers of legal and illegal immigrants are being held in ICE-rented jail cells across the state. Last August, the federal agency opened a detention wing at the South Bay Correctional Center, in Boston. Within weeks, the approximately 200-person cell block was filled to capacity.

Caught up in today’s hard-line climate are immigrants like Walter Arboleda Giron, 39, a slight, gentle man from Colombia. His journey to this country was rooted in fear and persecution; in late 1997, he arrived in Texas after guerrilla groups in his homeland tried to put Arboleda, a chemist, to work in the drug trade. When he refused, he received death threats. When the guerrillas tracked him down in Texas, he fled to Boston. Eventually, in 1999, he applied for political asylum. Here, Arboleda got a job as a biomedical technician and met his wife, Ximena, who is also chemist from Colombia. Over the past five years, as his asylum claim has made its way through the immigration process, he has become a prominent local activist for immigrant rights.

But on October 9, 2003, Arboleda’s hopes of winning asylum crumbled. That morning, he walked into the immigration office at the JFK Building, in Boston, only to be seized by ICE agents. Although he had a pending asylum appeal before the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, he was considered a "fugitive alien" by ICE — and thus subject to immediate deportation. Arboleda spent the next 66 days in an ICE-rented cell at Bristol County House of Corrections. On December 15, after he lost pleas for bail and a temporary stay in the US, the ICE shipped Arboleda back to Colombia. He became one of 166 Colombian immigrants deported from the US that day, forced to return to a war-torn nation where violence runs unchecked.

Today, Arboleda cannot quite fathom his current fate. "I’ve tried to understand why the ICE wanted to deport me," he says in a telephone interview from Bogotá — a city as foreign to him as it is to many Americans, since he grew up in a place more than 150 miles away, in Cali, Colombia. Worse still, Arboleda has yet to shake the sense of shame that comes with being caged up by his adopted country and then kicked out. "The most humiliating thing," he says, "is to be arrested just because you’re an immigrant."

XIMENA ESCOBAR, Arboleda’s wife, is similarly perplexed. On a cold, wet evening in December — just 48 hours after her husband’s deportation — the 33-year-old Colombian immigrant is sitting in her basement apartment in South Boston, riffling through pages of Arboleda’s immigration records. Short, squat, and deferential, Escobar speaks in near-impeccable English as she tells me about her husband’s plight. About how he was cuffed and shackled by ICE agents. About how he spent a frightful night with hardened offenders at Plymouth County House of Corrections. About how he languished in the Bristol jail for more than two months, locked up, with virtually no visitors — not even his wife, whose illegal status made it impossible for her to visit him.

"It was terrible for Walter," Escobar says. Ever since she met Arboleda — in the fall of 2000, at the Park Street T station — he has lived a stand-up life. While awaiting resolution of his asylum appeal, he secured a legal work permit. He landed a job as a chemist in Cambridge, where he worked long hours. He paid taxes. He even got involved in the cause of immigrant rights. In recent years, he organized the local Colombian-immigrant community for the Malden-based group Voices in Action. He has lobbied state and federal politicians on everything from amnesty to temporary protection for illegal aliens. In short, he became an active, responsible citizen. That he could end up being treated like a felon strikes Escobar as ironic. "Walter is not a criminal," she says. "He was always by-the-book."

In retrospect, it seems, Arboleda’s desire to play by the rules set off the chain of events leading to his current predicament. On that fateful morning of October 9, he had gone to the JFK Building to extend his work permit, which must be renewed yearly. He had filled out an application in June, he says, but never received a reply from immigration officials. By October, his work authorization had expired. After consulting with his attorney, Arboleda says, he went to the ICE office to straighten things out. "I went to fix the paperwork," he explains. "My lawyer said to me, ‘Don’t worry, Walter. You are okay. You will be fine.’" (Arboleda’s Boston-based attorney, Walter Gleason, declined to speak to the Phoenix about his client.)

Arboleda assumed his visit to the immigration office would be routine, and didn’t fully appreciate the risk at which he placed himself. At the time, his protected status as an asylum applicant had shaky standing. His June 1999 asylum claim hinged on his testimony that he fled his native Colombia after guerrilla groups threatened his life when he refused to manage their cocaine- and heroin-producing laboratories. (His story was featured in an October 2000 Phoenix article on local Colombian immigrants fighting for legal status. See "Catch-22," News and Features, October 13, 2000.) Five months later, in October 1999, his asylum claim was denied by a US immigration judge on a technicality: he had failed to file it within a year of entering the US.

Arboleda immediately appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). Yet more than three years would pass before the BIA determined his fate. In an order dated April 7, 2003, the BIA threw out Arboleda’s appeal, ruling the original decision had "accurately set forth the facts" of the case. The BIA gave Arboleda 30 days, until May 4, to voluntarily leave the country — or else. Even though Arboleda’s attorney worked the legal process for his client — petitioning the BIA to reconsider the case and filing an appeal of the BIA decision with the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit — the BIA’s dismissal meant that the deportation order against Arboleda was "final." Now, just six days after his federal appeal had been filed, he was walking into the JFK Building to renew his work permit.

When he approached a customer-service window, an immigration officer asked him to step aside. Arboleda waited for close to an hour before two ICE agents appeared. The agents, he recalls, told him he was a "fugitive" and "in hiding." He protested. "I said, ‘What do you mean? You know everything about me,’" he recalls. The ICE knew he was in this country under the "color of law," as asylum applicants’ status is called. The bureau knew where he lived and worked. "But agents said, ‘We know nothing. You are a fugitive.’" Soon he found himself under arrest, his hands and feet shackled, his self-respect shattered. "I was humiliated," he says. "Everything in my life I have done right. But they treated me like I was a criminal, a terrorist."

Paula Grenier, the spokesperson for the Boston ICE office, confirms Arboleda’s account of what happened on October 9. "We encountered him when he was renewing his authorization for employment," she says. Because he had yet to leave the US "of his own volition," Grenier adds, "he had failed to comply with the final deportation order, which basically makes him a fugitive alien." So he was arrested and detained.

Hours after Arboleda had been taken into custody, his wife heard that her husband was scheduled for immediate deportation. "I said, ‘Oh my God. Why is this happening?’" she remembers. Escobar picked up the phone and dialed her husband’s activist friends, who wrote letters to US Senator Edward Kennedy and US Representative Michael Capuano, who had worked with Arboleda on immigrant issues. Escobar also called Gleason, her husband’s attorney, who turned to the federal appeals court for help.

On October 10, the following day, Gleason filed an eight-page emergency motion for a "stay of order of removal" to stop the ICE from deporting Arboleda while his federal appeal was pending because, as the motion states, "His appeal would be rendered moot if the Petitioner was removed to Colombia." Within days, on October 14, Gleason filed another motion asking the court to release his client on bail "pending a final adjudication on the merits of his appeal." The document noted that Arboleda "has no criminal violations. He does not use any drugs, and he has been a model husband. He has not been accused of any crime or act of violence against any person." Arboleda did not pose a flight risk, let alone a threat to national security. To back up these claims, Gleason filed a half-dozen letters from people who would vouch for Arboleda’s upstanding character.

One of those witnesses was Mary Regan, a Cambridge resident and a housing organizer at the Cambridge Eviction Free Zone. Regan has known Arboleda since the summer of 2000, when she met him at a mutual friend’s party. Over the years, he’s helped her organize Spanish-speaking tenants by translating fliers outlining tenants’ rights for free. Regan wrote a letter for Arboleda’s legal defense because, she says, "The government seemed not to be treating Walter as a person." She wanted the appellate court to see "how valuable Walter is to Boston, and what a contribution he has made." In her letter, dated October 13, 2003, she described Arboleda as a person of "integrity and responsibility" — words echoed in the other letters. "Walter Arboleda is a trustworthy, dependable, and cherished person," Regan wrote.

For Arboleda, meanwhile, days behind bars turned into weeks. On October 10, 24 hours after his arrest, he was transferred to the Bristol jail and placed in the ICE-rented detention wing, where he saw dozens of similarly situated immigrants. People who had been locked up for four, eight, and even 14 months, in his words, "doing nothing, just waiting to be deported." There were immigrants from Guatemala, Russia, China, and Angola. The vast majority of them represented what Arboleda calls "hard-working, honest people" who had committed minor violations — overstaying a visa, for instance, or failing to update paperwork. Some, like him, had unwittingly walked into the Boston ICE office to renew legal papers, only to be seized by agents. Still others, also like him, had political-asylum appeals pending in federal court. The number of immigrant detainees stunned Arboleda. "All these people were being punished for trying to stay in the country," he says. "They didn’t do anything bad."

Arboleda entered jail resolved to push for his own appeal, but the conditions soon wore him down. The only contact he had with his wife was a weekly 15-minute phone call. He spent his time sleeping, eating, and exercising. He lived by the prison’s regimented schedule. He lost his privacy and, more important, his liberty. By November 19, after more than a month behind bars, he grew depressed. "My situation was not fair," he says. Things became more unjust after the appeals court issued a November 19 order denying his October motions for a stay and a bail hearing because he had "not demonstrated a substantial likelihood of success on his claim."

By issuing the order, the appeals court sided with the ICE and its immigration attorneys, who had argued for Arboleda’s imminent deportation. According to court documents, the government claimed that allowing Arboleda to stay here during his federal appeal "would negatively impact the public interest by further delaying" his removal.

Over the next month, Arboleda realized that his chances of winning the federal appeal seemed slim. And it became harder for him to stay positive. By the time the ICE set his deportation date for December 15, he had lost all hope. Although his lawyer filed a second emergency motion for a stay of removal, on December 10, Arboleda had resigned himself to his fate. That same day, he penned an open letter titled "Hear the Voice of an Immigrant in Silence." In it, he explained that the reasons for his detention were a mystery. "I do not have a clear course," he wrote, "because they have not accepted my petition to leave under bail without giving me any type of explanation." He couldn’t deal with being in prison for an indefinite period of time, yet his asylum appeal could take months. "I was worried I would be in jail for months and months," Arboleda says. By then, he adds, "I was tired of fighting." So he decided to give up. It was better, he says, to leave the country.

page 1  page 2 

Issue Date: January 9 - 15, 2004
Back to the News & Features table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group