🚀 go-pugleaf

What about some national media coverage about American citizens who have
fallen victim to criminal illegal aliens?

Hank


<goldstein@nym.hush.com> wrote in message
news:1145219082.683376.147650@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com...
> As if on que, the mainstream media has begun cranking out the
> predictable sob-stories about the Brown Menace invaders in a
> transparent and pathetic attempt to manipulate public opinion in favor
> of anarchy and a John Lennon-like "Imagine" world with no borders and
> no possessions.  Radio Havana and that Dallas PR firm that Mexico hired
> to sway public opinion on Mexico's "migrants" surely had a hand in this
> pathetic propaganda piece.
>
>
http://www.comcast.net/news/national/index.jsp?cat=DOMESTIC&fn=/2006/04/16/368919.html
>
> Mother Again Faces Deportation to Mexico
> By GARANCE BURKE, Associated Press Writer
>
> 3 hours ago
>
> RAYMORE, Mo. - Myrna Dick is desperate for her young son to take a nap,
> so she cajoles him with soft Spanish phrases.
>
> "Vete a dormir, mijo," she says, telling Zachary to sleep as he fumbles
> for Teddy Grahams. "Take the bear in your arms and the two of you go
> lie down."
>
> It's a suburban life, in a place that hosts fishing derbies and Easter
> egg hunts and calls itself the "Garden Spot of the State." But it's a
> life that Zachary, snug in his cornflower-colored jumpsuit, was very
> nearly denied.
>
> In 2004, the government tried to deport Myrna Dick. It charged that she
> once lied to gain entry to the United States, that she claimed she was
> an American when she was in fact a Mexican.
>
> But Myrna was pregnant, and a federal judge in Missouri said Myrna's
> fetus essentially was already an American citizen. He could not be
> expelled, and as a result, neither could she.
>
> Until Zachary was born.
>
> Then, immigration officials reasserted their claims. In February, a
> federal appeals court gave immigration officials the right to bar the
> 31-year-old mother from the United States for life, separating her from
> her son, now 17 months old, and her American husband.
>
> This time, the family's case is attracting the attention of prominent
> legislators who say it symbolizes the contradictions of the broken U.S.
> immigration system. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, a research
> organization in Washington, nearly five percent of U.S. families are
> headed by illegal immigrants.
>
> "Illegal immigration is deeply intertwined within our households and
> communities," said former INS Commissioner Doris Meissner. "A family
> like this is an illustration of literally millions of people in the
> country today."
>
> ___
>
> Myrna was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, and grew up in Santa Barbara
> Tutuaca, a mountain village of 3,000. Her father, Ramon Ochoa, told his
> 20 children stories of picking string beans and onions in California's
> Central Valley, where he traveled in the 1950s and 1960s under the
> United States' first guest worker program.
>
> Two older sisters had left the family ranch in Santa Barbara to work in
> Texas, and would come back periodically with their children to stock
> her mother's grocery store.
>
> "Our skin would be black from working outside," Myrna said, "and my
> nieces would come in from America with their beautiful clothes and
> their dolls. Seeing them was like dreaming of being a star."
>
> When Myrna, an epileptic, suffered from grand mal seizures, her father
> sold everything and the entire family moved to Texas so the 12-year-old
> could get treatment.
>
> They overstayed a temporary visa and settled illegally in Oakleaf, near
> Dallas. Myrna spent much of the rest of school in the nurse's office,
> learning English in fits and starts.
>
> No one can really explain why Myrna was passed over during the 1980s
> amnesty, when millions of immigrants were allowed to stay. Most of her
> family, including both parents, were granted citizenship or permanent
> residency then.
>
> Still, Myrna came to think of herself as a proud Texan. At work one
> night, she met Brady Dick when he wandered into the Dallas sports bar
> where she was a hostess.
>
> After a few months of dating, they married in a small courthouse
> wedding in 2002; that same year, Brady submitted an application for
> Myrna to become a U.S. resident by marriage.
>
> But when she went to renew her work visa in spring 2004, the federal
> government ordered her immediate deportation.
>
> Everyone agrees that Myrna crossed the desert in 1998 to go to her
> grandmother's funeral in Chihuahua. She said smugglers led her and
> another woman through the sand for hours, where border agents found
> them on a deserted hill.
>
> "It was all sand and bushes," Myrna said, crying as she told the story
> of that crossing. "The wind lifted up the dirt. They caught us some
> place _ I don't even know where. All I remember is it was night and we
> were alone with them."
>
> What's in dispute is what happened next.
>
> Michael Sharma-Crawford, her lawyer, says Myrna never claimed she was a
> U.S. citizen, but instead told officials she was attempting to enter
> the country illegally. The government says when agents took her
> fingerprints, she told them her name was Ivette Treviso-Frias
> (something she denies) and said she was American.
>
> That lie, the government says, makes her ineligible to ever live in
> America.
>
> "The consequences are based on her own actions," said Carl Rusnok, a
> spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "The charge has
> been made before about family separation. However there is a strong
> element of personal responsibility that has to be taken into account
> when someone violates the law and they are put away in jail."
>
> Six years later, the government reinstated the old deportation order
> under Treviso-Frias' name to take Myrna into custody. Myrna was three
> months pregnant. For two weeks, nauseous with morning sickness, she was
> shackled to the floor and bused from a detention facility in
> Versailles, Mo., to Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices in
> Kansas City.
>
> "When they sent her to jail, no one told her she could consult a
> lawyer," said Sharma-Crawford, an immigration attorney in Overland
> Park, Kan. "Then, when the case finally went to court, it was like
> having a murder trial by argument alone. We got no witnesses and could
> only present evidence that the government got to pick."
>
> ___
>
> Sharma-Crawford says the file the Department of Homeland Security keeps
> under Myrna's name contains a jumble of fingerprints, photographs and
> alien identification numbers that arguably could belong to seven
> different people. One computer print-out is labeled "wrong person."
>
> When lawyers from the Department of Justice appealed the district
> judge's ruling, the government selected less than half of the 424 pages
> of documents to send to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as
> evidence. In February, a three-judge panel ruled a set of fingerprints
> labeled "Ivette Treviso-Frias" were identical to fingerprints attached
> to one of the alien ID numbers linked to Myrna's name.
>
> Such administrative disarray, said Meissner, only underscores the
> challenges the government will face if Congress approves new amnesty or
> guest worker laws. The disorganized state of many immigration records
> and the multiple aliases adopted by many border crossers can make it
> practically impossible to determine how many times a given person has
> entered the country.
>
> Kris Kobach, who served as immigration advisor to former Attorney
> General John Ashcroft, says the statute that made false claim to
> citizenship a deportable offense was never intended to be applied years
> after the fact. When it became law in 1996, he said it was intended to
> stop dangerous criminals from coming across the border, not to deport a
> suburban mother.
>
> "They're taking the statute out of context," said Kobach, a law
> professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. "Her claim is that
> they've got the wrong person. And there are enough valid questions that
> Myrna Dick is raising that her case should be reconsidered."
>
> Abortion rights advocates who normally find themselves opposing any
> opinion or law that expands the rights of a fetus now find themselves
> sympathizing with an evangelical Christian woman who was instrumental
> in just such a case.
>
> "First a judge declares there is some right of personhood attached to
> this fetus," said Pamela Sumners, the executive director of NARAL
> Pro-Choice in Missouri. "Then the courts deprive this child of his
> mother once it's been born by deporting her. This is insane public
> policy."
>
> The Eighth Circuit will hear the Dicks' appeal in the next two months,
> said Sharma-Crawford. If it fails there, he believes the case could
> proceed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, several legislators are
> considering introducing a special waiver that would grant some
> immigrants who made false claims to citizenship the right to stay in
> the country.
>
> For the moment, however, Myrna keeps waking up at night, imagining
> Zachary has been taken from his crib. She says she's seen other
> marriages fall apart over things like this, and tries to imagine how
> she and her husband could live apart, on two sides of the border.
>
> "People have no idea what these immigration laws do to families," said
> Brady, 34. "Myrna's worried about the call that they're coming to get
> her, and my stomach is always upset. The last time we went to court we
> were thinking that the judge's would be God's word, and we got back a
> miracle. All I can think is that God knows what we're going through."
>
>
http://www.comcast.net/news/national/index.jsp?cat=DOMESTIC&fn=/2006/04/6/368919.html
>