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 News from Around the Americas | April 2007 
Mother Rejects Appeal, Decides on Deportation
 Jessie Mangaliman - Medianews
| | Adrian Ramirez, 12, cries while answering a reporter's question at First United Methodist Church in Palo Alto, Calif. Ramirez's parents, Pedro Ramirez and Isabel Aguirre, were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. (AP/Jeff Chiu) |
Despite an eleventh-hour legal appeal, Isabel Aguirre, the Palo Alto mother of four U.S. born children decided to leave Friday on a flight bound for Mexico, ending a long battle by the illegal immigrant to remain in the United States.
Disappointed Palo Alto residents and Bay Area religious leaders fought to keep the family stateside and even contemplated church sanctuary to shield them from federal immigration authorities. On Friday, attorneys in San Francisco and Los Angeles pursued last-minute efforts to extend Aguirre's stay so her children could complete the school year.
But in the end, Aguirre rejected all appeals and complied with a 2005 deportation order. After a day filled with anguished decisions, and an anonymous "scary phone call" to her home the night before, she chose to take her children to Mexico instead of giving them up to foster care in the Bay Area. Federal immigration agents were to escort the family to the plane.
Aguirre and her husband Pedro Ramirez, a longtime manager at an Albertsons grocery store in Palo Alto who has been in the United States since 1985, were arrested on Feb. 28 by agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ramirez was deported the same day and his wife was strapped with an ankle security monitor and placed under house arrest. She was given until Friday to leave the country.
"She's just very concerned about complying with the law," said Los Angeles attorney Peter Schey, of the Center for Human Rights, a legal and immigrant advocacy organization. "She, like many immigrants, share a real fear of breaking the law."
Schey said he spoke with Aguirre through an interpreter on Friday afternoon and asked her if she wanted lawyers to pursue an extension, an effort backed by various religious groups.
"She decided to go back," Scheysaid.
Officials of ICE said the couple was originally ordered deported in 2002 after an immigration judge ruled they were illegal immigrants. But after a long legal battle which the couple said was botched by a lawyer who was eventually disbarred the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against them in 2005.
"She and the people in the community have made a point that she didn't get adequate legal representation," said ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice. "This immigration case was in litigation for almost a decade and the court found that they had no legal basis to be here."
Aquirre and Ramirez were arrested as part of national crackdown on illegal immigrants who have ignored previous deportation orders. An estimated 18,000 have been arrested under "Operation Return to Sender," in which ICE agents also target immigrants who have criminal convictions.
The agency also has stepped up crackdowns across the nation against employers who hire illegal immigrants.
The arrests of Aguirre and Ramirez became the rallying cry of immigrant advocates in the Bay Area, denouncing the ICE sweeps they say have caused the breakup of mixed-status families made up of legal and illegal immigrants. The four children of the couple Pedro Jr., 15; Adrian, 12; Yadira, 10; and Adriana, 6 all were born at Stanford Medical Center and raised in East Palo Alto and Palo Alto. All of them were attending schools in Palo Alto.
"It's absurd," Schey said. "Four American children are effectively being forced to leave their own country."
After her husband was deported, and she faced the deportation deadline, Aguirre was confronted with a dilemma leave her American children to foster care or bring them with her to Mexico to join her husband in Apatzingan, a city southwest of Michoacan state capital of Morelia. After news broke about the family Aguirre not only had to decide her own fate but took at least one unsettling call Thursday night.
Schey said the anonymous caller told Aguirre "she better leave," and characterized it as "a scary call" that caused her to worry about her kids.
Aguirre through her eldest son, Pedro and family friends declined to be interviewed.
Pedro Ramirez Jr., a freshman at Gunn High School, said he spoke with his father on Friday morning and told him that the family was preparing to leave.
"I'm just glad we're going to be together as a family again," Pedro Jr. said, standing on the doorway of the living room strewn with clothes, books and toys. "I miss my Dad. We'll be with him again."
On early Friday morning, two unidentified friends of Aguirre drove her to the ICE office in San Francisco to get the security bracelet on her ankle removed, ending weeks of house arrest.
Two hours later, she returned to the pink, one-story, rented bungalow in Palo Alto. After lunch, family friends arrived with suitcases, apparently to help the family pack.
Rev. Lawrence Goode, pastor of the family's church, St. Francis of Assisi in East Palo Alto, said the last minute attempt to get Aguirre to stay was "to buy a little time."
"It wasn't something to defy the law," he said. "It was another way to get her another hearing with the court, an extension so the kids can finish school."
Six years from now when Pedro Jr. is 21 he is a U.S. citizen and carries a U.S. passport he may be able to petition for his parents to return to the Bay Area, Schey said. |
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