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 News from Around the Americas | June 2007 
Voice of a Boy Spreads Far and Wide
 The Guardian
| | Elvira Arellano and son Saul attend Sunday services at the Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago. Mexican-born Ms Arellano is fighting deportation. (Reuters) |
For more than nine months, Saul Arellano and his mother, Elvira, have been engaged in a prolonged and all too real wrestling match.
Since August, they have been living in "sanctuary" in the Adalberto United Methodist church, behind an unassuming shopfront in Chicago.
The church is shielding Ms Arellano symbolically, if not legally, from the reach of immigration officials.
They want to deport her as one of the 12 million undocumented immigrants, more than half of whom come, like her, from Mexico.
Saul, 8, also represents a significant statistic in the debate.
He is one of at least 3 million children with illegal immigrant parents who were born in America and are US citizens enjoying full rights.
Ms Arellano approached the Reverend Walter Coleman, the pastor of her church in a heavily Mexican and Puerto Rican neighbourhood of Chicago. On August 15 last year — the day of her expected deportation — she and Saulito took up residence on the second floor of the church. Elvira has not set foot outside the church since that day.
Saulito, on the other hand, is free to move around and has travelled thousands of kilometres acting as his mother's ambassador, with Mr Coleman as guardian.
He has addressed rallies outside the White House, in Los Angeles, Boston and Miami. And he caused a sensation in Mexico when he addressed its parliament.
Congressmen Support Immigration Activist
Associated Press
Chicago - A delegation of Mexican congressmen pledged their continued support Friday for an undocumented Chicago mother who says she is defying a U.S. deportation order because she wants to remain here with her son, who is a U.S. citizen.
The politicians visited immigration activist Elvira Arellano at the Adalberto United Methodist Church, where she and her now 8-year-old son have taken refuge since mid-August. They told Arellano that her plight had galvanized Mexico’s multiparty Congress behind a single issue: family reunification.
“This fight of yours – this fight for the Latina family – is a fight that has united us,” Edmundo Ramirez, a congressman with Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, said in Spanish.
The Mexican officials traveled to Chicago after visiting Washington, D.C., on Thursday and presenting members of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Hispanic Caucus with a resolution passed by the Mexican Congress in November.
The resolution expresses support for Arellano and asks the U.S. Congress to suspend her deportation order. The document, which also calls for a moratorium on massive deportations, was drafted after Arrelano’s son, Saul, visited Mexico’s 500-member Chamber of Deputies to plead for help in lobbying Washington to stop his mother’s deportation.
Jose Jacques, a congressman with Mexico’s Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, said the U.S. needs to enact sensible immigration laws that allow families to stay together.
“We don’t want to be hidden from the streets in the darkness of our homes,” he said. “It is a humane fight. It is a fight for families.”
The Mexican congressman also were joined by Dolores Huerta, a longtime activist who helped found the United Farm Workers Union along with Cesar Chavez. She asked that immigrant rights marches being planned around the country for April 29th be dedicated to Arellano and her son, Saul.
“The people that come here from Mexico come here to work and build this country,” Huerta said.
Arellano illegally crossed into the U.S. in 1997. She was arrested and sent back to Mexico but returned to the U. S. within several days and moved to Chicago three years later. In 2002, Arellano was arrested again and convicted of working as a cleaning woman at O’Hare International Airport under a false Social Security number.
She says she wants to live in the United States to get a better life for her son, who was born in the U.S. and is a legal citizen. She has become a vocal proponent for immigration reform that would prevent undocumented aliens from being deported if they have children born in this country.
She defended her decision to defy a federal deportation order.
“We know we came to a country that doesn’t belong to us,” Arellano said Friday. “But we didn’t come to harm anyone. We didn’t come to kill or rob. We only came to this country with the hope of finding a better job, a better future for our families.” |
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