30577: Craig (article) Danticat: Impounded Fathers (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig


June 17, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor


 Impounded Fathers

By EDWIDGE DANTICAT

MIAMI

MY father died in May 2005, after an agonizing battle with lung disease. This 
is the third Father’s Day that I will spend without him since we started 
celebrating together in 1981. That was when I moved to the United States from 
Haiti, after his own migration here had kept us apart for eight long years.

My father’s absence, then and now, makes all the more poignant for me the 
predicament of the following fathers who also deserve to be remembered today.

There is the father from Honduras who was imprisoned, then deported, after a 
routine traffic stop in Miami. He was forced to leave behind his wife, who was 
also detained by immigration officials, and his 5- and 7-year-old sons, who 
were placed in foster care. Not understanding what had happened, the boys, when 
they were taken to visit their mother in jail, asked why their father had 
abandoned them. Realizing that the only way to reunite his family was to allow 
his children to be expatriated to Honduras, the father resigned himself to 
this, only to get caught up in a custody fight with American immigration 
officials who have threatened to keep the boys permanently in foster care on 
the premise that their parents abandoned them.

There is also the father from Panama, a cleaning contractor in his 50s, who had 
lived and worked in the United States for more than 19 years. One morning, he 
woke to the sound of loud banging on his door. He went to answer it and was 
greeted by armed immigration agents. His 10-year asylum case had been denied 
without notice. He was handcuffed and brought to jail.

There is the father from Argentina who moves his wife and children from house 
to house hoping to remain one step ahead of the immigration raids. And the 
Guatemalan, Mexican and Chinese fathers who have quietly sought sanctuary from 
deportation at churches across the United States.

There’s the Haitian father who left for work one morning, was picked up outside 
his apartment and was deported before he got a chance to say goodbye to his 
infant daughter and his wife. There’s the other Haitian father, a naturalized 
American citizen, whose wife was deported three weeks before her residency 
hearing, forcing him to place his 4-year-old son in the care of neighbors while 
he works every waking hour to support two households.

These families are all casualties of a Department of Homeland Security 
immigration crackdown cheekily titled Operation Return to Sender. The goals of 
the operation, begun last spring, were to increase the enforcement of 
immigration laws in the workplace and to catch and deport criminals. Many women 
and men who have no criminal records have found themselves in its cross hairs. 
More than 18,000 people have been deported since the operation began last year.

So while politicians debate the finer points of immigration reform, the 
Department of Homeland Security is already carrying out its own. Unfortunately, 
these actions can not only plunge families into financial decline, but sever 
them forever. One such case involves a father who was killed soon after he was 
deported to El Salvador last year.

“Something else could be done,” his 13-year-old son Junior pleaded to the New 
York-based advocacy group Families for Freedom, “because kids need their 
fathers.”

Right now the physical, emotional, financial and legal status of American-born 
minors like Junior can neither delay nor prevent their parents’ detention or 
deportation. Last year, Representative José E. Serrano, a Democrat from New 
York, introduced a bill that would allow immigration judges to take into 
consideration the fates of American-born children while reviewing their 
parents’ cases. The bill has gone nowhere, while more and more American-citizen 
children continue to either lose their parents or their country.

Where are our much-touted family values when it comes to these children? Today, 
as on any other day, they deserve to feel that they have not been abandoned — 
by either their parents or their country.

Edwidge Danticat is the author of the forthcoming “Brother, I’m Dying,” a 
memoir.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/opinion/17danticat.html?ex=1182830400&en=a63a3ac4f205c902&ei=5070&emc=eta1