Family deported, father had been here 20 years, mother 14 years, & 3 kids

Panel Honors Cesar Chavez, Addresses Immigration
By Judith Scherr (04-10-07)

When Margot Pepper speaks at an event honoring the legacy of Cesar Chavez on Wednesday, her former second-grade student Gerardo Espinoza will be foremost on her mind.

A bilingual teacher at Rosa Parks School and a prize-winning journalist, Pepper and Gerardo’s classmates said goodbye to Gerardo on Valentine’s day—just before the little boy, his brothers and parents were deported to Mexico.
...

As Pepper tells it, Gerardo’s father, the hard-working Felipe Espinoza, had been in the country 20 years, since he was 14 years old, and his wife Norma Espinoza had been in the United States for 14 years. The senior Espinoza held down two jobs, working five to six days a week at a steel mill and in a restaurant to support his family.

Felipe Espinoza’s mistake was to trust Walter Pineda, an immigration lawyer—disbarred last November—who instead of gaining the parents legal residence, caused the family’s deportation. “It’s tragic—he really botched up the Espinozas’ case,” Pepper said.

Pepper has stayed in touch with the family, and she says their stories are heartbreaking. “They’re living in a town of 1,000 with no gas and stagnant water. The three boys have been sick,” she said, adding that the community can help the family by sending donations to Berkeley Organizing Congregations for Action (BOCA) at 2606 Dwight Way, Berkeley, 94704 and putting Espinoza in the memo line of the check.

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?issue=04-10-07&storyID=26768

We need a Statute of Limitations on this sort of thing, sheesh....

More on the attorney in this case here:
http://www.sfweekly.com/2006-05-10/news/the-asylum-trap/

Pineda is contesting the disbarment, claiming that his former clients are accusing him of incompetence in order to get their cases reopened, but a clear pattern runs through their allegations. According to the state bar, Pineda consistently encouraged his Mexican clients to apply for political asylum, although they rarely had a legitimate claim: Almost all Mexican immigrants come to the United States for economic reasons, not because of political or religious persecution, as asylum requires. Their chances of success were negligible; from Oct. 1, 2004, to Oct. 1, 2005, only 34 asylum applications were granted to Mexican immigrants nationwide.

But the asylum application was only the beginning of Pineda's legal maneuvering — just the easiest way to get a client into immigration court. Court documents show that once there, Pineda withdrew the application and submitted another, this time for something called "cancellation of removal." Cancellation, Pineda told his clients, was the golden loophole. According to their declarations, he said it was available to immigrants who had been in the country for at least 10 years without arrest, and who had a close relative who was a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. Unfortunately, it wasn't that simple.

Nora Privitera, a lawyer at San Francisco's Immigrant Legal Resource Center, says immigrants have fallen for such tricks for years. "There are many immigration scams, but this asylum scam is one of the most popular," she says. Her group has run educational campaigns to warn immigrants not to trust green card schemes that sound too good to be true. "There are so many people who would not have come to the attention of the immigration authorities if they hadn't filed these applications, people who ended up getting deported," she says. "They would have been much better off living the way they're living. Most of them had been here 10 years or more, and some of them own homes, have established businesses, have children who are U.S. citizens who have grown up here, but off they go."

Everyone who advocates deporting undocumented immigrants should be forced to read these stories about real people and how they are affected by it.

For this family, it sounds like this man was brought here by his parents when he was too young to make the choice to cross the border without a visa or passport. We should definitely grant amnesty to people in that situation.

I read about a man who had been here since he was 8 years old. And he was deported when he decided to do the right thing and apply for citizenship. He left behind a wife and 2 kids, and their house was foreclosed. So he is punished for what his parents did and his kids are punished for the same mistake. Sickening.

"A phrase used in criminal law to describe conduct that is considered contrary to community standards of justice, honesty, or good morals.

Crimes involving moral turpitude have an inherent quality of baseness, vileness, or depravity with respect to a person's duty to another or to society in general."


Never heard that word before, but sounds as tho it perfectly describes the actions of this vile "lawyer".

It is so so sad to hear of families being destroyed like this. Thanks for posting, folks all over need to be warned of these scheisters.

I surely hope the Espinozas find a way to return

hearing?

Something isn't adding up here.

Thanks for posting it.

Don

because their parents were illegals.

http://www.pbs.org/kpbs/theborder/history/timeline/20.html

Operation Wetback
In 1949 the Border Patrol seized nearly 280,000 illegal immigrants. By 1953, the numbers had grown to more than 865,000, and the U.S. government felt pressured to do something about the onslaught of immigration. What resulted was Operation Wetback, devised in 1954 under the supervision of new commissioner of the Immigration and Nationalization Service, Gen. Joseph Swing.

Swing oversaw the Border patrol, and organized state and local officials along with the police. The object of his intense border enforcement were "illegal aliens," but common practice of Operation Wetback focused on Mexicans in general. The police swarmed through Mexican American barrios throughout the southeastern states. Some Mexicans, fearful of the potential violence of this militarization, fled back south across the border. In 1954, the agents discovered over 1 million illegal immigrants.

In some cases, illegal immigrants were deported along with their American-born children, who were by law U.S. citizens. The agents used a wide brush in their criteria for interrogating potential aliens. They adopted the practice of stopping "Mexican-looking" citizens on the street and asking for identification. This practice incited and angered many U.S. citizens who were of Mexican American descent. Opponents in both the United States and Mexico complained of "police-state" methods, and Operation Wetback was abandoned.

Just plain wrong.

Appreciate the address for donations

Called the registry, if an alien has been in the U.S. continuously since 1972. It was due to be updated to 1986, then 911 happened and the update fell by the wayside.

The American children aren't deported - they could stay, they are simply functionally "deported" as in "children go to live with their parents." They can return to the U.S. as adults without problems. The parents should have their passports issued before they leave. They are probably dual citizens, so they won't be aliens living in Mexico.

As for people who sign applications with lies in them and then just blame the lawyer or whoever encouraged them to do it, I don't feel that sorry for them. You are ultimately responsible for what you sign if you are an adult. They are just as guilty as the lawyer. They must have signed off on untrue statements. If they didn't read it they were reckless, and if they did, they knew they were lying to the U.S. government.