Law-abiding Mom Jailed, Faces Deportation
Tribuna, News Report, Emanuela P. Lima, Posted: Mar 12, 2008
It is a typical winter morning in a quiet middle-class neighborhood in Danbury. Tereza Pereira, owner of a house-cleaning business, gets ready to leave for work. Her partner, Carlos Lima, stays at home because of the bad weather to look after their two children.
"I didn't get to see the kids before I left to go to work that day," Pereira, a Brazilian native who came to the United States 20 years ago, recalls about the day her life crumbled.
It's 7 p.m. She is working on her last house and receives a phone call from her 15-year-old son, Thiago. He tells her she needs to come home immediately - the police are there and want to see her.
She presses him to tell her why, fearing that the worst had happened to his then-6-year-old brother Brian or his father. Thiago simply replies, "You just need to come now, Mom, please."
Tereza rushes to tell the owners of the house she needs to leave, and they refuse to let her drive on her own, taking her car and giving her a ride.
"As we drove onto my street, I saw a white van parked in front of my house, and as we pulled up, they began shouting, "Are you Tereza Pereira? Get out of the car, put your hands in the air," she described.
The "police" are Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents looking for Pereira for failure to comply with an outstanding deportation order. They search her and handcuff her hands and feet. They then place her into the van as she pleads to see her children one last time.
"From then on, confusion and despair overtook me," Pereira said. "I didn't know what was happening."
Sitting in the van, she cannot understand why she is wanted by ICE. Pereira and Lima had entered the country with a legal visa, had paid their taxes, had no criminal record and owned a home and small business.
In 1997, the couple hired an immigration attorney recommended by friends to adjust their family's status. Pereira and Lima were introduced to Maria Luisa de Castro Foden.
According to the Connecticut Law Tribune, Foden charged them $4,500 to submit them for deportation proceedings and then file an application for "cancellation of removal."
The lawyer's strategy was to turn the couple in to immigration authorities for deportation and then, based on a 1996 federal law, request a cancellation of the deportation order that would grant them their legal status by proving that their children would suffer if they were deported.
After Foden surrendered Lima and Pereira to immigration officials, she handed the case over to attorney A. Manuel Nieves of Hartford, who represented the couple in subsequent proceedings.
What Pereira didn't know as she was being taken by ICE agents to Hartford, was that Nieves missed the window in which to file the actual cancellation applications, which in turn led a judge to deny the applications.
Nieves' subsequent attempts to reverse the effects of the court orders, in 2002 and 2004, also ultimately failed.
"He never notified us that we had deportation orders," said Pereira. Now, according to immigration authorities, Pereira was a fugitive.
It is 11 p.m. that same day. Pereira arrives in Hartford to be processed. Her hands and feet still shackled, she is directed to a holding cell with a narrow concrete bench and a toilet surrounded by bars in plain view of the officers.
"I thought I was having a nightmare. This could not be happening to me. All I could do was cry, thinking of my kids," Pereira said. "The agent who arrested me came up to my cell and told me, ‘Don't worry. Tomorrow your friend and your lawyer are coming for you. You can stop crying'."
The friend was Nan Howkins, the owner of the house Pereira was cleaning that night. Howkins had hired attorney Michael Boyle of North Haven to represent Pereira.
The following morning, an agent let her know she had visitors. "I was confident that the attorney would come and tell me that it was all a horrible mistake, and I was going home."
As she walked into the visitation room behind glass, there were Howkins and Boyle with heart-shattering news.
Pereira was going to be deported. Boyle needed her to sign an authorization for him to represent her and to fight to keep her in the country. He explained that she would be waiting in jail for up to four months until her case was decided.
Pereira was sent to a detention facility in Cumberland County Jail in Portland, Maine.
"The feeling of entering the prison was an anguish I can't describe," she said. "I will never forget the sound of those gates closing behind me."
There she met other women who, like her, were awaiting deportation. Many of them had also put their faith in lawyers promising to obtain legal status for their clients.
Meanwhile, Boyle worked on reopening her case and unraveling the mistakes committed by her previous lawyer.
"There is no question that her situation is the product of the mishandling of the case," Boyle said. He was able to prove so satisfactorily to a federal judge, who scheduled a hearing for Pereira's case to be heard again.
Pereira was released on bond. The final hearing to decide the fate of her family is scheduled for March 7.
"This hurts. I came to this county when I was 23 years old and I am now 43," Pereira said. "What do you learn in life until your twenties? Nothing. All I know about life I learned here, my life is here. My kids' future is here."
It is the future of her children that may be able to save her and her husband.
Thiago, who will soon turn 17, is the centerpiece of Boyle's case to cancel Pereira and Lima's deportation orders. He must prove that Thiago will suffer extreme hardship if he or his family is deported.
"We have a very good case," Boyle said. "Traditionally, when a judge finds this level of hardship, it is when a child is very sick or has a learning disability. We are presenting a different type of hardship."
Thiago is a high honors student at Danbury High School, and competes on the school cross-country and on track teams. His teachers and counselors believe he will be accepted to a top-flight university such as Yale, Boston College, Boston University or New York University. Boyle will introduce all this information to the immigration judge.
Deportation would destroy those opportunities, Boyle said, because Thiago is not equipped to finish his high school career in Brazil, where college admissions tests are given in Portuguese, which Thiago doesn't speak well.
If Thiago lived in the United States without his parents, he would have to give up playing sports and find a job to support himself and possibly his 7-year-old brother, Bryan.
After her release, Pereira spoke at an immigration forum, sharing the story of her plight and expressing her desire to remain in the United States.
"I felt the need to tell my story to show Americans how the immigration system is broken," Pereira said. "They need to know no one wants to be illegal, but there are no options available. When we finally find a crack in that wall, a lawyer makes a mistake and now my family will pay the consequences. Nobody wants to be in my situation - nobody!"
When asked what the United States represents to her now, Pereira replied, "I love this country. It's all I want - all I will ever want for me and my family."
The Tribuna is a bilingual Portuguese- and English-language newspaper based in Danbury, Connecticut. See its coverage of Danbury's mayor- and Common Council-supported partnership between ICE and the Danbury Police Department, at TribunaCT.com.
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