Wife Fights To Save Husband From Deportation (WBZ..com)

Absence of reason
By Kevin Cullen
April 2, 2009

They were waiting near the bus stop in Roslindale last week. Immigration men.

They had the decency to wait until Adalid Arteaga was alone, his son's yellow school bus puffing down the road, before they walked briskly toward him and arrested him.

Leah Arteaga's husband, the man she loves, her best friend, the father of her three sons, is in a lockup, by location and definition a criminal.

"My husband is not a criminal," she said. "I will say, right up front, he crossed the border illegally, 17 years ago. I'll give you that. But he is not a criminal."

In 1992, Adalid Arteaga left the abject poverty of his village in Honduras and walked many miles before he crossed the border in Mexico. He made his way to Boston and met Leah in a church in 1995.

"We wanted to get married in 1996," Leah was saying. "But the ministers said wait. 'You're young, you have the rest of your life in front of you.' And so we waited. We waited a year."

Leah, born here, thinks the ministers were worried that Adalid wanted to marry her only for a green card. But they were in love, and they had three boys, three beautiful boys. They followed every rule and procedure to get a green card, but some of the rules changed in the middle of the process, and they never got one.

Six years ago, the immigration men knocked on the door in Roslindale.

"It was 6 in the morning," Leah said. "They woke us up. They wouldn't let him kiss his kids goodbye."

She thinks the immigration men who interviewed her husband were reasonable men, that they knew he wasn't a criminal, because they released him, put him on something called ordered supervision. Adalid Arteaga would check in regularly with the immigration men and tell them when the family left the state for a trip, and for six years that was good enough.

And then something changed, and the immigration men showed up at the bus stop in Roslindale last week, and Adalid Arteaga is to be deported any day now.

"What changed?" Leah Arteaga was saying. "Why now?"

Paula Grenier, a spokeswoman for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Adalid Arteaga was arrested as part of a "routine, targeted fugitive operation."

But fugitive implies that someone is hiding or intends to flee. Adalid Arteaga has been living at the same house in Roslindale, working at the same job as a stone mason, paying his taxes, and putting his kids on the school bus every morning, as long as the government has been aware of his existence in this town.

"I know the immigration people have a tough job. I know they have to get rid of criminals, but my husband is not a criminal," Leah Arteaga said. "He works, he pays taxes, he provides for his children."

Their youngest, the 4-year-old, sat in the circle at play group the other day and tried to explain what was going on to his buddies.

"The 4-year-old can't begin to fathom it, and I can't fathom how to explain it to him," Leah Arteaga was saying.

There are many people, all over the world, wondering what will happen to President Obama's aunt, who has been living in the projects in South Boston and who faces deportation. No one outside the small circle of people who know and love Adalid Arteaga are wondering what will happen to him.

When it rains it pours. Leah Arteaga got a notice in the mail the other day; her house is going to be foreclosed. She has a job, but her husband is locked up, days from being deported.

"My children will lose a father. I will lose a husband. We will lose our house," Leah Arteaga said. "And what will this accomplish?"