PSJA North student volunteers to leave the country (The Monitor)

PSJA North student volunteers to leave the country
October 14, 2010 8:26 PM
Naxiely Lopez
The Monitor

U.S.-MEXICO BORDER — Juan Armando Garcia is trying to adjust to his new life in Mexico, where he voluntarily returned to last week after facing possible deportation.

The former PSJA North High School sophomore was arrested for criminal trespass by Pharr police Sept. 24 after skipping school and entering an abandoned warehouse near the campus with three other friends.

Garcia, who turned 17 a week prior to the arrest, was charged as an adult and sent to the Hidalgo County jail, where he was flagged as an undocumented immigrant. He was brought to the country by his mother when he was a baby and had been in the public school system ever since.

Faced with the option of deportation or voluntary departure, the 17-year-old chose to return to Reynosa to live with his 64-year-old grandmother Oct. 7.

Opposing parties evaluated his decision from two very distinct standpoints.

“Really a (voluntary return) is like a slap on the hand,” said Border Patrol Spokeswoman Rosalinda Huey. “If he wishes to apply to come into the United States legally it wouldn’t affect him. A deportation would, but not a voluntary return.”

McAllen immigration lawyer Carlos M. Garcia, however, said signing the voluntary departure was the worst thing the teenager could’ve done.

“They paint a very pretty picture, but he has no way of coming back,” the lawyer said. “They’re not going to give him a tourist visa, because they know he’s not going to come in as a tourist. He doesn’t have any family that can petition for him, so there’s no way he can lawfully come back to the United States. He should have never signed that voluntary return.”

The lawyer said Garcia should’ve fought his case in immigration court instead. The teen would’ve been transferred to a detention center, where he would have likely been released on bond and would have even received a permit to lawfully remain in the country while his case was resolved, he said.

“Now that he’s in Mexico he’s given up his right to fight that case,” Garcia added.

The lawyer said he has two female clients who are in a similar situation.

“They were both high school students when they were arrested and we were able to get them out on very reasonable bonds so that they could continue their education,” he said. “These people who get arrested here, they need to know that if they were arrested or even convicted it doesn’t necessarily preclude them from immigration relief. That’s for an immigration judge to decide, and they have that right under our immigration law.”

‘FROM ZERO’

The day before he left the country, Garcia went before an Hidalgo County judge who ordered probation for him. That was the last time he saw his mother.

“I knew that day he would leave,” his mother, Angelica Aleman, said in Spanish. “I knew it was going to be the last day I would see him until God knows when.”

Aleman, also an undocumented immigrant, is now faced with the fact that she may never see her son again unless she chooses to leave the country with her three other sons in tow.

“I tried to be calm and act strong and he did too,” she said with tears welling in her eyes. “But even though he’s 17, he’s still my son. He’s my first-born.”

Garcia’s family had a difficult time getting reaching the teen after Border Patrol agents handed him over to Mexico’s Desarrollo Integral de la Familia — the agency that oversees child protective services.

“No one would tell me where he was,” his mother said. “I didn’t know he was in border patrol custody until the Mexican Consulate helped me.”

Garcia’s mother and grandma spent a day trying to figure out where he was, and didn’t find him until a day later Oct. 8 after he had spent the night at DIF, the Mexican agency.

“I just thought I wasn’t going to make it home because I didn’t have any phone numbers for my mom or my grandma,” Garcia said in an interview at the Hidalgo-Reynosa International Bridge on Tuesday. His mom had changed her phone number the same day of his arrest.

His grandmother, Maria Cervantes, accompanied him to the bridge and is now caring for him. Cervantes said she works at a home where she’s’ been cooking and cleaning for 52 years.

“I’m going to take him to the Conalep (a technical high school) to see if they’ll admit him,” she said in Spanish.

But that might prove to be a challenge because Garcia doesn’t have any Mexican documents either. He had been living in the United States since he was a baby, his mother said.

“In the meantime he’s going to be working with his uncle in his mechanic shop,” his grandma said. “I don’t want him here doing nothing. I don’t want to see him on the streets.”

Garcia has also been thinking about his future.

“I need to get used to being over here,” the teen said. “I miss my family, my friends. I have everything over there, and now I’m going to have to start all over again from zero”

IMMIGRATION REMOVAL TRENDS

There are hundreds of thousands of people who have been or are in Garcia’s situation. The number of people removed from the country has almost doubled in the past five years, according to an in-depth study by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which carefully examined nearly 2 million detention records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the agency in charge of detaining and removing non-citizens.

In that same time frame, the 2010 report states, Congress poured $24 billion into the agency with the promise that ICE would give priority to detaining and removing aliens who were widely believed to pose a real threat to the safety of the United States.

However, up until 2010, the sharp increase in detentions and removals was largely accomplished by catching noncitizens who had not committed a crime, the report found.

ICE Spokeswoman Nina Pruneda said her office was not involved in Garcia’s removal.

“ICE did not have any involvement in this,” she said and referred us to Huey, the Border Patrol spokeswoman. Huey, however, said she could not release any information on Garcia’s case.

“The person in question is a minor so we can’t comment any further,” she said. Garcia, however, was not a minor in the eyes of Pharr Police or the Hidalgo County jail.

A follow-up report released in August by TRAC noted a change in ICE’s detention and removal practices. The numbers for the first nine months of fiscal year 2010 showed that the agency was beginning to target individuals who had committed crimes for the first time since 2005.

Garcia doesn’t know in which group he stands.