Deportation on hold for cancer patient's guardians (AP via San Jose Mercury News)

Deportation on hold for cancer patient's guardians

By E.J. TAMARA Associated Press
Posted: 08/30/2011 03:31:24 PM PDT

LOS ANGELES—Immigration authorities on Tuesday agreed to suspend the deportation of the guardians of a 17-year-old California leukemia patient and release them from detention, an official said.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement will suspend for a year the deportation to Peru of Jose Humberto and Hilda Jauregui (HOW'-ray-gee), whose granddaughter Joseline suffers from leukemia and diabetes, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for the agency.

Authorities also will suspend the deportation of Lili Jauregui, the couple's daughter, who has been detained with them since July, Kice said.

Kice did not provide a reason for the suspensions except to say they were "appropriate."

The decision comes a day after The Associated Press reported that Joseline, who is a U.S. citizen, had asked immigration authorities to refrain from deporting her grandparents for humanitarian reasons.

While the teen's cancer is in remission, she is still undergoing related treatment and said she needs the Jaureguis—who have raised her since birth and became her formal guardians last year—to care for her.

"If they take them away, I don't think I can live," she told the AP before ICE's decision.

Immigration authorities arrested the Jaureguis at their Duarte home in July. The couple had tried to obtain legal papers more than a decade ago but was defrauded by a lawyer who botched the case, said Jessica Dominguez, the family's current immigration attorney.

Dominguez said she expected the family to be released Tuesday night.

FACT FINDER: How police & prosecutors fight illegal immigrant crime (WSBT-IN)

FACT FINDER: How police & prosecutors fight illegal immigrant crime
Immigration spokesperson says ICE prioritizes "serious criminals who present the greatest risk"

By Kelli Stopczynski
5:09 p.m. EDT, August 30, 2011

ELKHART COUNTY – Last week's violent crime spree in Elkhart County has now put the spotlight on illegal immigrants and crime. WSBT’s Fact Finder 22 team did some more digging Tuesday on how Elkhart County police and prosecutors handle suspected illegals who break the law.

Francisco Macias is the man accused of stabbing two women. He is a "person of interest" in a house fire that killed three people.

WSBT found out Macias might have still been in the United States legally even though he was apparently not a U.S. citizen. Court documents from a 2008 domestic violence case show Macias was born in Mexico and was not a citizen of the United States. But we might never know if he was here illegally because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can't release that information without a signed waiver from Macias.

We did find out the bigger problem of illegal immigrants and crime is frustrating for Elkhart County police and prosecutors.

When Elkhart County Prosecutor Curtis Hill took office in 2003, he required deputy prosecutors to report convicted criminals who were illegal to ICE.

“[That reporting] went on for quite some time and nothing ever seemed to happen. You can't burden your deputies with this is another part of a job because this is really not their job. It's beyond us,” said Ed Windbigler, chief investigator for the Elkhart County Prosecutor’s Office.

The prosecutor’s office is obligated to properly prosecute people who commit crimes and a fair number of those people are not legal citizens, he added.

But if immigration officials don’t pick illegals up, there’s not much else the prosecutor can do.

“It’s a matter of resources,” Windbigler said. “If they only have two offices in the state, I don’t know how they would ever keep up with the number of people who may be here illegally who have committed a crime.”

Before the prosecutor’s office ever sees those cases, many of them begin with officers on the streets and at the Elkhart County Jail. They often have to determine whether a suspect is legal and that process isn’t easy.

“There's a lot of forged documents out there,” said Elkhart County Undersheriff Sean Holmes. “That's getting into a whole other topic, but that does happen.”

Even though everyone booked into the jail is asked if they were born in the United States and their names turned over to ICE if their answer is "no," police still have to be careful not to violate somebody's rights during an investigation.

“You can't just pick somebody up and arrest them because you think they're not a citizen,” Holmes said.

Regardless, it’s a complicated issue with no clear cut answer.

“I don’t have a solution for you, I really don't,” said Windbigler. “It is a problem but it's much bigger than Elkhart, Indiana.”

In a written statement to WSBT, ICE spokeswoman Gail Montenegro said “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is focused on sensible, effective immigration enforcement that prioritizes first on serious criminals who present the greatest risk to the security of our communities.”

The statement went on to say ICE had “record-breaking immigration enforcement statistics” in fiscal year 2010.

“For two years in a row, ICE has removed more aliens than were removed in fiscal year 2008,” wrote Montenegro. “In fiscal year 2010, half of those removed—more than 195,000—were convicted criminals. The fiscal year 2010 statistics represent increases of more than 23,000 removals overall and 81,000 criminal removals compared to fiscal year 2008.”

WSBT has been in e-mail contact with Elkhart Superior Court Judge Evan Roberts who apparently knew Macias was not a legal U.S. resident in a domestic violence case. He sentenced Macias to probation. Judge Roberts told WSBT he still needs time to review the case before commenting on it.

Police: Drunken driver stranded self in Glouco floodwaters before setting off unneeded search (Courier-Post)

Police: Drunken driver stranded self in Glouco floodwaters before setting off unneeded search
2:56 PM, Aug. 30, 2011
Written by CourierPostOnline.com

Franklin Township police say a man was driving drunk Monday night when he drove past a road closed sign on Delsea Drive in Franklin Township and became stuck in flood waters there.

The Vineland man then told rescuers he was only a passenger in the truck, prompting police to call out a state police helicopter area to search the waters for the alleged driver.

The search was eventually called off when police determined the man was lying.

The driver, Lorenzo Baltazar, was charged with drunken driving and hindering arrest, police said.

Baltazar is being detained by Immigration Customs Enforcement officials at the Gloucester County Jail, police said.

For Bay Area immigrants facing imminent deportation, new Obama policy offers no reprieve (Contra Costa Times)

*****UPDATE BELOW******

For Bay Area immigrants facing imminent deportation, new Obama policy offers no reprieve
By Matt O'Brien
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 08/29/2011 04:30:41 PM PDT

CONCORD -- Less than two weeks ago, the Obama administration announced it would stop deporting many illegal immigrants who are not public safety threats. But Monday, Arturo Rengifo Jr., a college student and Peruvian citizen who is no one's idea of a threat, paced the floor in his Concord living room as he prepared to be shipped back to Lima on Tuesday.

Rengifo, 24, who has lived in the United States since he was 6, is one of a number of immigrants in the Bay Area and around the country caught in a bureaucratic tangle: While the administration has announced its intent to change immigration policy, it hasn't yet implemented a new system, so planned deportations are proceeding.

"The new policy is to not break families apart, but they're not budging on this," said Rengifo, who must leave the country along with his father, while his mother and brother will stay in the Bay Area. "For us to leave everything here would just be a big, big tragedy."

The college student waited for hopeful news on his cell phone as his father, who suffers from depression, sat nervously on a sofa. His mother's voice shook as she contemplated what would happen to the family if she lost her son and husband of more than 30 years.

"We've never depended on the government, we pay our taxes, we've never had problems with anybody," Emperatriz Rengifo said. "I don't know what I will do without them."

The Department of Homeland Security announced more than a week ago that it will review 300,000 pending cases to prioritize deporting felons, but the agency clarified Monday that it has not begun the case-by-case reviews and will continue to enforce immigration law as it did before the announcement.

"Because the working group is in the midst of designing the process for reviewing cases, no individual cases have been administratively closed or otherwise affected by the policy," the agency said.

Eventually, a committee of federal lawyers and other officials from Homeland Security and the Department of Justice will review each pending case and focus "on the removal of criminal aliens, other aliens who pose a threat to public safety or national security, repeat immigration law violators, recent illegal border crossers, and immigration fugitives."

Rengifo does not fall under any of those high-priority categories. The graduate of Ygnacio Valley High School has a clean record, studies at Diablo Valley College, works in customer relations at an AT&T store and helps his family run a day care service at their home. However, an immigration agent told him last week that he does not qualify for a reprieve because his father's long-standing plea for political asylum had already been litigated, and lost.

Agents plan to escort the 69-year-old father and his son to San Francisco International Airport on Tuesday night, where the two men -- both named Arturo Rengifo -- will board a flight to Lima, splitting the family of four as Emperatriz Rengifo and the couple's older son remain in Concord.

"My family is all I have," Arturo Rengifo Jr. said. "Without them, it's like we're falling apart. Imagining my mom by herself is really depressing."

His mother's deportation is on hold because judges found her asylum testimony more credible than her husband's. Meanwhile, his older brother has a path to legal residency because he married a U.S. citizen.

The imminent deportation of half the Rengifo family reflects ongoing confusion over the new Obama administration policy, which was made public Aug. 18 and celebrated by many immigration advocates because of the promise to drop thousands of low-priority cases. The administration also released new guidelines in June that instruct agents to reconsider deporting some immigrants, including high school graduates such as Rengifo who have lived in the U.S. since childhood, but immigration lawyers say those guidelines are not always followed.

"According to (immigration agents), the Dream Act was denied and the kid is good to go," said Rhoda Wilkinson Domingo, the Rengifo family's lawyer. "He's had his bite of the apple is what they keep telling me."

The Rengifos were not the only Bay Area family who cited the new Obama administration policy in pleading for a last-minute reprieve this week. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Monday detained Victor Rosales, of East Palo Alto, and planned to deport him to Guatemala. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-San Francisco, and Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto, asked federal officials to put his deportation on hold. The Board of Immigration Appeals denied the appeal on Monday afternoon but then, late in the day, the immigration agency granted him a 30-day stay.

After fingerprinting him and getting ready to place him in detention, Rosales said immigration agents appeared annoyed at getting the late-afternoon call to release him, but his wife and 2-year-old son were overjoyed when he came out of custody.

"I feel at peace, so relieved," said his wife, Idania Rosales-Picen.

The Guatemalan man's wife had applied for political asylum because she had been abused by a former husband in Guatemala, but the family -- like the Rengifos -- recently lost their case at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The family's lawyer said that Rosales and his wife have a 1996 shoplifting conviction, making it less likely that their case would be reconsidered.

San Francisco attorney Mark Silverman of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center said these cases might not be a good gauge of the new policy, since judges already had issued a final order of deportation for both Rosales and the Rengifos.

"It's vague," Silverman said of the new policy. "It's hard to say how it is going to be implemented."

He hoped that of the 300,000 cases being reviewed, at least a third of them would be administratively closed, but he said it might depend on the discretion of immigration agents, some of whom are likely to personally oppose the new mandate.

Immigration control groups think the case-by-case review violates the will of Congress.

"This goes way beyond just some regulatory changes," said Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "Essentially, the administration has scrapped the existing immigration policies and made its own."

Mehlman said immigration agents should be able to use discretion in "extenuating, unusual circumstances," but he argued that the new policy gives a blanket reprieve to entire categories of people who violated immigration laws.

********UPDATE*********

Handful of Deportations Halted as New Removal Criteria Worked Out
August 31, 2011, 3:06 pm • Posted by Jon Brooks

Arturo Rengifo and his son, Arturo Rengifo, Jr., are two undocumented Concord residents who were ordered to leave the country by Aug 30. Yesterday, however, Immigration and Customs Enforcement granted them a 30-day reprieve so it could review their case. But it took an intervention by a U.S. Senator -- Dick Durbin from Illinois -- to stall the process.

According to the Rengifos' lawyer, Rhoda Wilkinson Domingo, Mr. Rengifo’s wife is not subject to an order of removal, and another son is a permanent resident. Wilkinson Domingo also sent out the following background information yesterday:

Mr. Rengifo and his family fled from Peru in 1993 after they were attacked and threatened by the Shining Path, a terrorist guerilla movement that now engages in highly dangerous narcotics trafficking. The Rengifo children were 15 and 6 years old, respectively, at the time. They have not left the United States since then.

"My father and I never even packed," Rengifo, Jr. told KQED's Mina Kim yesterday. "It's been the greatest miracle ever, that's ever happened to me. Even these 30 days gives us another chance of hope to live and just do what we need to do here, and that's live the American dream, and live as a family."

"We've never been split apart, ever. For me and my dad to leave and to leave my mom here, it's taking part of my mom's heart. It's really devastating. I'm still in this state of mind where I am going to stay here. I'm putting everything in the hands of God, whatever's going to happen is going to happen. But I know that good things will happen to us, hopefully, since we are good people."

Here's audio [link] of Rengifo's reaction, which starts with his recounting of his appeal to ICE to reassess his case under the new federal guidelines that prioritize deportation of undocumented immigrants who pose a public safety risk, as opposed to those who meet certain mitigating criteria -- outlined in a Jun 17 memo (pdf). Rengifo says an immigration officer told him the policy shift was "not new news," and that deportations were continuing.

In that Jun 17 memo, under a header called "Factors to Consider When Exercising Prosecutorial Discretion," ICE officials are directed to weigh some 20 considerations in deciding whether to apprehend, detain, or remove any of the 300,000 immigrants who currently face deportation. Such factors include education, age, health status, ties and contributions to the community, and family ties to legal residents.

However, as reported in this Contra Costa Times article about the Rengifos, the case-by-case reviews under the new policy have not yet begun, as the process for assessment is still being worked out. However:

Bay Area immigration lawyers have heard of a few anecdotal cases of immigration agents or judges halting a deportation since the June memo, and all of those involved illegal immigrants who are students or same-sex married spouses.

Last week, a San Francisco judge closed a deportation case against a member of a same-sex couple from southern California. The judge’s decision came at the request of ICE. Two other same-sex couples, including one from Oakland, have also had their deportation orders rescinded. All the cases involve men who married legal residents in states allowing same-sex marriage. Previously, this was not enough to shield an undocumented spouse from deportation, as it would in an opposite-sex marriage, because the Defense of Marriage Act prohibits federal recognition of same-sex unions.

Despite policy, Friendswood teacher deported (Houston Chronicle)

Despite policy, Friendswood teacher deported
By SUSAN CARROLL, HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Updated 12:45 a.m., Saturday, August 27, 2011

Sha' Vonne Ironche's husband called her Tuesday afternoon from inside the Houston immigration detention center, saying an officer told him to have a bag packed and ready by 5 p.m. for his deportation flight back to Spain.

She blacked out. The other teachers at her Houston-area school had to call her mother to come and pick her up.

Just days earlier, she and her husband, Esterny Ironche, a 55-year-old Spanish teacher, had high hopes he would be spared from deportation. Obama administration officials last week announced a case-by-case review of pending immigration cases, saying they planned to dismiss "low-priority" cases involving non-criminals to better target dangerous criminals.

Esterny Ironche had no criminal history, and he was married to a U.S. citizen. He had overstayed a visa 15 years ago, but had paid his taxes and had legal work authorization from the government. He had a case pending before the Board of Immigration Appeals. And he was in remission for prostate cancer and participating in a clinical trial in Houston.

All of those factors, the lives that had carefully constructed together here, would surely count in his favor, they figured.

But the government did not spare Ironche, who was loaded onto a flight from Houston to Dallas with the suitcase his wife had packed for him. He arrived in Madrid early Thursday.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said Friday that they could not comment on Ironche's deportation, citing the agency's privacy policy. A DHS official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the agency has not yet started the national case reviews. The agency is still operating as it did before the Aug. 18 announcement, the official said, and will continue to do so until the government establishes a formal case review process.

Wife is a citizen

"It's a tragedy," said Raed Gonzalez, a Houston immigration attorney. "There are many promises from the administration, but nothing is really coming about."

"It's really sad that they're still separating families," he said.

Sha' Vonne Ironche spent the day on Friday filling out paperwork officially resigning her husband's position with the school district and trying to figure out what to do with the new home they recently bought together in Friendswood.

She was trying to be strong for her 5-year-old daughter, Ironche's stepdaughter, who kept asking for "Papa."

She has a contract with her school district, and no immediate plans to pack up and move to Madrid. But, the 32-year-old said, she feels lost without Ironche, and will eventually find her way there to be with him, if that's what it takes.

"I feel out of place, and I belong here," she said. "I don't feel this is my home and my country. I cannot believe this."

Ironche had entered the U.S. legally and overstayed his visa, applying for a green card in 1995 based on an earlier marriage. Sha' Vonne Ironche said her husband's application languished for years and was denied after his divorce. But he was not notified, she said, and the government continued to renew his work authorization year after year.

They taught at the same school and fell in love three years ago. He was a doting father to her daughter, Carmen, from an earlier marriage, she said.

The couple planned to have a big wedding in October 2009, she said, but Ironche was diagnosed with prostate cancer in late August of that year. They decided to move the wedding up and exchanged vows in a quiet ceremony in the minister's backyard in September 2009, three days before he had surgery to remove his prostate.

Still in shock

But when the couple applied in 2010 for a green card based on his recent marriage, immigration officials grilled them about the hasty wedding, she said. They said Ironche had an immigration warrant dating to 2007. His green card application was denied. On Aug. 5, immigration officials detained him. His lawyer requested that the government consider exercising prosecutorial discretion and dismissing his case, but they declined.

Sha'Vonne Ironche said she can't understand why the government went ahead with the deportation, especially after the announcement that gave them hope.

"When the president says we don't need to deport people who don't have criminal records, you should acknowledge it," she said.

Sha'Vonne Ironche said she's still in shock, but is starting to think about the future, trying to figure out how to get her family back together. That most likely will someday result in her leaving her home here in Texas and moving to Madrid.

"I have no choice," she said. "That's where my husband is."