Posted on 01/22/2006 3:23:33 AM PST by Tyche
Alarm is spreading through South Florida's CentralAmerican communities as U.S. officials weigh ordering hundreds of thousands of temporary residents out of the country.
Juana García gave up seeing her children grow up so they would not go hungry.
García's youngest of four children was 3 when she left Honduras 21 years ago and headed north looking for work. The others were 7, 8 and 11. She never saw three of the children again -- the oldest, a son, came to live with her for some time -- because, as an undocumented immigrant, she couldn't travel. But she never forgot her children, sending $350 every month so that relatives could buy them food and clothes.
''I came here because of them, so they would survive,'' García said in an interview Wednesday night.
García, 52, is one of more than 300,000 anxious Central Americans who fear the Bush administration soon will order them to leave the country.
Alarm has spread through South Florida communities of Hondurans, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans, and across the nation over the possibility that the administration is considering ending a program called Temporary Protected Status. TPS allows people like García to live and work with renewable permits.
South Florida's three Cuban-American Republicans in the House, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln and Mario Díaz-Balart, plan to write a joint letter to President Bush and Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff asking them not to kill TPS. The joint letter will be announced Monday at a news conference at the office of Rep. Lincoln Díaz-Balart in Miami.
TPS for illegal Hondurans, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans began after natural disasters struck Central America -- a hurricane in Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998, and earthquakes in El Salvador in 2001.
The programs enable illegal migrants who were in the United States when the disasters hit to remain here legally while their countries recover.
TPS work and residence permits were never intended to be permanent -- but they have become virtual entitlements because they are routinely renewed every 18 months.
As the mood of the country turns more and more against illegal immigration, some administration officials have begun lobbying for an end to TPS.
Some South Florida Central-American migrant leaders are now hoping TPS can be folded into President Bush's proposed guest worker program if Congress approves it later this year. Bush's program would grant temporary work permits to millions of illegal workers for perhaps up to six years.
''That's what we are working on,'' said José Lagos, president of Honduran Unity, a Little Havana-based immigrant rights organization that also represents Nicaraguans and Salvadorans. Lagos compared Bush's guest worker proposal to a ``giant TPS program.''
Lagos' tiny office, at 1421 SW Eighth St., has been swamped by hundreds of anxious Central Americans seeking information after a front-page article in The Miami Herald on Tuesday noted that the TPS program may be eliminated.
People who stop by Lagos' office are asked to sign a letter urging President Bush to continue the program. It expires for Hondurans and Nicaraguans in July and for Salvadorans in September. The letter also seeks legalization for all immigrants and resumption of a now-expired immigration amnesty for illegal migrants sponsored by an American citizen spouse or a U.S. employer.
Lagos is also organizing a Mass Feb. 3 at the Church of Saint John Bosco, 1301 W Flagler St., to pray for TPS renewal. The date marks the Day of the Virgin of Suyapa, an annual religious festival for Hondurans' patron saint.
Half a dozen Hondurans and Nicaraguans who dropped by Lagos' office to sign the letter to Bush on Wednesday evening agreed to tell their stories to The Miami Herald.
One of them was García, who was 31 when she made the fateful decision to find a better life in the United States.
''I had four young children and no one but me to take care of them,'' she said. ``If I had stayed in Honduras, they would not have had a real chance to make it.''
García made her way to the Mexico-Texas border. One night in 1984 she and a group of other illegal migrants crossed the Rio Grande near Laredo, Texas.
Once across, García worked in a series of odd jobs in Texas, cleaning homes or working in small Latin American cafeterias.
Eventually she saved enough money for a plane trip to Miami. Currently she works at a Hialeah factory that packs food condiments.
García's fears were echoed by other Central Americans with TPS.
Paula Durán, from Nicaragua, said she is resigned to returning home if TPS ends.
''What can I do?'' she wondered. ``It would be fate. I would have to go back, even though I have built a new life here, and life is so much more difficult there.''
Durán, 47, arrived in June 1998 from Managua. She cleans homes and regularly sends money to her two sons back home -- Esel Jocsán, 17, and Milton Uriel, 13.
''I don't know what I'm going to do if TPS ends,'' she said. ``I may have to go and live in the streets.''
Iris Alvarez, 33, from Honduras, said that if she is ''deported'' she would be going back to a country where she no longer has relatives.
''My mother and brothers are now in Canada,'' she said. ``I have nobody back there. I'd be homeless.''
I met women in Amsterdam who went to prostitute so their Central American kids could eat. Does that make it right?
If they are illegal, why should their opinion matter, they are here illegally.
If they are here legally, well, when did being and staying in the United States without being a CITIZEN become an entitlement.
Illegal aliens are NOT immigrants.
What's wrong with the governments in Latin America, that it is so generally such a great place to be from?Bush is looking to promote democracy, we sure need it in Latin America so its people might stop the slow-motion invasion of the US.
If here illegally screw them put them on a leaky boat. If here legally, welcome and GOD bless now get a job, learn english stay off the public dole and stay the hell out of trouble or get on that leaky boat.
Cherry picking sob stories will not change the big picture realities. Cheap labor is NEVER cheap.
Democracy is the last thing these illegals seek when sneaking into our country.
So, it's a "right" to continue doing something illegally?
RIGHT??? No one has a right to live in the US but natural born citizens or legalized immigrants. These squatters should have been deported decades ago. They had no right to take a job from a citizen and send the cash home to their relatives. They should be at home, improving their own pathetic countries. This is the 21st century, like it or not. America has no obligation to take in the third world just because they are too lazy or cowardly to change their own societies.
They could come to MA, where the state AG (among others) is pushing for in-state tuition rates at state colleges for illegals.
Which brings us to the larger question of how office-holders supposedly sworn to uphold the law can decide on their own which laws (or non-laws, as with Spitzer) to uphold and which to brazenly announce that they will not enforce. I'm not usually one to resort to "there oughta be a law," but isn't there something wrong with this picture?
I can see being in such a position -- faced with a law one is opposed to, but wouldn't the honorable thing be either to enforce it anyway or to explain why one is opposed and then to resign? Oh, wait, these are politicians . . .
If she can't feed her children, she should not have any. Bank robbers also commit crimes to, among others, feed their children. This is no excuse to break our laws.
So these people have Temporary Protected Status? Okay- sounds like they are here properly- albeit temporarily.
It's the ones who invade without permission that need to be deported.
Bush's program would grant temporary work permits to millions of illegal workers for perhaps up to six years.
Spot the problem.
ping
If true she was eligible for amnesties offered in 1986, 1994, 2 in 1997, and 2 in 2000. Why didn't she take advantage of any of them?
Spot on. Illegal aliens are criminals, plain and simple.
A buddy of mine married a Brazilian girl. This girl has two degrees, one a Masters. She speaks 7 languages and is gainfully employed by a major airline and has been for at least 10 years. They've been trying to get her naturalized for SEVEN YEARS.
The moral of this story is, if you are indigent, illiterate, have communicable diseases or are about to download a baby, WELCOME to the USA!
If you are educated, literate in multiple languages, have no children and are free of disease, then get the hell out....
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