Free Republic

TIJUANA, Mexico - The towering black gate opens silently to an alley with walls of corrugated metal. Scrawled in large white letters on one wall is: "The End." For those deported from the United States, the words are an unnecessary reminder. Nearly every hour of the day, guards unlock this gate that leads back into Mexico, clicking open the padlocks hung on each side, in each nation.

When Felicita Bautista prepared her husband’s coffee and kissed him goodbye on the morning of April 16, she thought she’d hear from him at lunchtime when he usually called. Instead, the phone rang at 8 a.m. Ms. Bautista’s husband, José Ramírez, told her immigration agents had raided the Pilgrim’s Pride chicken processing plant in downtown Chattanooga and that he had been arrested. “At first I didn’t believe him, I thought it was a joke, but he assured me it was true,” the 28-year-old Guatemala native said. Ms. Bautista’s husband, who had been in the United States illegally for five years...

At 7 months old, Kemberly Méndez doesn’t roll over or sit in a propped-up position. Her right thumb is flexed downward; her index finger is a nubbin and the rest of her right-hand fingers are webbed. Her short life has consisted of physical therapy sessions and visits to specialists who are treating her for Poland syndrome, a pattern of one-sided body malformations, usually on the right side, that are present at birth. But all the care Kemberly, a U.S. citizen, is receiving at Erlanger hospital and at the Shriners Hospital in Lexington, Ky., is in limbo because her mother is...

When Hilma Díaz was handcuffed one April morning at Pilgrim’s Pride, she had one thought. “When I realized we were being arrested, the first thing I could think of was my son,” Ms. Díaz said later, holding her son Raymond in her arms. “As a mother you worry about them. Who’s going to take care of them?” Ms. Díaz and her husband, César Mazariegos, were released the afternoon after their arrests wearing monitoring ankle bracelets so they could care for their now-9-month-old son, who is an American citizen. The couple will leave the United States voluntarily in October, about seven...

Joann Gardner sat forlornly on her living room floor, waiting for the final step in her home's foreclosure process. The lender's representative was due any moment to give her "cash for keys," a transaction in which she would deliver her family home vacant in exchange for an incentive payment. "I'm glad it's done," Gardner said wearily. "I just want to sit down and have some Hennessy." Only days earlier, the house had been jammed with boxes and bags holding the worldly goods her family had accumulated during 54 years in the cramped Oakland bungalow. Now it was entirely empty, the...

Eight years ago, Mr. Jiménez, 35, an illegal immigrant working as a gardener in Stuart, Fla., suffered devastating injuries in a car crash with a drunken Floridian. A community hospital saved his life, twice, and, after failing to find a rehabilitation center willing to accept an uninsured patient, kept him as a ward for years at a cost of $1.5 million. What happened next set the stage for a continuing legal battle with nationwide repercussions: Mr. Jiménez was deported — not by the federal government but by the hospital, Martin Memorial. After winning a state court order that would later...

Memo to the illegal-alien community: That presumably doped-up Brazilian with the criminal rap sheet as long as your arm was not shot by a Yarmouth policeman because he was in this country illegally. Andre Martins was killed after he rammed a police car in an attempt to avoid being arrested. You can’t blame this one on the traditional excuse of a “language barrier.” Ramming a police car is what you call a global language. In any tongue, it means the same - I’m willing to kill you to escape. The fliers were out on Cape Cod yesterday demanding “justice” for...

Veronica Matias and her aunt Eulalia Matias were leaving for a church retreat Saturday morning when two vehicles blocked their driveway in East Ridge. Men got out of the cars and, without identifying themselves, started asking if she and her aunt were in the country legally and demanding identification, Ms. Matias said. “I got out the car and asked them why they needed my information,” said Ms. Matias, a 20-year-old U.S. citizen. “I was told they were looking for a murderer, and they showed me the picture of a man from Ecuador.” She told the men she didn’t recognize the...

<p>Hundreds of legal and illegal immigrants in Arizona are being sent back to their home countries, sometimes against their will, for medical treatment because they lack insurance.</p>

POSTVILLE, Iowa -- Antonio Escobedo ran to get his wife Monday when he saw a helicopter circling overhead and immigration agents approaching the meatpacking plant where they both work. The couple hid for hours inside the plant before obtaining refuge in the pews and hall at St. Bridget's Catholic Church, where hundreds of other Guatemalan and Mexican families gathered, hoping to avoid arrest. "I like my job. I like my work. I like it here in Iowa," said Escobedo, 38, an illegal immigrant from Yescas, Mexico, who has raised his three children for 11 years in Postville. "Are they mad...

Students Must Pay To Make Up Difference In Out-Of-State Tuition. Was it a promise kept, or a promise broken? Four years ago in an auditorium at Cole Middle School, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper promised the 300-plus students in attendance that he would find a way to send each of them to college for free. Now, the first group of those students is set to graduate, and some are finding that the mayor's promise isn't adding up. The promise only pays in-state tuition, and state law requires illegal immigrants to pay out-of-state tuition. So undocumented students must make up the difference....

In his first years in the United States, Carlos B. Jacinto endured the itinerant life of a Guatemalan migrant worker, from picking fruit in Florida to moving logs at a sawmill in Washington. Eventually, he settled here in northern Georgia and erected a middle-class American life. The carpet factories that sustained this town were desperate for workers to supply a nationwide boom in home construction. The wages Mr. Jacinto earned over the last decade were enough to buy a minivan and a brick house with a yard and a swing set for his four young girls. It was a long...

The changes have also brought thousands of Hispanics, some legal immigrants and others not, who have migrated up Interstate 270 to meet the demand for construction and service jobs. Until now, the county has handled the influx with outreach classes in schools and community policing programs. Chic Hispanic restaurants flourish in downtown Frederick, and working-class Latinos have remained relatively invisible. Suddenly, however, their presence is igniting a controversy that some fear could escalate into the kind of war over illegal immigration that has torn apart Prince William County. In the past month, the Frederick County sheriff has joined with federal...

Oakland -- Immigration arrests at homes in Berkeley and Oakland on Tuesday sent a wave of panic among parents in both cities, as authorities mistakenly believed immigration agents were raiding schools. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were in both cities Tuesday, performing routine fugitive operations, spokeswoman Virginia Kice said. Teams go out virtually every day looking for specific "immigration fugitives," she said. Officers arrested four family members at a Berkeley home and a woman at an Oakland residence. They were not at schools. Yet, within the next few hours, rumors of raids circulated throughout the communities. In Berkeley, school...

MOUNT PLEASANT — Friends and family of the 46 people taken to jail by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in April met Sunday with supporters offering legal and emotional support. The federal government moved on Pilgrim's Pride Corp. facilities in Mount Pleasant and in four other states on April 16, gathering some 400 employees on various identity theft charges. A year-long investigation produced the arrests. It also produced a vacuum of information among much of the Latin immigrant community that feeds Pilgrim's Mount Pleasant workforce of about 3,300 people. That lack of information drew an attorney from the Mexican...

CHICAGO — Diego Hernandez and Anh Phan have never met, but they may share something of a common path. Both Hernandez, 40, a native of Mexico, and Phan, 27, a Vietnamese national, were held for immigration officials after they were arrested in Madison County, and will attend court hearings in Chicago to resolve their citizenship status. Anderson police arrested Hernandez this month on suspicion of misdemeanor drunken driving and driving without ever having received a license. Indiana State Police troopers arrested Phan in September at the Pendleton BMV branch when she allegedly tried to get an Indiana ID card using...

The arrests of 100 foreign workers at a Chattanooga poultry plant came swiftly Wednesday morning, but it could be months before they are sent home. “Time in the detention facility can be anything from weeks to months,” said Robert Divine, Chattanooga-based chairman of the immigration group for the Baker Donelson law firm. “It depends on the availability of a judge, and the need to get the person where there is a judge, Atlanta or Memphis.” Most foreigners arrested this week in Chattanooga will have to appear before a U.S. Immigration Court judge. The deportation process also can drag because U.S....

After a tough day of testing on Wednesday, some Hamilton County Schools students got off their buses to find an even more stressful situation at home: Their parents were nowhere to be found. Tennessee and local officials still are assessing the needs of the children, who they say are among those most profoundly affected by Wednesday’s sweeping federal immigration raid at Chattanooga’s Pilgrim’s Pride poultry plants. “There are a lot of families really hurting,” said Mike Feely, executive director of the St. Andrew’s Center, a resource for the city’s multi-cultural communities. “If you have that many moms and dads arrested,...

Although there is no formal tally, Mexican consular sources say a growing number of illegal immigrants across the United States are starting to pack their bags and return home. Illegal immigrants were able to buy U.S. homes during the boom years, either by showing evidence that they pay taxes or by simply presenting false documents. Many of them took out high interest fixed-rate loans or subprime mortgages with a low entry rate that later rose sharply. Experts say language difficulties made them more vulnerable to being offered, and taking, bad deals.

It's not yet 3 a.m. Juana Rivas grabs her shopping cart and steps off the curb into the dark.She shields herself from the cold with a sweat shirt and jacket, along with a pink hat and gloves she bought at the 99-cent store. Only a barking dog interrupts the silence. Rivas arrives at the first house, lifts the trash can lid and shines her flashlight inside. Nothing. "No hay. No hay," she says in Spanish. She peers into another trash can. Nothing. She zigzags back and forth across the street, stopping at each house to search for aluminum cans, glass...