Posted on 02/16/2002 3:50:53 PM PST by usadave
BRANFORD — Last Thursday, Anne and Alfredo Cordero got the letter they'd been awaiting for years - a notice from the Immigration and Naturalization Service telling them of Alfredo's "change of status" hearing.
It was salvation on a slip of paper. After four years with his American wife, Alfredo Cordero would finally metamorphose from endangered illegal alien to a lawful permanent resident.
Instead of a hearing Monday, Cordero, 23, got orders - orders to remove his watch and his wedding ring so immigration agents could take him to a Hartford detention center. He languished there for four days, unable to see his wife and 2-year-old son, unsure whether he'll be removed to his native Ecuador.
"They wouldn't let me say goodbye to him, we had to do it thorough plate glass," said Anne Cordero, 32, who worried all week whether she would see her husband again on American soil.
In a surprise move Friday, INS officials called Anne Cordero and asked her to retrieve her husband. A judge had ordered a stay of deportation and the INS - after a deluge of phone calls from friends and reporters - had released him on his own recognizance, attorneys said.
"They treated me like I was a criminal," Cordero said of his prison experience. He still risks deportation pending an upcoming hearing, and he's still afraid.
"I can't feel comfortable because I was doing (the immigration process) the right way and they do this to me. I can't trust them."
According to attorneys for the Corderos, the INS had moved to deport Cordero due to an administrative mix-up when he entered the country as a lost and guileless 16-year-old.
But his sudden detention has sparked concern as to how the INS deals with adolescent aliens - and whether it fails to follow up with them later. Cordero's new attorney, Michael Boyle of North Haven, believes the INS heaped a huge responsibility on the teenage Cordero when he entered the country - and could be exacting a heavy price from his family.
Alfredo Cordero's odyssey began when he was a teen-ager living in Ecuador, assembling sewing kits to sell at the town market or scraping by any way he could. Like millions of other illegal immigrants, he saw opportunity up north and paid a "coyote" - an immigrant smuggler - to steer him across America's southern border.
In January 1995, INS agents caught Cordero near Douglas, Ariz., and detained him. There was fingerprinting, there were deportation papers - but there was no place to detain Cordero.
The INS also has a policy against jailing juveniles, so agents contacted an uncle living in Branford and sent him there, officials confirmed this week.
They promised to send Cordero notice of a future deportation proceeding. Cordero, then just 16, was expected to attend the hearing and offer himself for removal.
Back in Connecticut, Cordero never received a notice. His uncle, himself an illegal alien, apparently gave the INS a nonexistent address, most likely to escape detention, Boyle said.
Still, immigration sent Cordero several deportation notices. One of them, returned "address unknown," is a part of his court file.
Meanwhile, Cordero started a new life. Back in Phoenix, an immigration court had deported him in absentia.
"He never really had any idea that he was in deportation hearings, the papers never got to him," Boyle said. "He lives here oblivious, thinking he's a normal illegal person, meets his wife in 1998, they have a child."
Things seemed so normal that Anne and Alfredo Cordero applied, like thousands of other couples, for the green card last year, shortly after they were married. The INS generally grants such applications — even if the immigrant entered the country illegally, experts said — as long as the marriage is real.
By that time, Anne and Alfredo had known each other three years and had a son, Nicholas, now 2.
"There's a lot of people out there who marry only for papers, and (the INS) don't check anything or they don't' say anything," Cordero said.
"And I'm trying to do the right way with my kid and my wife, and it's worse." But the INS is generally not sympathetic to aliens they've already tried to deport, and the Corderos walked into harm's way by filing the green card application.
Instead of summoning Alfredo for a green card interview, they summoned him for deportation.
Amy Otten, spokesman for the Eastern Region of the INS, said its not unusual for aliens to fail to show for their deportation hearings, so the agency took the next logical step with Cordero - to deport him the next time they saw him.
"He did in fact commit a crime - he entered the country illegally and that's a crime," she said. But Boyle argues that the INS needs to take into account Cordero's age at the time of apprehension. He thinks its unreasonable for the INS to expect a child in a strange land to follow up on paperwork he never received and, no less, turn himself over to authorities.
Cordero, who most recently worked as a painter in Clinton, also seemed to make friends wherever he went. Many of them are fighting for him now.
"He's very close with his son; he's the type of husband that just family is everything to him," said Gail Flores, his former boss at Branford's Jalapeno Heaven, the restaurant where Cordero met his wife. Anne Cordero said she's relieved her husband is home, but she still feels shaky and a little scared.
"He's not out of the woods yet," she said. And fears that had persisted all week were fresh in her mind.
"I can't live without him, and I can't live in Ecuador, and I can't allow my husband not to be with my son," she said.
For Example:
"They treated me like I was a criminal," Cordero said of his prison experience.
That's because you are a criminal, idiot!!! That's what the word "illegal" in illegal immigrant means.
"I can't feel comfortable because I was doing (the immigration process) the right way and they do this to me. I can't trust them."
No, you weren't doing the immigration process the right way, idiot!!! Doing the immigration process the right way doesn't involve paying a "coyote" to sneak you over the border into the United States.
"He never really had any idea that he was in deportation hearings, the papers never got to him," Boyle (Cordero's attorney) said. "He lives here oblivious, thinking he's a normal illegal person, meets his wife in 1998, they have a child."
So Cordero thought he was a normal illegal person. As opposed to what, an abnormal illegal person? Huh? Never heard that one before.
They promised to send Cordero notice of a future deportation proceeding. Cordero, then just 16, was expected to attend the hearing and offer himself for removal.
Back in Connecticut, Cordero never received a notice. His uncle, himself an illegal alien, apparently gave the INS a nonexistent address, most likely to escape detention, Boyle said.
"He's very close with his son; he's the type of husband that just family is everything to him," said Gail Flores, his former boss at Branford's Jalapeno Heaven, the restaurant where Cordero met his wife. Anne Cordero said she's relieved her husband is home, but she still feels shaky and a little scared.
"He's not out of the woods yet," she said. And fears that had persisted all week were fresh in her mind.
"I can't live without him, and I can't live in Ecuador, and I can't allow my husband not to be with my son," she said.
Yes and what person who has broken a law doesn't think it's unfair when they're caught? What the perp "thinks" is of zero importance before the law. This child made it all the way from Equador to the Unite States where he conciously entered our nation throught illegal means. That seems like a fairly mature act. Traveling thousands of miles alone is not the act of a child.
I liked this one too, "He's very close with his son; he's the type of husband that just family is everything to him," said Gail Flores, his former boss at Branford's Jalapeno Heaven, the restaurant where Cordero met his wife. Anne Cordero said she's relieved her husband is home, but she still feels shaky and a little scared.
Actually, I feel sorry for the family. But they are the ones who decided to play fast and loose with the laws of our nation. Now that they've been caught, they think the government is the bad guy. Burglers have families. Robbers have families. Those who perpetrate fraud have families. So he's good with his son. Since when does that absolve someone of a crime?
Initially he was remanded into the custody of his uncle, also an illegal alien. Then the government was surprised when he didn't show up for court hearings. Good one. Note also that his employer is Gail Flores. He met his wife in the restaurant where he worked. It seems to me that this was a situation where everyone knew what was going on from day one. Now the only defense they have is, "yes but..."
Adios amigo.
Five cents to a dollar, this guy gets legal status and is heralded as a vibrant new part of our growing diversity. After all, justice always wins out in the land of the pot-o-gold.
Imagine that! What'll they think of next?
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