Keyword: sobstory
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In their East Lake home, Marcos Tomás and his wife, Lidia Velázquez, recently packed 10 years of their lives into cardboard boxes, preparing for their long journey back to their native Guatemala. “My dream was for my children to study and be raised here, but the current economic situation has stolen the dream I had for my children,” Mr. Tomás said, standing in an almost empty house with a few portraits of the family on the wall and a framed painting of the words “Home Sweet Home.” The economic slowdown, high unemployment rates and tighter immigration laws are pushing local...
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Jose Luis Hernandez rose from vegetable chopper to sous chef at an exclusive New York restaurant -- and saved $100,000 along the way. Recently, the illegal immigrant from Mexico contacted real-estate agents in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he currently rents an apartment. "I wanted to use my money as a down payment on a house," says Mr. Hernandez, 32 years old. In doing so, he sought to join thousands of undocumented workers who in recent years have purchased homes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITIN, instead of a Social Security number. The Internal Revenue Service doesn't give Social Security...
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–Luis Martínez went from being a successful Dallas businessman to a struggling alfalfa farmer in rural central Mexico because of a North Texas crackdown on illegal immigrants. "You make $10 an hour over there and $10 a day here in Mexico," said Mr. Martínez, who added that in addition to his recycling business he has Dallas property and pays U.S. taxes. Of the 500,000 Hispanics who have lost their jobs since January 2007, he estimates 60,000 are illegal immigrants from Mexico. Some have been forced to take jobs that pay much less..... Meanwhile, U.S. authorities are deporting Mexican immigrants at...
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DEMACÚ, Mexico – Luis Martínez went from being a successful Dallas businessman to a struggling alfalfa farmer in rural central Mexico because of a North Texas crackdown on illegal immigrants. Now, that crackdown is squeezing towns across Mexico as immigrant unemployment grows in the U.S. and money sent home declines at a record rate.
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Despite concerns from business groups and immigrant advocates about a government Web-based employment verification program, a growing number of local companies are using it. Since the voluntary program E-Verify was offered to employers in 2004, almost 4,000 Georgia companies and more than 800 businesses in Tennessee have signed up to participate in the federal program, including 50 employers in Chattanooga and 96 in Dalton, Ga. The E-Verify program is a voluntary, Internet-based program established to allow employers to verify workers’ employment eligibility electronically with the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. “We have been using E-Verify without...
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PHOENIX (Reuters) - U.S. immigration agents have arrested 595 people at a Mississippi factory in what was the largest workplace enforcement raid in the United States to date, an immigration official said on Tuesday. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez said federal agents arrested the workers in a raid at the Howard Industries Inc. factory in Laurel, Miss, on Monday, "This is the largest targeted workplace enforcement operation we have carried out in the United States to date," Gonzalez told Reuters by telephone. The swoop at the plant, which makes electrical equipment including transformers, was part of an ongoing...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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<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>
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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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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