Georgia Immigration" - (Google) News Sweep - 11/6/'06
Georgia Immigration" - (Google) News Sweep - 11/6/'06
Note: Articles are not inclusive of all publications, especially non-English publications, but focus on those that the vast majority of US voters are likely to see regarding the issue.
11/6/'06 - The following article(s) were found in the media. Several stories or headlines are provided ... with links to the original sources ... for your convenience:
- Hispanic group rips Cobb deportation proposal
- Triad Woman snagged in Homeland Security net
- Hispanics and blacks: Cooperation or confrontation?
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/metro/cobb/stories/2006/11/04/1105hispanics.html
Hispanic group rips Cobb deportation proposal
By SHELIA M. POOLE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 11/05/06
Some advocates for Cobb County's fast-growing Latino population are upset that county authorities did not consult them about a plan to let the sheriff speed up the deportation of certain illegal immigrants who have committed crimes.
Members of the Cobb Hispanic/Latino Initiative said they learned only from news reports that the county commissioners planned to vote on the deportation plan. The committee was created in 2004 by Sam Olens, chairman of the Cobb County Board of Commissioners, and Georgia Power Region Manager David Connell, who was then incoming chairman of the Cobb County Chamber of Commerce.
"It's like we don't count," said Patricia Henao, director of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Atlanta's community outreach center in Cobb. "You guys ignored us. That's how I feel."
Zayra Alicia Fosse, state director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, also took issue with the commissioners during an initiative meeting Monday.
"To see us completely ignored ... this is mind-boggling," she said.
The county commissioners endorsed a plan Oct. 24 that would let the sheriff's department work more closely with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The plan would help sheriff's deputies identify illegal immigrants in the county jail who have committed crimes. Immigration authorities would deport an immigrant after a federal court authorizes the removal and after the immigrant completes his or her local sentence.
The immigration agency still must approve Cobb participation.
Olens defended the commissioners but said it would have been prudent
to notify members of the Cobb Hispanic/Latino Initiative. He said the sheriff's office asked for the item to be added to the agenda days before the meeting. "We saw this as a jail management issue and not a law enforcement issue," he said.
Jerry Gonzalez, a member of the Cobb Latino initiative and executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, said the controversy "has set us back tremendously." He also said participation in the federal program duplicates what will be required under a state law taking effect in July 2007.
The Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act prohibits illegal immigrants from receiving some taxpayer-funded services.
It also requires Georgia jails to work closely with federal immigration officials.
After Gov. Sonny Perdue signed the bill into law last year, six of 17 members of the statewide Latino Commission for a New Georgia resigned because, they said, the governor did not seek their opinion.
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http://www.news-record.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061105/NEWSREC0101/611050319
Staff Writer
Instead, she sat in a federal detention center in southwest Georgia, awaiting deportation to her native Peru.
Despite her four-year marriage to a U.S. citizen, her job as a medical assistant with Eagle Family Medicine and the fact that she had a valid Social Security number and had paid taxes for years.
A federal immigration crackdown intended to help fight terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks instead snagged Lenna.
Since Oct. 5, when federal Homeland Security agents intercepted Lenna in her workplace parking lot, handcuffed her and drove her away in an unmarked car, life has been nothing short of hell, she said.
"I just want this to be over," Lenna, 29, said in a telephone interview Wednesday from a detention center in Georgia, where she arrived recently after being shuffled between two county jails in North Carolina.
Her husband, Nathan, 30, writes letters to whoever might read them, trying to call attention to his wife's plight.
"It breaks my heart every single second of every day," he said. "My wife is a beautiful, sweet, innocent woman. I just don't understand it."
This weekend, like the last, Nathan Lenna drove to Stewart County, Ga. -- a 16-hour roundtrip -- to visit his wife. Neither has been told when she will be deported, though both have accepted the fact that she will.
All available legal appeals have been exhausted, said Jeremy McKinney, a Greensboro immigration lawyer who now handles her case. Homeland Security officials did not return numerous telephone calls from the News & Record.
Immigration officials rejected Nathan Lenna's recent offer to buy his wife's plane ticket to Peru, expedite the process and get her out of indefinite lock-up. Immigration detainees often must wait from three to six months to be flown home, McKinney said.
"Now, she's being housed on the taxpayers' dime, and she'll be deported at the taxpayers' expense," McKinney said.
Nathan Lenna said he won't even know when his wife is deported until she reaches Peru and can call him. What happens after that, he isn't sure.
Unless his wife can get a waiver from Homeland Security, her deportation means she can't re-enter the United States for at least a decade.
Lenna, who works at Timco Aviation, says that may force him to sell their Greensboro home and settle permanently in Peru.
"I feel a little betrayed by my country," he said.
Sara Lenna's problems with U.S. immigration began in 1993, when, at age 16, she arrived in America from Peru with her parents, Carlos and Sara Mondargo, and a younger sister.
The visit was legal, but an immigration judge rejected the Mondargos' petition for political asylum -- citing fear of the Shining Path, a violent leftist guerilla group in Peru. The parents were deported; the two teenage daughters agreed to voluntary departure, signing agreements they would return to Peru on their own.
Instead, the family decided to fight for asylum, hiring a Miami lawyer to appeal their case. Their choice of lawyers, Ramon Pizzini, turned out to be a huge mistake, Sara Lenna said.
"He told us he was filing all the paperwork," she said.
Unknown to the family, she said, Pizzini missed numerous court deadlines. And he persuaded Sara and her sister to sign documents separating their cases from that of their parents.
In 2003, the Bureau of Immigrant Affairs suspended Pizzini indefinitely from practice, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Sara Lenna, thinking she had a case in litigation and unaware she could be deported at any moment, meanwhile earned a medical assistant degree at a Miami community college. A few years later, she moved to Greensboro to live with a friend.
She quickly got a job at Eagle Family Medicine's Adams Farm office.
She met Nathan Lenna, a Florida native who grew up in North Carolina. In September 2002, they were married at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greensboro.
Ironically, Nathan Lenna thinks his subsequent visit to an immigration official in Charlotte, where he filed a petition to have Sara recognized as the spouse of a U.S. citizen, may have tipped off Homeland Security officers to her whereabouts.
Lenna's spousal petition was approved. But a panel of immigration judges denied a motion to reopen the deportation case, filed in Miami by yet another lawyer, Joshua Bratter.
"We just received a very generic and flat-out denial,'' Bratter said. "It was entirely detached of humanity. A very disappointing and frustrating decision."
Meanwhile, Sara's parents, whose rejected asylum plea sparked the entire case, continue to fight their case in the courts, said McKinney, the Greensboro lawyer. They have neither been taken into custody nor deported.
"What it came down to is, the judge knew about the disbarment of the attorney, he knew about the marriage case being approved; he simply thought that because Sara was given voluntary departure and didn't leave, he wouldn't reopen the case,'' said McKinney.
The Georgia detention center, a new jail, is an improvement over the county jails in which she had been housed, Sara Lenna told the News & Record.
"I was put in with prostitutes, drug dealers, and women accused of murder,'' she said. "There's no need to treat people like this."
Still, the jail's 300 or so inmates represent some heartbreaking cases, Lenna said. "There are mothers and fathers here, but their children, since they were born here and are U.S. citizens, have been taken by Family and Children's Services.''
The Lennas have no children, though Sara was pregnant and miscarried in January.
"Maybe God knew this was going to happen,'' she said.
Back in Greensboro, Lenna's friends, medical clients and colleagues say they are stunned by the recent events.
"It's beyond belief to me,'' said Cecil Adams, a retired Army brigadier general and a longtime patient at Lenna's medical office.
"I've seen a lot of unjust things, but I sure as hell didn't expect to see it in my backyard. We're not a nation that professes that sort of thing.''
Maureen Cavanaugh, parish nurse at Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church, described Sara Lenna as a devoted churchgoer and an active volunteer in the community. Each year, during an Hispanic health fair sponsored by the church, Lenna acted as interpreter and nurse.
"She was always there,'' Cavanaugh said. "This is a terribly sad situation."
Nathan Lenna isn't sure what the family's options will be after deportation. He's applied for a passport, so he can visit his wife in Peru as soon as possible. If the couple's petition for a waiver of the 10-year ban on re-entering the United States is denied, there's the likelihood he'll have the sell their new house and emigrate.
"I'm going to be with my wife,'' he said.
McKinney said the case comes down to simple priorities.
"With the Department of Homeland Security, it's about making us more secure,'' he said.
"Is the deporting of Sara Lenna going to make us more secure?''
Contact Tom Steadman at 373-7351 or tsteadman@news-record.com
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http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/110506/news_20061105024.shtml
Hispanics and blacks: Cooperation or confrontation?
Race relations in the South
Associated Press Photo
ATLANTA - Rumors of racial hatred swirled around the small farm town of Tifton last fall after four blacks were arrested in the deadly robberies of six Mexican immigrants. In a single night at different trailer parks, the men were shot and beaten to death with a baseball bat as they slept.
Community leaders - the white police chief, the Hispanic priest of the Roman Catholic church, the local president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - quickly stepped in to maintain peace. They called these crimes of opportunity, saying theft not racism was behind them. Still, they conceded the community was far from integrated.
"We've just never been friends and buddies," said Isabella Brooks, the president of the NAACP in Colquitt County, near Tifton. She said she has no white neighbors and doesn't socialize with the Hispanics up the street because of the language barrier.
The nation's two largest minority groups are sorting out whether their relations will be driven by competition and mistrust or a common bond, a joint effort to close persistent gaps between whites and minorities. In no region is the tension more clear than in the South.
"The Hispanic presence changes the dynamic of the South, which has always been viewed as white and black," said William Ferris of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina.
Advocacy groups from the NAACP to the National Council of La Raza argue that Hispanics, especially immigrants struggling for legislative reform, find the perfect ally and model in blacks and their history of fighting for equal rights.
Hispanics have passed blacks as the largest U.S. minority group at 14.5 percent of the population compared with blacks at 12.1 percent, according to the Census Bureau. (It counts Hispanics as people of any race whose ethnic background is in Spanish-speaking countries.)
While blacks are still more numerous in the Southeast, except for Florida, a rush of immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries is changing racial interaction across the region. Several Southern states now lead the nation in the growth of Hispanic residents and illegal immigrants.
In places like Houston and Los Angeles, where blacks and Hispanics have long lived side-by-side, the two groups most often fight for jobs, notably low-income jobs that were often held by unskilled black workers.
An April 2006 Pew Research Center poll showed that more blacks than whites said they or a family member had lost a job or never got it because an employer hired an immigrant worker.
"When you get down to the nitty-gritty worker, the antagonism still exists, while politicians talk about common areas and agendas," said Nicolas Vaca, author of "The Presumed Alliance: The Unspoken Conflict Between Latinos and Blacks and What It Means for America."
That animosity endures in the South, where anti-immigrant groups argue that Hispanic newcomers are willing to accept wages that others won't. Many Southern employers, especially farmers, however, say that there simply aren't enough local workers to harvest their peaches and pluck their chickens.
Is the job argument simply a new version of the "racial baiting" behind historic white-on-black discrimination in the South? Yes, said race relations historian John Inscoe, it's all too easy to stir up racial or ethnic mistrust in poor people who feel outnumbered in the fight for survival.
Census figures show that across 11 Southern states, foreign-born Hispanics have a substantially lower unemployment rate than blacks - less than 5 percent, compared to more than 9 percent for blacks in 2004 - and earn more; their median household income of $33,765 in 2005 was nearly 10 percent higher than that of blacks.
Further, research has found blacks feel threatened beyond the workplace by the influx of Hispanics in the South. Of the three metropolitan areas with booming immigrant populations surveyed in a study related to the April Pew poll, it's only in the Southern one - Raleigh-Durham, N.C. - that a solid majority of blacks favors cutting back on legal immigration.
But some say it's precisely because of the history of strained race relations in the South, where institutional segregation was painfully dismantled, that the region can help integrate another community into the American mainstream.
"There's a very natural linkage between the African-American and the Hispanic communities," said NAACP President Bruce Gordon. "There's a conscious effort to create animosity between African-Americans and Hispanics that takes our eye off the ball. There's an advantage to coalition, and we should find a way to take advantage of this opportunity."
Angela Arboleda of La Raza agrees, though she notes black leaders have not always embraced the notion of solidarity among minorities, citing as an example New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's comment that he feared that city would be "overrun by Mexican workers" during reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina.
In Georgia - home to many black leaders, one of the fastest-growing illegal immigrant populations, and some of the nation's most stringent immigration laws - the growing pains in the developing black-Hispanic relationship have been acute.
"Both sides (blacks and whites) are waiting to see if Latinos will define themselves as black or white," said Dana White, a professor at Emory University who has written about the South. Since skin color is still a defining issue in race relations, and most Hispanics in the U.S. are white, some argue that rather than joining a coalition of minorities Hispanics will close ranks with white Americans and further marginalize blacks.
In 2001, black Georgia lawmakers fought legislation making Hispanic businesses eligible for a state program designed to bolster minority enterprises, arguing it would weaken the state's goal of helping black businesses.
However, last April some black leaders spoke of a shared cause against discrimination at a pro-immigration rally in Atlanta that drew 50,000 people, the kind of street demonstration typical of the civil rights movement defined by Atlanta son Martin Luther King Jr.
And it was in a majority-black county just outside Atlanta that Georgia's first bilingual public school, Unidos Dual Language Charter School, opened in August.
Yolanda Hood, who's black, enrolled her 5-year-old son in the school even though some relatives feared his English could be compromised.
"We're more sensitive to the plight of Hispanics just because we dealt with so many prejudices," she said, explaining that her own educational experience influenced her decision. "I went to a predominantly black school, then a predominantly white college and it was a shock to me - I didn't want my son to have that."
Overcoming mistrust and misunderstandings will take time, experts say.
After the attacks in Tifton, even though they were not officially termed hate crimes, the U.S. Justice Department sent peacemakers to ease tensions, and police stepped up patrols to quell rumors of blacks terrorizing Hispanic neighborhoods.
"Sometimes I think it was some kind of racism," said Tereso Rodriguez, who was assaulted by a black man shortly before the deadly attacks. "I met a man with his jaw and teeth taken out. If it were only stealing, there'd be no need to hit us so much."
Vaca, the author, says basic attitudes differ between the minority communities. Blacks tend to see their historic struggles against slavery and discrimination as giving them an entitlement they don't feel Hispanic immigrants have a right to share, he said, while foreign-born Hispanics know less about black struggles and tend to feel blacks are owed nothing.
Ultimately, people on the front lines like Brooks, the NAACP president, ask a question that's not as simple as it sounds: "What can we do to connect?"
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NAACP: http://www.naacp.org/
National Council of La Raza: http://www.nclr.org/
Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on 110506----------------------------------------
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