ICE and Human Rights: Two More Case Histories

After Losing Freedom, Some Immigrants Face Loss of Custody of Their Children
by Ginger Thompson, New York Times
April 22, 2009

CARTHAGE, Mo. — When immigration agents raided a poultry processing plant near here two years ago, they had no idea a little American boy named Carlos would be swept up in the operation.

One of the 136 illegal immigrants detained in the raid was Carlos’s mother, Encarnación Bail Romero, a Guatemalan. A year and a half after she went to jail, a county court terminated Ms. Bail’s rights to her child on grounds of abandonment. Carlos, now 2, was adopted by a local couple. [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/us/23children.html

Mentally Ill and in Immigration Limbo
by Nine Bernstein, New York Times
May 3, 2009

Twice the immigration judge asked the woman’s name. Twice she gave it: Xiu Ping Jiang. But he chided her, a Chinese New Yorker, for answering his question before the court interpreter had translated it into Mandarin.

Patrick Andrade for The New York TimesMs. Jiang’s sisters, Yun, left, and Yu, who both live in New York, have been fighting to have her freed and have watched her condition deteriorate in jail. “I’m afraid my sister will commit suicide in the detention,” said Yun, who said Ms. Jiang was too ill to recognize her when she visited in February. “Ma’am, we’re going to do this one more time, and then I’m going to treat you as though you were not here,” the immigration judge, Rex J. Ford, warned the woman last year at her first hearing in Pompano Beach, Fla. He threatened to issue an order of deportation that would say she had failed to show up.

She was a waitress with no criminal record, no lawyer and a history of attempted suicide. Her reply to the judge’s threat, captured by the court transcript, was in imperfect English. “Sir, I not — cannot go home,” she said, referring to China, which her family says she fled in 1995 after being forcibly sterilized at 20. “If I die, I die America.” [...]

Read the full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/nyregion/04immigrant.html?_r=1&ref=us#