After deportation, migrants determined to return...

After deportation, migrants determined to return;
U.S. crackdown to secure borders pitted against strong desire to flee poverty, crime


By Emily Bazar
USA Today, March 24, 2008

Oscar Ordooez, 56, pleaded guilty to attempted theft in Colorado, he didn't realize he could lose his right to live in the USA. Now he sits on his sister's balcony overlooking the green Salvadoran hills, dreaming of the life he left behind and plotting his illegal return.

Estella Lemus, 27, cries as she describes the hunger, danger and injuries of her illegal border crossing and says she won't do it again.

The seamstress, who earns up to $5 a day in her poor neighborhood north of San Salvador, worries about how she will repay the $3,000 that her family borrowed for her trip.

Nearby, Pedro Berrios, 25, reads to his 5-year-old son in their cinder-block home next to the filthy Tomayate River. Berrios will keep trying to enter the USA illegally, he says, because 'I don't see another way out of here.'

The lives of Ordooez, Lemus and Berrios converged on Feb. 28 when they boarded a plane in Texas with 116 other men and women. They were being deported to El Salvador, targets of the U.S. government's crackdown on illegal immigrants.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been raiding job sites, renewing its efforts to track down illegal immigrants with criminal records and stepping up deportations. Last year, a record 282,548 illegal immigrants were sent home, more than double the number in 2001.

The government limits legal immigration to roughly 1 million people each year, giving preference to relatives of U.S. citizens. On top of that, it admits 800,000 or more people on temporary work visas. Those limits mean immigrants such as Ordooez, Lemus and Berrios take their chances and try to cross illegally, sometimes again and again.

The government ramped up deportations after 9/11 as part of a broad effort to secure U.S. borders. Yet, as the Salvadorans' stories show, the policy is up against the economic reality of life in developing countries. The three say they went to the USA to escape poverty and crime. Now that the deportation flight has left them back in their homeland, they say the same things may spur them to try again.

'I don't want to stay here,' Ordooez says. 'In the U.S., you have a chance to work and buy whatever you need.'

Charles Kuck, president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, says illegal immigrants such as Ordooez won't stay in their homelands.

'They have no reason to stay,' he says. 'Regardless of how hard it is to make it here as an immigrant, it is still better than being back home.'

Kuck says Congress should allow more people to enter legally.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who oversees ICE, advocates expanding temporary worker programs.

'Many of these people would be happy to work and go home again,' he says. 'It would satisfy our economic needs and be humane and law-abiding.'

But for now, Chertoff says, his department has no choice.

'When we find somebody who's here illegally, we deport them,' he says. 'To fail to do that essentially would be turning a blind eye to a violation of the law.'

Chertoff says he knows most people who enter the country illegally come to work and many are fleeing difficult circumstances. 'But I can't condone their violation of the law,' he says. 'However heart-wrenching the motive is, it is still a violation of the law to sneak in.'

72,000 deported by plane

ICE deports illegal immigrants by land and air. Most Mexican deportees are bused across the border. Others are sent home on commercial flights or government charters. Last year, nearly 72,000 illegal immigrants were deported by plane.

'For many of them, it's the first time they've ever been on an airplane,' says Michael Pitts, chief of the ICE Flight Operations Unit.

Flying its nine planes will cost ICE $135 million this year, up from about $100 million last year.

'We're really serious about enforcing immigration laws and securing our borders,' ICE spokeswoman Kelly Nantel says.

On the last Thursday morning of February, three buses roll up to a Boeing 737 in Harlingen, Texas.

One by one, 38 women and 81 men step off the buses, hands behind their heads, laces removed from their shoes and belts from their pants so they can't be used as weapons. ICE officials frisk them and check their shoes and mouths for drugs and weapons.

Although one of ICE's highest priorities is deporting people with felony records, most of these people had no criminal convictions. Most were caught in Texas trying to enter illegally and 23 had been in the USA before, Nantel says.

The flight, less than three hours, is quiet. The passengers eat sandwiches and get up, with supervision, for bathroom breaks.

The plane lands at the San Salvador airport at about 11 a.m. One man steps into the tropical air, throws his arms out wide and yells 'Home!' in English.

Economic, public safety effects

The deportees are funneled into a processing center at the airport, offered tetanus shots and given a traditional Salvadoran meal of pupusas, stuffed corn tortillas. After being interviewed, photographed and fingerprinted, they're given up to $6 for bus fare and are free to go.

The rising flow of people deported from the USA has had a dramatic effect on the economy and public safety of this Central American country of about 7 million people. Nearly 20,000 Salvadorans were sent home last year, up from about 11,500 in 2006.

'The capacity of the United States to catch people who are undocumented in the country or who have committed crimes has increased,' says Rene Leon, El Salvador's ambassador to the USA.

There are about 2 million Salvadorans in the USA, he says. Three-quarters are in the country legally, he estimates.

Last year, Salvadorans working abroad, most in the USA, sent $3.69billion home, equal to about 18% of El Salvador's gross domestic product, the central bank reported.

Rising deportations 'will affect employment here,' immigration official Balbino Velasquez says. 'It will affect the economy.' Salvadorans who no longer receive monthly wires of money from relatives in the USA have less to spend, and returning immigrants have trouble finding jobs, he says.

The tide of deportees also affects public safety. Nearly one quarter of the immigrants deported to El Salvador last year had criminal records in the USA, from theft and drug possession to violent crime. Leon says there's a 'positive, clear-cut correlation' between the rise in criminal deportees and a rise in crime in El Salvador. Of particular concern are gangs and organized crime networks, he says.

Bob Dane, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates more border security and less immigration, applauds the aggressive deportation of immigrants with criminal records.

'Countries can't expect to export their criminals without us sending them back,' he says. 'America can't be a sanctuary for the world's bad guys.'

Jose Castaneda, 34, was sent back to El Salvador last April after getting out of jail. He had joined his mother in Los Angeles when he was 13. He became a legal permanent resident but lost that status after he was convicted of possessing crystal meth. 'When I got here last year, I was lost,' he says. 'I'm from here, but I was raised in the USA.'

Castaneda lives with his aunt in the picturesque town of Ataco and earns $3 a day unloading trucks. He left behind four children and a girlfriend in Las Vegas. 'I'm going to have to go back,' he says. 'That's where my family is.'

'I don't have a choice'

About half of Salvadoran deportees lived in the USA more than five years, says Jesus Aguilar, head of CARECEN International in El Salvador, which advocates for migrants.

Aguilar believes most deportees try to return to the USA because jobs at home are scarce and many left family behind. But the stakes are high. An illegal immigrant who has been deported before risks a felony conviction and up to 20 years in prison if caught.

Ordooez, who lived in the USA more than 18 years, isn't giving up. 'My life is not here,' he says of El Salvador. 'My life is there.'

Ordooez finished the sixth grade and started working at age 12. In his early 30s, he went to the USA for the first time and was caught three days later, kicking off a cycle of illegal entries and run-ins with the Border Patrol. He says he was sent home 18 times, but government records show he was officially deported just once.

What tenacity couldn't do for him, marriage did. Ordooez met Jean Gibson, an American who helped Salvadorans fleeing civil war. When he returned to El Salvador in 1987, she followed and they married. He got a waiver to immigrate the next year and became a legal permanent resident.

His immigration troubles began not when the couple divorced in 1994 but when he was convicted of a felony in Colorado.

Ordooez was working as a janitor at a Cripple Creek casino. In 1996, his landlords accused him of stealing two rings and other items. He says he didn't steal the jewelry but that his landlady gave it to him to sell. Acting on what he says was bad advice from a public defender who didn't advise him of the consequences to his immigration status, Ordooez pleaded guilty in 2002 to attempted theft.

An attorney helped Ordooez get the case dismissed and the felony erased from his record in 2005, but it was too late. He lost his legal status and returned to El Salvador to live with his sister in Santa Tecla.

He didn't stay long. Last year, he was caught twice trying to cross the border. He spent four months in jail. Despite the threat of a longer sentence if he's caught again, he says he'll return. He wants to earn money for his family in Santa Tecla.

'I don't have a choice,' Ordooez says. 'Right now, I don't have a life in this country.'

A family's dream

Desperate circumstances prompted Lemus to head for the USA. Her father, Jorge Hernandez, 50, needs a $1,200 operation to remove a tumor from his groin. Her mother, Maria Reyna Lemus, 48, has diabetes and needs insulin.

At 14, Lemus began working as a seamstress in her parents' home in Apopa, which has no running water and at times is a haven for roosters. On good days, she says, she earned $5. She wanted to stay in school, she says, but didn't have the money for books and supplies.

Her younger brother, 24, went to the USA two years ago to escape neighborhood gang violence that once took 11 lives in two months, she says.

Lemus' decision to strike out alone on Jan. 25 was part of her family's dream. She planned to find work, send money home regularly and return after a few years.

'Some Salvadoran families see the United States as their only option for survival,' her father says. 'Once Estella made it to the other side, everybody was going to be better off.'

Lemus crossed through Guatemala and Mexico on foot, by bus and by hitching rides. Just south of the U.S. border, she found a smuggler taking a group of migrants to Houston. She paid him $4,000: $1,000 from her boyfriend, and $3,000 her family borrowed on their house at 20% interest.

She recounts a harrowing trip: She walked for days without food. She slept in temperatures so cold her hair froze. She drank from cow troughs. She has scars from horsefly bites, thorns and wire fences. A woman in the group nearly drowned crossing the Rio Grande.

The Border Patrol caught her near Falfurrias, Texas, on Feb. 8.

Lemus says it all soured her on going to the USA illegally. 'I don't want to take my chances again on the trip, but I might change my mind down the road because of this mortgage,' she says through a translator. 'If they take away the house, where will we live?'

Motivation remains strong

Berrios, Lemus' neighbor, says he has mounting debts. Because visas are too difficult to get, he says, he'll keep trying to sneak into the USA.

A construction worker who was on the same deportation flight, Berrios can make $20 a day, but sometimes he goes months without work.

'Look at the reality of our house and how we live,' he says of his crime-infested neighborhood and unfinished home, which overlooks a river whose polluted water runs purple, red and brown. When family members go to the grocery, he says, they run to minimize chances of being robbed.

For now, the home's windows are boarded with plywood, and the walls and floors are bare, but Berrios says he dreams of making it a beautiful sanctuary for his family: girlfriend Luz Cardenas, 31; her daughters Stefany, 12, and Katherine, 9; and their son, Anthony, 5.

In January, his mother took a $7,000 mortgage on her house to finance his trip to join four brothers and a sister in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was caught in Texas. 'I'll try again because I have no other way to pay back the money,' he says through a translator.

Berrios says he doesn't want to stay in the USA. He wants to earn money for his family and return to El Salvador to open a business. He's unapologetic about his plans. He says people like him just want to give their families a chance to rise out of poverty.

As he surveys his threadbare home, Berrios says he's missing a key ingredient for happiness: 'I have love and health, but I'm missing money. ... That's what's motivating me to try to cross again.'


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ortees_N.htm