DEPORTATIONS WON'T SOLVE U.S. IMMIGRATION JAM
By A. RUIZ
New York Daily News
February 8th, 2007

She was young and full of hope when she crossed the border from Mexico to the U.S. 10 years ago.

Lourdes Torres was 21, and she dreamed of a job in New York - any job, no matter how hard - that would lift her out of the desperate poverty she had endured all her life.

Instead, six years later, she found herself in jail for a crime she did not commit.

For four years, Torres was confined to a cell in Rikers Island, suspected of killing her boyfriend. It turns out that, as she had insisted all along, she was innocent. On Jan. 25, all charges were dismissed in Queens Supreme Court.

"Thank you, I am grateful," Torres, now 31, said with tears in her eyes as she was released.

The truth, though, is that this humble woman who used to survive by selling flowers under the elevated train tracks, has little to be grateful for.

Not only was she unjustly deprived of freedom for four long years, but after her release, because she came here illegally, Torres faces deportation. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.

Yet her deportation, if it happens, would be one more in a long list of sad, senseless cases.

Stories abound about people who lived most of their adult lives in this country, have children who were born here, for years were law-abiding members of their communities, yet were deported because of some minor infraction - a marijuana cigarette, a drunken fistfight - committed many years back when they were young and foolish.

Every year, nearly 200,000 noncitizens, many with kids who are U.S. citizens, are torn from their families and deported even when a judge thinks they deserve to stay in the U.S. to help raise and support those families. Just this week, there are reports of about 150 deportations in the town of Bridgeton, N.J.

"The system is clearly broken. Fix it before destroying more families and communities," said Aarti Shahani of the Brooklyn-based Families for Freedom, a group that fights deportation.

A diverse and growing group of religious, ethnic and educational leaders is coming together with the intention of demanding a moratorium on deportations for as long as there is no lucid immigration law in place.

The moratorium is in tune with President Bush's words in the State of the Union speech. He said that he wanted to "resolve the status of the illegal immigrants who are already in our country, without animosity."

The problem is that since the day Bush uttered those words, the persecution of immigrants has intensified. Surely Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in black uniforms knocking on doors at daybreak, bursting into family homes and hauling away fathers while frightened women and children look on is not the way to show a lack of animosity.

AS FRANK Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum has said, "We simply cannot deport our way out of the current immigration mess, nor should we want to. The only way to reestablish control over immigration is through targeted enforcement of laws made enforceable through legal immigration reforms."

Will reform happen this year? If elected officials in Washington are paying attention to their constituents, it should. Every poll tells the same story: Americans do not want useless border fences or police state-type tactics, but real solutions.

"Ours is a nation of immigrants, and we have a responsibility to help those most recently arrived to become productive contributors to our society as quickly as possible - not punish them for having made the journey," said Rep. José Serrano (D-Bronx).

© 2007 Daily News, L.P.