http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-911-immigrants-20170911-story.html
Barbara Demick reports:
“Within days of the terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center, word spread in the immigrant neighborhoods of New York that workers were desperately needed to aid in the cleanup. The job would pay cash, about $10 an hour — no questions asked about Society Security cards or immigration status.
Then 32, Carlos Cardona had watched with horror from a construction site across the river in Brooklyn. Although his construction job paid a little better, he felt he ought to pitch in to help the country where he’d lived since his teens, having moved illegally from Colombia. He was married to a U.S. citizen and raising a 2-year-old daughter.
“The money wasn’t very good. But I felt I had to be there to do what I could,’’ Cardona said. “It was an emergency. We had to serve.”
Today he suffers from respiratory and digestive disorders, known as “World Trade Center syndrome,” that have left him unable to climb a flight of stairs and dependent for his medical care on clinics set up for 9/11 responders.
He also faces a predicament shared by up to 2,000 immigrants who helped to clean up after Sept. 11, 2001: the threat of deportation.
After more than three decades in the United States, Cardona was detained Feb. 28 after showing up for one of his regularly scheduled check-ins with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in New York. Days earlier, the Trump administration had issued a memorandum prioritizing the removal of immigrants in the U.S. illegally with criminal records.
“They told me there is a new president and the law has changed,’’ Cardona said. He had plead guilty to a nonviolent drug offense in 1990 and served 28 days in jail — which later hurt his ability to legalize his status despite being married to a U.S. citizen.
He was transferred to an immigrant detention center in Kearny, N.J., and then to a facility in Louisiana. His deportation was averted in June only through the intervention of his congressman, Joseph Crowley, and the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, who issued Cardona a hasty pardon for the drug offense.”
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Read the complete article, which also describes legislative efforts to save these deserving Americans from the Trump-Sessions gonzo enforcement insanity.
Lets take a look behind The Administration’s misleading removal numbers. We already know that most of the removals are “collaterals” without any serious criminal records.
But someone like Cardona is no-doubt misleadingly chalked up as a “drug felon deportation.” Yet, his nonviolent drug conviction was nearly three decades ago for which he served a grand total of 28 days (probably less time than he recently spent in ICE detention before politicos intervened in his behalf).
Since then, he apparently has lived a productive law abiding life, and is the husband of a US citizen and the father of a US citizen daughter. He had been faithfully and voluntarily showing up for his immigration check-ins until the Trump-Sessions-Kelly redefinition of “criminal priorities” snared him. (This is what passes for “law enforcement” in the Trump Administration.) And, he is disabled as a result of the dangerous work he undertook for our country after 9-11. He doesn’t fit any sane definition of a “criminal alien” or an “enforcement priority.”
Under the Obama Administration’s more reasonable and realistic “enforcement priorities” he would have been given prosecutorial discretion (“PD”). Yet, but for some unusual high level intervention, he would have been summarily removed by this Administration (and, by no means it it clear hat he won’t eventually be removed).
So, the next time you hear Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions or anyone else in this Administration pontificate about the importance of immigration enforcement, you can be pretty sure that the real story is something quite different from the White Nationalist restrictionist narrative they are trying to pass off on the public. Sessions and Trump are proven, and brazen, liars. And their “gonzo” immigration enforcement program is hurting, not protecting, America.
PWS
09-12-17