Bronx father facing deportation forced to live away from family
Rose, 12, holds her baby brother Angel, with sisters Maylee and Ashley, as well as brother Victor, outside their home. The children’s father, an undocumented immigrant, faces possible deportation.
A Bronx Mother and her five children are in danger of losing their Angel.
Reina - along with her five children, who were all born in the U.S. - live in fear that, at any time, Reina’s husband Angel may be forced by U.S. immigration officials to leave the country.
Angel, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, has worked in construction, and last August, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement informed him he would be deported because he had been convicted of a misdemeanor related to drunken driving.
“We would all be separated and lost,” said Angel’s daughter Rose, 12. Family members declined to give their last name in order to protect their identity.
The separation has already begun. To avoid being picked up by immigration officials and deported, Angel does not live with his family. “It is . . . hard,” Rose said with a frown.
A 1996 federal law has resulted in an increased number of undocumented immigrants - 672,593 of them - being deported for crimes, according to government figures compiled by the Human Rights Watch.
These immigrant deportees are forced to leave their families behind. A 2007 Human Rights Watch report, “Forced Apart,” estimated that 1.6 million family members had been left behind in the U.S. after deportations.
Nancy Morawetz, professor of clinical law at NYU’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, described the law - the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 - as “very punitive.”
“Now, Immigration Court is required to apply a ‘one size fits all’ rule that requires deportation, leaving Immigration Courts powerless,” said Morawetz, adding that judges are no longer able to evaluate individual circumstances of undocumented immigrants facing deportation.
“The law right now, for the most part, doesn’t consider the fact that there are U.S. citizen children. . . . It doesn’t allow a judge to decide whether it would be unfair to that family,” Morawetz said.
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