video: PBS and VBSTV

The Border Fence: "Is America's border fence working, or an utter waste? NOW travels to Texas to meet families on the U.S.-Mexico border who fear losing their property, their safety, and their way of life."

Illegal LA: "The "debate" over illegal immigration in the United States has always been dominated by hotheads—pissy, sloganeering loudmouths on either sides of the fence drawn together by their shared love of yelling crap on radio call-in shows and steering the dialogue away from anything approaching a solution. And since the 9/11 attacks (carried out by 16 legal immigrants and three on expired visas), the discussion has basically devolved into an incomprehensible jumble. Like did you ever see those supposedly pro-immigrant "A Day With No Mexicans" ads where everyone’s sad that there’s nobody to mow lawns or sell tacos? Who’d they get to write those, the KKK? Seriously, the whole thing just makes us want to shut off our brains and watch Reba or something. But then we remember the lives of some 12 million people hang in the balance of this pissing match (as well as the American economy, welfare, national security, etc), and it’s like, "[exagerated sigh] OK, [rolling up sleeves] looks like we’ll have to wrestle this away from the assholes after all."

In Illegal LA, VBS heads to Los Angeles, the US locus of Latin American migrants and a flashpoint for recent anti-immigrant tensions, in an attempt to suss out the full nature of la reconquista instead of just trying to yell “We’re all immigrants!/Speak English!” until it looks like we’re about to hemorrhage from our eyeballs. Check out the Illegal LA showpage for more information."

Thai slave laborers freed in El Monte become U.S. citizens, By Teresa Watanabe (LAT)

Maliwan Clinton recalls her first taste of America with a shudder. In this fabled land of the free, she was enslaved behind razor wire and around-the-clock guards in an El Monte sweatshop, where she and more than 70 other Thai laborers were forced to work 18-hour days for what amounted to less than a dollar an hour.

When she was freed, a shocked public learned of slavery in its midst and flooded the Thai laborers with American generosity: Churchgoers offered shelter, community advocates proffered English lessons and job tips, lawyers fought for work permits and legal status for the group.

Exactly 13 years to the day the Thai laborers won their freedom, Clinton's American journey came full circle Wednesday as she acquired U.S. citizenship by taking the oath of allegiance to her new nation.

"I'm an American and this is my home now!" said Clinton, 39, as she waved a miniature American flag at the Montebello ceremony, where more than 3,600 citizens were scheduled to be sworn in by day's end.

Another former slave laborer, Sukanya Chuai Ngan, was also granted citizenship Wednesday. The two women are among dozens of the El Monte workers who have acquired citizenship this year or expect to do so soon.

More than 40 of them had gathered Sunday to celebrate with the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, which successfully fought for a $4-million settlement from manufacturers and retailers for their exploitation and won an uphill battle to gain legal status for the workers.

"Because of their courage, they were able to take what was a horrific experience and emerge from it as victors," said the legal center's Julie Su, their lead attorney for 13 years. "I'm really proud of them, but I'm also proud of America because this nation opened its arms to them and showed its best ideals of freedom and human rights."

The El Monte case drew international attention, blazed new paths in immigration and labor law, led to legislation offering visas for victims of human trafficking and became the subject of an exhibit in the Smithsonian Institution.

The case marked the first time in federal court that garment workers successfully held manufacturers and retailers responsible for the actions of their labor contractor.

It was the shocking nature of modern-day slavery in such a nondescript American neighborhood that so riveted the nation, Su said.

Ultimately, law enforcement officers arrested eight operators of a Chinese Thai garment sweatshop in an early morning raid in August 1995 and freed 72 Thai immigrants, some of whom had been held captive for at least four years.

As they celebrated their journeys to citizenship Sunday with American flags and certificates as "American heroes" from the Asian legal center, the former captives reminisced, often tearfully, over their trials.

Most of them said they came from impoverished farming families and had headed to the metropolis of Bangkok to find sewing jobs. There, they met labor contractors who promised them good jobs in America and monthly pay of $1,000 -- nearly 10 times what some were earning in Thailand.

They were told they would work 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., with weekends off to see the glamorous sights of Los Angeles.

But the reality was vastly different.

Buppha Chaemchoi, 37, said she was shocked to arrive in El Monte and realize that she would sleep crammed in one bedroom on the floor with nine others. The windows had been boarded up, she said, allowing virtually no sunlight. Her captors told her that if she tried to escape, brutal U.S. police would shave her head and stamp her scalp with marks of disgrace, she said.

"It made me worry and want to stay inside and just wait for my three-year contract to end," Chaemchoi said.

Chuai Ngan, 47, who came to the U.S. in 1993, said she also was intimidated with threats that her family would be harmed and their home in Thailand burned down if she attempted to leave.

Not all captives were willing to accept their fate, however.

Win Chuai Ngan, the 51-year-old husband of Sukanya, was the first to escape from El Monte. As one of the few male laborers, he said, he was allowed to go outside to take out the trash and help move sewing machines and other heavy supplies into the complex.

One day, he said, he saw a Thai newspaper in the trash, surreptitiously tore out the phone number for a Thai temple and kept it hidden in his pocket. In November 1992, he made his move -- jumping over the fence in the middle of the night. He ran to a taxi stand and asked to be taken to the temple.

"I was so scared the owner would see me and kill me," Win Chuai Ngan said.

He said he told his story to Thai authorities and newspapers in Los Angeles, and gave them an address label for the El Monte complex that he had torn from the newspaper.

But he said he did not report it to U.S. law enforcement officials because he was scared they would deport him.

A few others also escaped, and community advocates eventually helped get the information to authorities. On Aug. 2, a multiagency task force led by the California Department of Industrial Relations raided the complex.

Some of the women were cowed by their captors' earlier descriptions of U.S. police and refused to open the door, which authorities hacked open with an ax. Others said they were overjoyed at their liberation.

"I was so happy," said Clinton, who had been held captive since April 1994. "I thought, 'Oh my God, I'm going home!' "

In the end, most of the workers decided to stay after Su and others successfully fought to win legal status for them. The workers annually celebrate Aug. 13 as their first full day of freedom, since that's when all of them were allowed to leave immigration detention facilities.

Clinton and the Chuai Ngans said that whatever travails they endured here, their American journeys have been well worth taking.

Clinton fell in love and married one of the volunteers who helped her; the couple has two sons.

She works the graveyard shift at Target stocking shelves and aims to attend community college as a steppingstone to a higher-paying job.

Her biggest dream is to sponsor her niece's immigration to the United States -- the daughter of her only sibling, who died in an auto accident.

Chuai Ngan, along with her husband, Win, have started two Thai restaurants and a massage parlor, own two North Hollywood homes and four cars, including a Mercedes-Benz.

They earn enough to send money home to relatives and have built a meeting hall, school lunchroom and library in their impoverished rice farming village in northeastern Thailand. The couple also sends school supplies and sports equipment to the village children.

Like countless immigrants before them, the former slave laborers expressed gratitude for the bountiful opportunities in their adopted homeland.

"American people have such big hearts," Clinton said, "and now I'm so proud to say I'm one of them."

**Story Link
**Image Courtesy of Gary Friedman (LAT): "GROUP HUG: Mario Mercado, left, and Nantha Jaknang, center, hug Suphaphon Khamsutthi during a ceremony at attorney Julie Su's home to celebrate the freedom of the former laborers."

Tuition paid for valedictorian in legal limbo, By John Koopman (SF Gate)

The future looked bleak for 17-year-old Arthur Mkoyan a couple of weeks ago.

A 4.0 student and the valedictorian at his high school in Fresno, Arthur had lost his chance to study chemistry at UC Davis this year because of immigration problems involving his father, who had come to the United States more than 16 years ago. He wasn't sure if he would stay in the States, get deported or ever finish his education.

Until Sherry Heacox stepped in.

The Danville resident saw a story about Arthur's plight in The Chronicle in July and decided to help him out. She's going to pay for him to go to UC Davis for four years.

"I didn't believe it at first," Arthur said. "I thought it was a joke."

No joke. Heacox said she stewed over the article for several days, frustrated and angry over a situation that seemed so hopeless for the young man. She wondered why no one would step forward and help this young man who had so much to offer his adopted land.

And then, a thought came to her.

"Sometimes you have to put your money where your mouth is," she said.

Education isn't cheap. The university estimates the annual cost for an undergraduate student, with in-state tuition, to be about $25,000.

It's not as if this will be easy for the Heacox family. Heacox runs a food-importing business and her husband, Hank, is an engineer. The couple just got done paying for their daughter's education at UC Santa Barbara. Heacox didn't want to say how much she intended to pay for Arthur's education, other than to say she will pick up the tab for everything: tuition, fees, books, room and board.

"This isn't Bill Gates we're talking about," she said. "It's not as if the money won't be missed."

Arthur's parents fled Armenia in 1991 after his father, Ruben Mkoian (father and son spell their surname differently), exposed corruption at the government office where he worked; the family's house was burned down and a shop they owned was ransacked.

Mkoian and his family settled in Fresno and Mkoian applied for asylum. Seven years later, his claim was denied, and he appealed all the way to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The court turned him down this year, saying he had failed to establish a "well-founded fear of persecution" if he returned to Armenia.

In April, federal immigration authorities detained Arthur's father and prepared to deport him. His mother was allowed to remain free to care for Arthur and his 12-year-old, U.S.-born brother until the date of their departure.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., heard about the family's case and, on the very day of Arthur's commencement, and just days before the family's scheduled deportation, introduced a private bill in the U.S. Senate that led to Mkoian's release after two months in detention and could grant the family lawful permanent residence.

Such bills rarely pass - an estimated 3 percent are approved - but as long as the legislation is pending, the removal order remains suspended, which gives Arthur and his family a temporary reprieve that could last a couple of years.

While the issue of deportation remains alive, the family is hopeful - and amazed that someone would make such a generous offer of help.

"She is a wonderful, wonderful lady," said Arthur's mother, Asmik Karapetian. "When she called us to say she wanted to pay, we couldn't believe it. Arthur was jumping for joy. This is like a dream come true."

Heacox said she decided to help Arthur because she doesn't like how his family was treated. "We're all immigrants," she said. "Some of us just got here earlier than others."

She also supports education, she said, and Arthur's plight struck her deeply.

"Anyone who is willing to study hard and get an education - especially in the sciences - ought to have the chance to do so," she said.

And then, too, there was a desire to do something special, something worthwhile. To make a difference in the life of another human being.

"I don't want to be one of the people in life where the best thing I did on this earth was die off," she said.

New-student orientation is on Sunday. Arthur and his parents will be there.

And so will Sherry Heacox.

**Story Link
**Image Courtesy of Paul Chinn (The Chronicle): "Asmik Karapetian and her son Arthur Mkoyan finish lunch at home in Fresno. They're amazed at the offer of help."

Push needed for immigration reform, By: Gebe Martinez (Politico)

The physical and emotional pain of dozens of immigrants and their children was palpable recently when a congressional delegation walked into a room at St. Bridget’s Catholic Church in Postville, Iowa.

The town still suffers almost three months after 389 immigrants were arrested at a local meat processing plant and then detained at a cattle exhibit hall. At this meeting with three members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, their stories of inhumane treatment at work and legal injustices after the arrests came tumbling out.

There was a 16-year-old who worked on the kill floor of the plant — he was under the legal age limit for the job — who labored 17-hour shifts, six days a week, without overtime. There was a man who had lost his hand. There were women who were sexually exploited if they wanted a shift change.

In May, hundreds of federal agents stormed into the Agriprocessors Inc. plant, rounded up workers like cattle and chuted them through a pre-scripted legal process that cut off their legal rights to defend themselves against unusually harsh felony “aggravated identity theft” charges. Families are separated and women are wearing electronic homing bracelets pending the conclusions of their cases.

After meeting with the immigrants, Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.) had a question for presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, the Arizona senator who once worked on Gutierrez’s comprehensive immigration reform plan.

“Is this his ‘enforcement only’ plan?” Gutierrez asked chidingly. “How many more years of this do we have to have before we have comprehensive [reform]? How many more Postvilles do we have to have?”

Of course, Gutierrez backs Democrat Barack Obama for president, but he also was disappointed last year when McCain stepped back from the broad immigration plan they had collaborated on and began insisting that “border security” must come first.

But the questions should be posed, not only to McCain, but to others who have failed to step up and lead.

Obama needs to be pressed on immediate immigration fixes, and so does the Democratic Congress, which has refused to take up a big reform package until next year at the earliest.

And do not forget President Bush, who once stood for the comprehensive immigration plan until it failed last year in the Senate. Now, as Bush’s lame duck presidency limps to an end, he has turned his back to Postville while reserving his compassion for oil companies.

It is highly unlikely that Bush will grant Gutierrez’s request for a moratorium on immigration raids until a better solution is in place.

“You know who is in charge now? The Gestapo agents at [the Department of] Homeland Security. They are in charge,” Gutierrez said. “I think it is election season, and they have decided it did not work for us one way [with comprehensive reform], so let’s try to exploit it politically another way” through harsh enforcement.

Enforcement only, without also figuring out how to legalize 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country or refining the rules for employers who hire illegal immigrants, is exactly what conservatives want in this election year.

The Center for Immigration Studies, which favors strict limits on legal and illegal immigration, recently concluded that, in addition to a sinking economy, “increased enforcement seems to have played a significant role” in reducing the illegal immigrant population over a nine-month period ending in May.

The accuracy of the center’s calculations were highly criticized by immigrant advocates, but the center stuck to its argument that “muscular enforcement” can “induce” illegal residents to return to their home countries.

Heeding the criticism that immigration enforcers have unnecessarily disrupted families, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is testing a 17-day program in five cities that asks 457,000 non-criminal illegal immigrants who ignored deportation orders to turn themselves in. Coordinating their departures with ICE will “ease their transition and minimize the impact of their removal on their loved ones,” the agency said.


Legal family members of the illegal immigrants are invited to leave the country as well.

The plan would be laughable if the issue were not so serious, said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, which wants an overhaul of immigration laws that combines tougher enforcement with expanded visa programs and earned legalization.

“Call me crazy, but I doubt that [test program] sends the message to Latino voters that the Republican Party understands the complexity of this issue and supports practical solutions,” Sharry said, referring to the competition for the Latino vote in the November election.

Postville is the poster board for the broken immigration system.

The federal government’s chase of illegal immigrants at the meat plant disrupted a Labor Department probe into unfair work and wage practices by the owners. Critics have accused ICE of being more aggressive about prosecuting minor immigration violations than punishing employers.

Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union found a government “manual” given to lawyers assigned to defend the workers. The package included scripts for plea and sentencing hearings, which the ACLU said resulted in undermining the immigrants’ ability to understand the charges against them and receive full hearings.

Filled with fear, most of those arrested agreed to waive their rights, plead guilty to lesser charges and spend five months in prison before being deported. The alternative was to spend at least six months in jail while waiting for a trial, risk being sentenced to at least two years in prison, and still be deported.

Gutierrez likened the process to indicting a person for murder without any evidence. In this case, where many are claiming innocence of the identity theft charges, “we prosecuted the people we should be protecting. It corrupts our judicial system and it undermines our values.”

While Democrats plan to hold a congressional hearing in Postville next month, efforts also are underway on incremental measures to help legal immigrant workers and their employers.

Fixes to the E-Verify electronic employment verification system were approved by the House last week.

Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) also proposed a new bill that would invest federal dollars in English literacy and civics programs for adults and school children and give a 20 percent tax credit to employers who provide English and GED instruction.

The point of the bipartisan-backed bill is to promote immigrants’ desires to integrate in American society rather than focus on “English-only” and other aspects of the immigration debate that fuel rancor, said Peter Zamora of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

“There’s hot air fatigue. Members [of Congress] now recognize they were elected to get something done, not just fulminate about a class of people,” Zamora said.

Maybe. But nothing will be done before the November elections, and not soon enough for the people in Postville.

**Story Link
**Image Courtesy of Politico

Some thoughts about Latino immigrants and class, By Miriam (Feministing)

Jack has a great post up at AngryBrownButch (and Feministe) about a new Demos report on the instability of the Black and Latino middle class. Jack shares some really interesting insights from childhood, and it inspired me to share some of my own thoughts.

From the report:

African-American and Latino families have more difficulty moving into the middle class, and families that do enter the middle class are less secure and at higher risk than the middle class as a whole. Overall, more African-American and Latino middle-class families are at risk of falling out of the middle class than are secure. This is in sharp contrast to the overall middle class, in which 31 percent are secure and 21 percent are at risk.
My parents are Cuban exiles, who immigrated here in the 60s shortly after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba. The reason why class has such different implications for immigrant families in the US is because they bring their class histories with them from their countries of origin.

Some immigrants come to the US to flee poverty, others are forced to leave behind relative wealth in their home countries seeking safety in the US. My family left because of communism, and their inability to maintain ownership over their respective businesses. While my paternal grandfather was a wealthy businessowner in Cuba, my maternal grandfather owned a small modest cornerstore. Neither side was able to regain similar class positions after coming to the US. Money was really tight when they first came over (people were not allowed to bring any of their things, including money, with them when they left) and my paternal grandfather (who had been relatively wealthy in Cuba) never rose above lower middle class status (my best estimation, it's hard to really know) in the United States. This was partially because he held onto the dream of returning to Cuba (as so many Cuban exiles did). For most of his life in the US he sold used cars for a living, and my grandmother (who had never worked before) worked as a secretary in a local school in Miami.

My parents and their siblings have all dealt with class in different ways. My mother's sisters became really wealthy, by marriage and entrepreneurship. Business and wealth are really important to them, and as someone who works in non-profits it's a struggle to relate to my cousins on that side. My parents took the education route, and are both college professors. They each have very different financial situations (now divorced) but we never had to deal with the fear of real poverty because of the security and stability that tenure and academia afford. They have always had trouble relating to their parents and siblings, who don't understand what they do and look down on them as simply "teachers."

It still remains to be seen how these things will affect my generation in my family, the first generation US citizens. We are all learning really different lessons about class from our parents and society in general.

**Artcile Link

Immigrants Facing Deportation by U.S. Hospitals, By Deborah Sontag (NYT)

High in the hills of Guatemala, shut inside the one-room house where he spends day and night on a twin bed beneath a seriously outdated calendar, Luis Alberto Jiménez has no idea of the legal battle that swirls around him in the lowlands of Florida.

Shooing away flies and beaming at the tiny, toothless elderly mother who is his sole caregiver, Mr. Jiménez, a knit cap pulled tightly on his head, remains cheerily oblivious that he has come to represent the collision of two deeply flawed American systems, immigration and health care.

Eight years ago, Mr. Jiménez, 35, an illegal immigrant working as a gardener in Stuart, Fla., suffered devastating injuries in a car crash with a drunken Floridian. A community hospital saved his life, twice, and, after failing to find a rehabilitation center willing to accept an uninsured patient, kept him as a ward for years at a cost of $1.5 million.

What happened next set the stage for a continuing legal battle with nationwide repercussions: Mr. Jiménez was deported — not by the federal government but by the hospital, Martin Memorial. After winning a state court order that would later be declared invalid, Martin Memorial leased an air ambulance for $30,000 and “forcibly returned him to his home country,” as one hospital administrator described it.

Since being hoisted in his wheelchair up a steep slope to his remote home, Mr. Jiménez, who sustained a severe traumatic brain injury, has received no medical care or medication — just Alka-Seltzer and prayer, his 72-year-old mother said. Over the last year, his condition has deteriorated with routine violent seizures, each characterized by a fall, protracted convulsions, a loud gurgling, the vomiting of blood and, finally, a collapse into unconsciousness.

“Every time, he loses a little more of himself,” his mother, Petrona Gervacio Gaspar, said in Kanjobal, the Indian dialect that she speaks with an otherworldly squeak.

Mr. Jiménez’s benchmark case exposes a little-known but apparently widespread practice. Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to accept them without insurance. Medicaid does not cover long-term care for illegal immigrants, or for newly arrived legal immigrants, creating a quandary for hospitals, which are obligated by federal regulation to arrange post-hospital care for patients who need it.

American immigration authorities play no role in these private repatriations, carried out by ambulance, air ambulance and commercial plane. Most hospitals say that they do not conduct cross-border transfers until patients are medically stable and that they arrange to deliver them into a physician’s care in their homeland. But the hospitals are operating in a void, without governmental assistance or oversight, leaving ample room for legal and ethical transgressions on both sides of the border.

Indeed, some advocates for immigrants see these repatriations as a kind of international patient dumping, with ambulances taking patients in the wrong direction, away from first-world hospitals to less-adequate care, if any.

“Repatriation is pretty much a death sentence in some of these cases,” said Dr. Steven Larson, an expert on migrant health and an emergency room physician at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. “I’ve seen patients bundled onto the plane and out of the country, and once that person is out of sight, he’s out of mind.”

Hospital administrators view these cases as costly, burdensome patient transfers that force them to shoulder responsibility for the dysfunctional immigration and health-care systems. In many cases, they say, the only alternative to repatriations is keeping patients indefinitely in acute-care hospitals.

“What that does for us, it puts a strain on our system, where we’re unable to provide adequate care for our own citizens,” said Alan B. Kelly, vice president of Scottsdale Healthcare in Arizona. “A full bed is a full bed.”

Medical repatriations are happening with varying frequency, and varying degrees of patient consent, from state to state and hospital to hospital. No government agency or advocacy group keeps track of these cases, and it is difficult to quantify them.

A few hospitals and consulates offered statistics that provide snapshots of the phenomenon: some 96 immigrants a year repatriated by St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix; 6 to 8 patients a year flown to their homelands from Broward General Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; 10 returned to Honduras from Chicago hospitals since early 2007; some 87 medical cases involving Mexican immigrants — and 265 involving people injured crossing the border — handled by the Mexican consulate in San Diego last year, most but not all of which ended in repatriation.

Over all, there is enough traffic to sustain at least one repatriation company, founded six years ago to service this niche — MexCare, based in California but operating nationwide with a “network of 28 hospitals and treatment centers” in Latin America. It bills itself as “an alternative choice for the care of the unfunded Latin American nationals,” promising “significant saving to U.S. hospitals” seeking “to alleviate the financial burden of unpaid services.”

Many hospitals engage in repatriations of seriously injured and ill immigrants only as a last resort. “We’ve done flights to Lithuania, Poland, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico,” said Cara Pacione, director of social work at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago. “But out of about a dozen cases a year, we probably fly only a couple back.”

Other hospitals are more aggressive, routinely sending uninsured immigrants, both legal and illegal, back to their homelands. One Tucson hospital even tried to fly an American citizen, a sick baby whose parents were illegal immigrants, to Mexico last year; the police, summoned by a lawyer to the airport, blocked the flight. “It was horrendous,” the mother said.

Sister Margaret McBride, vice president for mission services at St. Joseph’s in Phoenix, which is part of Catholic Healthcare West, said families were rarely happy about the hospital’s decision to repatriate their relatives. But, she added, “We don’t require consent from the family.”

In a case this spring that outraged Phoenix’s Hispanic community, St. Joseph’s planned to send a comatose, uninsured legal immigrant back to Honduras, until community leaders got lawyers involved. While they were negotiating with the hospital, the patient, Sonia del Cid Iscoa, 34, who has been in the United States for half her life and has seven American-born children, came out of her coma. She is now back in her Phoenix home.

“I can think of three different scenarios that would have led to a fatal outcome if they had moved her,” John M. Curtin, her lawyer, said. “The good outcome today is due to the treatment that the hospital provided — reluctantly, and, sadly enough, only in response to legal and public pressure.”

Unlike Ms. Iscoa and Mr. Jiménez, most uninsured immigrant patients in repatriation cases do not have advocates fighting for them, and they are quietly returned to their home countries. Sometimes, their families accept that fate because they are told they have no options; sometimes they are grateful to the hospital for paying their fare home, given that other hospitals leave it to relatives or consulates to assume responsibility for the patients.

Mr. Jiménez’s case is apparently the first to test the legality of cross-border patient transfers that are undertaken without the consent of the patients or their guardians — and the liability of the hospitals who undertake them.

“We’re the rhesus monkey on this issue,” said Scott Samples, a spokesman for Martin Memorial.

A Life-Changing Accident

Mr. Jiménez’s journey north was propelled by the usual migrant’s dreams. When he pledged thousands of dollars to pay the smuggler who delivered him to the United States, he envisioned years of labor on the lawns of affluent America and then a payoff: the means to buy land of his own, to cultivate his own garden, back in Guatemala.

But fate — in the person of Donald Flewellen, a pipe welder with a drug problem and a long criminal record — intervened. At lunchtime on Feb. 28, 2000, Mr. Flewellen was loitering in the parking lot of a Publix supermarket in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., when the employees of an irrigation company ran inside, leaving the keys in their van. Seizing the moment, Mr. Flewellen, a thorn in the side of local prosecutors with at least 14 arrests, jumped into the van and drove off.

In the next few hours, Mr. Flewellen consumed enough alcohol to produce a blood-alcohol level four times higher than the legal limit. But drive he did, along the back roads that connect the affluent Treasure Coast to the agricultural interior where Guatemalan Mayan immigrants have settled in a place, coincidentally, called Indiantown.

About 4 p.m., Mr. Flewellen was heading east on a rural road just as Mr. Jiménez and three compatriots were returning home from a day of landscaping. His stolen van and their 1988 Chevrolet Beretta crashed head-on, instantly killing two of the Guatemalans and severely injuring the driver and Mr. Jiménez, a back-seat passenger.

Identified first as John Doe, Mr. Jiménez arrived by ambulance at Martin Memorial, a not-for-profit hospital on the banks of the St. Lucie River in Stuart. He was unconscious and in shock from extensive bleeding, with two broken thigh bones, a broken arm, multiple internal injuries, a terribly lacerated face and a severe head injury. A doctor noted his prognosis as “poor.”

But Mr. Jiménez, after intensive surgical and medical intervention, survived. “He was no longer Luis; he was another person,” Montejo Gaspar Montejo, his cousin by marriage, said, describing a previously husky and industrious laborer who was also a soccer enthusiast. “He didn’t talk. He didn’t understand anything. He stayed curled up in a ball. But he was alive.”

During that time, Martin Memorial asked Michael R. Banks, a local lawyer who specializes in estate planning, to set up a guardianship for Mr. Jiménez. “I said, ‘Sure, what can come of such a case?’ ” Mr. Banks said. “Then it took on a life of its own. They probably regret they ever called me.”

Mr. Jiménez, whose common-law wife and two children remained in Guatemala, had been living for just under a year with Mr. Gaspar’s family. Mr. Gaspar, who works in golf-course maintenance, agreed to serve as guardian.

At first, things were amicable. In the summer of 2000, Mr. Jiménez was transferred to a nursing home in Stuart, which may have accepted him because an insurance payout was possible.

Mr. Flewellen, who eventually pleaded guilty to D.U.I. manslaughter, D.U.I. injury and grand theft auto, was not insured. But the Guatemalan families sought to hold the irrigation company liable since its employees left the keys in the car. Their lawsuit ultimately failed.

In the nursing home, Mr. Jiménez began wasting away. His relatives grew anxious. Then, Robert L. Lord Jr., Martin Memorial’s vice president of legal services, said, “Mr. Jiménez was put back on our doorstep.”

He arrived by ambulance, this time emaciated and suffering from ulcerous bed sores so deep that the tendons behind his knees were exposed. With infection raging, “the question to be answered is if the patient’s condition is terminal,” a doctor wrote in his file.

Again, Martin Memorial’s doctors provided life-saving care. Hospitals are mandated to treat and stabilize anyone suffering from an emergency medical condition, and the federal government does provide emergency Medicaid coverage for illegal and new immigrants.

But hospitals say that emergency Medicaid covers only a small fraction of those expenses: $80,000 in Mr. Jiménez’s case, according to court papers.

Mr. Jiménez remained in a vegetative state, coiled in a fetal position, for “one year, two months and 15 days,” Mr. Gaspar said with precision.

Stunning his relatives and medical officials, though, Mr. Jiménez gradually woke up and started interacting with the world. “One day,” Mr. Gaspar said in Spanish, “we arrived for a visit, and he said to me, ‘You are Montejo.’ ”

Not long afterward, the battle began between Martin Memorial and Mr. Gaspar, a reserved man whose Indiantown living room is decorated with a “We Love America” clock, a beach towel from the ancient city of Tikal and a hammered metal image of the Virgin Mary.

A Hospital’s Dilemma

The average stay at Martin Memorial, a relatively tranquil hospital which features a palm frond design in its gleaming lobby floor and white-coiffed volunteers in its gift shop, is 4.1 days and costs $8,188. Patients rarely linger.

Those like Mr. Jiménez who outstay their welcome are an oddity but not an anomaly. Mr. Jiménez had a roommate from Jamaica, a diabetic who lost both legs. Martin Memorial eventually flew him back to his native country, too.

In addition to trauma patients, there are uninsured immigrants with serious health problems. “In our emergency room, we don’t turn anyone away,” said Carol Plato Nicosia, the director of corporate business services. “The real problem is if we find an underlying problem, and now we have six of them — six patients who showed up in renal failure and that we are now seeing three times a week for dialysis.”

One of the six, she said, voluntarily returned to Guatemala after receiving a poor prognosis. But she showed up at Martin Memorial again after her relatives insisted that she undertake the trek over the borders a second time because she could not get treatment in Guatemala, Ms. Plato Nicosia said.

“I don’t want to sound heartless,” Ms. Plato Nicosia said. “A community hospital is going to give care. But is it the right thing? We have a lot of American citizens who need our help. We only make about 3 percent over our bottom line if we’re lucky. We need to make capital improvements and do things for our community.”

Martin Memorial reported a total margin of 3.6 percent over its bottom line last year and 6 percent in 2006. According to the most recent statewide data, the nonprofit medical center also reported assets of $270.6 million in 2006, with its senior executives earning more than $4 million in salaries and benefits.

Tax-exempt hospitals are expected to dedicate an unspecified part of their services to charity cases, and Martin Memorial devoted $23.9 million in 2006, about 3 percent, which was average for Florida, according to state data.

Mr. Jiménez was a very expensive charity case. In cases like his, where patients need long-term care, hospitals are not allowed to discharge them to the streets. Federal regulations require them — if they receive Medicare payments, and most hospitals do — to transfer or refer patients to “appropriate” post-hospital care.

But in most states, the government does not finance post-hospital care for illegal immigrants, for temporary legal immigrants or for legal residents with less than five years in the United States. (California and New York City are notable exceptions; Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, spends $20 million a year on long-term care for illegal immigrants, as does the Health and Hospitals Corporation of New York City.)

Martin Memorial’s lawyer, Mr. Lord, said hospitals should not be forced to assume financial and legal responsibility for these cases. “It should be a governmental burden,” he said, “or the government should step in and otherwise exercise its authority for deportation or whatever it wants to do.”

In Mr. Jiménez’s case, the hospital’s doctors determined that appropriate post-hospital care meant traumatic brain injury rehabilitation. Much to the surprise of the hospital staff, Mr. Jiménez had regained cognitive function to about the level of a fourth-grade child.

Hospital discharge planners searched to no avail for a rehabilitation program or nursing home. “Unable to take patient” was the response to many queries, as noted in Mr. Jiménez’s files, which also state: “At this time, patient remains a disposition problem.”

Representing Mr. Jiménez’s guardian, Mr. Banks took the position that the hospital had a responsibility to provide Mr. Jiménez with the rehabilitation he needed — even if it meant paying a rehabilitation center to provide it. That, he noted, could have benefited both the hospital and the patient.

“It would have been more cost-effective for them,” Mr. Banks said, given that daily patient costs in long-term care are far lower than in acute-care hospitals. “And if the rehab worked, then Luis might have become a functional person and nobody’s charge.”

But the hospital declined, as Mr. Lord put it, “to take out our checkbook” and subsidize his care at another institution.

“Once you take that step, for how long are you going to do that — a year, 10 years, 50 years?” Mr. Lord, the lawyer, asked.

At that point, the hospital intensified its efforts to involve the Guatemalan government in the case. In a memorandum obtained by The New York Times, a consular official wrote that the hospital “informed us of how expensive it was becoming to care for Luis given that there was no insurance and that he is illegal and that the state won’t assume responsibility for his charges.”

Eventually, the Guatemalan health minister wrote a letter assuring Martin Memorial that his country was prepared to care for Mr. Jiménez. Gabriel Orellana, who was foreign minister at the time but did not have direct knowledge of the case, said the Guatemalan government was disposed to assist an American institution. “If a hospital in Florida asks if we can take care of a Guatemalan patient, the tendency is to say yes,” Mr. Orellana said.

Mr. Gaspar was dubious, believing the public health care system in his homeland to be grossly inadequate.

So the guardian and the hospital reached an impasse, and Martin Memorial finally took the matter to court, asking a state judge to compel Mr. Gaspar to cooperate with its repatriation plan. In June 2003, a hearing was held before Circuit Judge John E. Fennelly.

The Journey Home

In the courthouse in Stuart, a low-key, upscale town that boasts world-class fishing, George F. Bovie III, a lawyer for Martin Memorial, addressed the judge: “This case is not simply a case, as some would try and paint it, of money. This is a case about care for a man in this country illegally who has reached maximum medical improvement at our hospital and is ready to be discharged and whose home government” is prepared to receive and treat him.

Mr. Banks responded: “Your honor, this is a case about a hospital that has failed to do its job properly,” adding that the hospital sought to “have this court legitimize its patient dumping.”

By the time of the hearing, Mr. Jiménez was essentially a boarder at the hospital, wheeling around the hallways and hanging out at the nursing stations. Diana Gregory, a nurse who supervises case management and discharge planning, said in a recent interview that Mr. Jiménez — “I will affectionately call him Louie” — became “like family” to hospital staff members, who bought him birthday cakes, knitted him blankets and gave him toys.

According to hospital records, however, it was not all pastries and presents. Mr. Jiménez grew depressed as he gradually became more cognizant of his situation. He showed signs of regression, too. Emotional and behavioral volatility often follow serious head injuries, and Ms. Gregory said that Mr. Jiménez had developed some disturbing habits, including spitting, yelling out, kicking and defecating on the floor.

In court, his doctor, Walter Gil, testified that Mr. Jiménez would benefit from returning to the intimacy of his family. In his case file, the doctor had noted that Mr. Jiménez had told him, “Estoy triste,” meaning, “I’m sad.”

Dr. Gil said he asked Mr. Jiménez, “Why are you sad when you have basically everything that could be offered to you?” And, he said, Mr. Jiménez replied, “I miss my family and my wife.”

Mr. Banks’s witnesses challenged what they described as Guatemala’s vague offer to care for Mr. Jiménez.

Dr. Miguel Garcés, a prominent Guatemalan physician and public health advocate, said in a deposition that serious rehabilitation “is almost nonexistent” in Guatemala outside private facilities. He predicted that Mr. Jiménez would be taken in and then released from the country’s one public rehabilitation hospital within a matter of weeks.

“I don’t want him to go home and die,” Dr. Garcés said.

“Nobody wants him to go home and die,” the hospital’s lawyer responded.

A few weeks later, Judge Fennelly ruled. “This Court,” he wrote, “sails on uncharted seas.” He acknowledged that his decision might provoke dissent but opined, “As Aquinas once stated, ‘The good is not the enemy of the perfect,’ ” inverting and misattributing Voltaire’s famous quote, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

And then he granted the hospital’s petition, ordering that Mr. Gaspar stop “frustrating” the hospital’s plan to “relocate the ward” back to Guatemala.

Mr. Banks was stunned. He filed a notice of appeal and asked for a stay of the court’s order while the appeal was pending. The judge asked the hospital to file a response by 10 a.m. on July 10 before he ruled on the stay.

Four and a half hours before that response was due, shortly before daybreak on July 10, 2003, an ambulance picked up Mr. Jiménez at the hospital and drove him to the St. Lucie County airport, where an air ambulance waited to transport him back to Guatemala. Mr. Gaspar was not apprised.

“We went to see him at the hospital, and his bed was empty,” he said.

The hospital’s lawyer declined to comment on why the hospital did not wait for the judge to rule on the stay.

Diana Gregory, the nurse, traveled to Guatemala with Mr. Jiménez, bringing a wheelchair, a week’s worth of medications, “lunch/snacks/juices/treats,” and an emergency passport signed with a fingerprint, according to discharge records. Mr. Jiménez wore a Florida Marlins cap and carried a toy cellphone.

During the flight, the records said, Mr. Jiménez dozed, paged through picture books, pushed the window shade up and down and pointed outside, saying, “Look, look!” When he arrived in Guatemala, an ambulance took him to the National Hospital for Orthopedics and Rehabilitation, which occupies the converted stables of an old villa in the historic center of the capital city.

Ms. Gregory accompanied him there, turned over his records and toured the hospital. In a recent interview, Ms. Gregory said she was impressed by the place and especially by the staff’s pride in it, despite equipment that looked “like it could have been donated to the Smithsonian.” She added, “That facility could have taken care of me any day.”

While Ms. Gregory was taking her tour, Mr. Jiménez was holding court, according to her notes in his file, “telling everyone that he was from Miami, Florida, and showing them his toy cat.” At her request, a physician told Mr. Jiménez in Spanish “that he would be staying with his new friends in Guatemala and that I was leaving.” His response, according to her notes: “O.K., O.K., adiós.”

Glad that she had helped reunite Mr. Jiménez with his homeland, she said, “I left Guatemala quiet in my heart.”

Care in Guatemala

Immaculately clean but dilapidated, Guatemala’s National Hospital for Orthopedics and Rehabilitation operates on a shoestring budget of approximately $400,000 a year, according to Dr. Harold Von Ahn, who was director when Mr. Jiménez arrived.

Half the hospital is devoted to orthopedic care and the other half serves as an “asylum” for profoundly disabled Guatemalans. Although it is the only public rehabilitation hospital in the country, it dedicates just 32 beds to rehabilitation and does not offer the specialized brain injury treatment that Mr. Jiménez needed.

The Guatemalan foreign ministry said that it knew of 53 repatriations by American hospitals in the last five years. During a visit by The Times to the National Hospital in June, the most recent arrival was an 18-year-old, Diana Paola Miguel, transported there by the University Medical Center in Tucson nine days after a van accident crushed her pelvis, which the Arizona hospital repaired. Supine on a gurney, she Ms. Paola was too tremblingly upset to talk.

Dr. Von Ahn said he believed that American hospitals were dumping patients that should be their responsibility. “It’s the same as the classic fall on the stairs, right?” he said. “You go to my home, you fall on my stairs and then you sue me. I am responsible.”

Shortly after Mr. Jiménez arrived, the Guatemalan hospital contacted his common-law wife, Fabiana Domingo Laureano, who lived in the city of Antigua with their two young sons, and asked her to come get him. Ms. Domingo, who was 27 at the time, was shocked to learn that her husband was back and terrified by the request. Then as now, she was eking out a living, selling traditional woven clothing in a marketplace while sharing a spare, concrete room with her sons in her parents’ humble home.

“I was already living from hand to mouth,” she said in an interview in Antigua, where her sons now supplement her income by selling cigarettes after school. “How could I possibly have given him what he needs?”

The couple met as teenagers in the highland village of Soloma. In the mid-1990s, Mr. Jiménez migrated with his wife’s family to Antigua, a volcano-ringed colonial city where tourism sustains the local economy. While she sold clothing, Mr. Jiménez worked as a bus driver’s assistant. Together, they earned about $6 a day, which was not enough to support their family, so Mr. Jiménez, with his wife’s brother, Francisco Gaspar, decided to follow a well-traveled path to the north. That is when he changed his name from Gervacio Gaspar to Luis Jiménez, which is how he is now known, even by his family.

After pledging to pay a coyote, or smuggler, about $2,000 each to ferry them into the United States, they crossed into California under cover of darkness and made their way to Encinitas, where Mr. Jiménez’s older brother lived, Mr. Gaspar said.

After the two men failed to find regular work, Mr. Gaspar began suffering panic attacks and returned to Guatemala; Mr. Jiménez decided to try his luck in Florida.

“Lamentably,” Mr. Gaspar said, “luck eluded him.”

After the hospital contacted Ms. Domingo, Telemundo, the Spanish-language network, called Ms. Domingo and offered to take her to Guatemala City. Shortly thereafter, the network showed her reunion with her husband.

“You are Maria by chance?” Mr. Jiménez said to his wife as the television cameras rolled.

“Fabiana,” she replied. Their two sons stood by her side, wide-eyed.

A few weeks later, Dr. Von Ahn said, the hospital discharged Mr. Jiménez “because we needed the bed,” transferring him to another public hospital, San Juan de Dios. That is where Mr. Jiménez’s brother, Enrique Lucas Gervacio, found him when he made his way down from the mountains by bus.

“He was lying in the hallway on a stretcher, covered in his own excrement,” Mr. Lucas said. “So we cleaned him up and we brought him home.”

In Favor of Jiménez

In May, 2004, a Florida appeals court overruled Judge Fennelly.

The Fourth District Court of Appeal found that the Florida state judge had overstepped his bounds because deportation is the prerogative of the federal government. The court also declared that no evidence supported the hospital’s assertion that Mr. Jiménez would receive appropriate care in Guatemala; the discharge plan, the ruling said, was not detailed enough to satisfy federal requirements or the hospital’s own rules.

The appeals court voided the judge’s order although, given that Mr. Jiménez was already back in Guatemala, that action came too late for him.

It might affect others, though. The decision has become what is known legally as a case of first impression on the issue of hospital repatriations.

John DeLeon, a lawyer who advises the consulates of Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala in Miami, said he now referred to it when he received calls from hospitals looking to discharge seriously injured or ill immigrants.

“I now write I call my Montejo Gaspar letter,” he said. “It’s a letter that says, ‘Listen, don’t take action to dump this individual because you’ll be risking legal action. The law is now that hospitals can’t dump immigrant patients without securing appropriate after-care. If somebody has a serious illness and needs continuing care, a hospital can’t simply discharge them onto the street, much less put them on a plane.’ ”

Mr. DeLeon said that he was “bombarded by such cases,” adding that he was investigating another medical repatriation by Martin Memorial, which took place two weeks ago “behind the back of the Mexican government.”

Martin Memorial confirmed that on July 16 they flew Neptali Díaz, a severely brain-injured patient to Mexico. A court order authorized Mr. Diaz’s transfer to an unspecified Mexican hospital, ending the man’s 859-day, $2 million stay at Martin Memorial.

After the ruling in Mr. Jiménez’s favor, Martin Memorial did not appeal. But the case did not go away. The appeals court ruling set the stage for a personal injury lawsuit, taken on by Searcy, Denney, Scarola, Barnhart & Shipley in West Palm Beach.

With that established firm behind him, Mr. Gaspar initiated a false imprisonment action claiming that his cousin was essentially kidnapped by the hospital and smuggled out of the country in a kind of medical rendition. Since then, appeals judges have again ruled in Mr. Jiménez’s favor, stating the hospital can be sued for punitive damages as well as for the cost of his medical care.

This infuriates Ms. Plato Nicosia, the hospital administrator, who said it was Mr. Jiménez’s family who owes the hospital money and not vice versa. “Should they win, we would like them to take those damages and pay his hospital bill,” she said.

Jack Scarola, representing Mr. Jiménez’s guardian, said that he empathized with the hospital’s “significant economic burden” but said that it was the “quid pro quo” of accepting Medicare and Medicaid funds to help finance the hospital’s services. (About 45 percent of Martin Memorial’s net operating revenues came from Medicare and Medicaid last year, based on state data.)

“Also,” he continued, “they chose the wrong way to deal with it. The right way would have been through the Legislature. There is no program in place to appropriately distribute care to undocumented persons who are catastrophically injured, and there should be. But you don’t stick a brain-injured immigrant on a private plane and spirit him out of the country in the predawn hours.”

Weighing Quality of Life

The journey to Jolomcú is an arduous one, as Mr. Jiménez’s new legal team discovered when several members — a lawyer, a paralegal, a priest and a bioethicist — first traveled there to meet him.

After a five-hour drive north from Guatemala City to Huehuetenango and then a winding trip, filled with hairpin turns on cliff-hugging roads up and over the Cuchumatán Mountains, they arrived at the provincial city of Soloma.

From there, the road to Mr. Jiménez’s hamlet only goes so far, and the trip must be completed on foot, up and down a rutted dirt path through goat-strewn meadows. The Americans arrived at the top panting. There, awaiting them, in an idyllically situated one-room brick house, was Mr. Jiménez, a broad grin lighting up his face.

“The first striking thing was his disposition: He was very, very happy,” said the Rev. Frank O’Loughlin, who pastored migrant workers in South Florida for decades. “Then, the second thing, he was well cared for. What I did was I got down over him and hugged him but also smelled. And there were no bedsores. Nothing was malodorous.”

As they drove back to Huehuetenango, Marnie R. Poncy, a nurse-lawyer who runs a bioethics law project in Palm Beach County, offered her view: “I said, ‘His quality of life is better than it would be in an American nursing home.’ ”

“But I hazarded a guess that his longevity of existence was probably severely curtailed,” she said.

Still, the team reached a conclusion that surprised them: “There was no real compelling reason to think of bringing him back to Florida,” Father O’Loughlin said. “We needed to focus on getting help to him or him to help in Guatemala.”

Help has been slow in arriving.

When The Times took the trek to visit him in late June, Mr. Jiménez had not budged from his hilltop home since returning there and no medical professional had visited him, either. With his mother too frail to move him into his wheelchair, his life had shrunken to the confines of his bed, across from his mother’s.

During the visit, Mr. Jiménez, wearing a nubby Adidas hat and a ski jacket, sat wrapped in a Guatemalan blanket; his mother, who wore a traditional woven skirt, with a floral scarf braided through her long gray hair, stood by his side. She patted his head; he reached out to pick lint from her sweater.

A few days prior, he had suffered a particularly violent seizure.

“He was almost dead,” his mother, Mrs. Gervacio, said in Kanjobal, which was translated into Spanish by a school principal serving as interpreter. “For many years, I am caring for him like he is a baby, changing his diaper, washing him. But this is worse. I am worried to leave him alone at all.”

She is right to worry, said physicians consulted for this article. Patients suffering seizure disorders run the risk of injuring themselves — and of increasing their brain damage.

Still, Mrs. Gervacio does leave from time to time, she said, to go to Mass, shutting the door behind her and hoping for the best.

“It scares me a lot when you leave, Mama!” Mr. Jiménez blurted out, revealing that he was intently following the conversation that at first took place as if he were not there.

Given that Mr. Jiménez’s mother’s health is failing, the family worries about the future, too. And Mr. Jiménez shares their concern. “The day my mother is no longer, what’s going to happen to me?” he said. “This is what I have on my mind.”

Mr. Jiménez, whose memory is patchy, said he remembered nothing about his time in the United States — not Indiantown, not his job as a gardener, not the accident and not the hospital.

He does, remember the dreams that propelled his migration, and he expressed them eloquently: “I headed north like a peasant with a heavy bundle on his back, bent over, determined to better himself,” he said. “Other people had things so I thought, ‘Why not me?’ But now I regret it. Maybe God was punishing me for my illusions.”

“No, Luis,” the interpreter interjected, “it was just chance, an accident, a car accident.”

In Guatemala City, Dr. Garcés, the public health advocate, said that he was not surprised that, as he had predicted, Mr. Jiménez never received further medical care. “That’s the usual story of patients that are released from the National Orthopedic Hospital,” he said.

Dr. Garcés called Mr. Jiménez’s repatriation “inhumane.”

“In cases like that, if you cut the medical care, you’re hurting that person,” Dr. Garcés said. “You’re doing just the opposite of what the medical system should do. That goes against every international convention of human rights and health. To send him to Guatemala was to send him to very poor living and health conditions and probably he will die because of that, and that’s not fair.”

Without evaluation, doctors cannot know what potential for rehabilitation — or survival — Mr. Jiménez possesses.

If Mr. Jiménez’s guardian were to prevail in the lawsuit, “it would be possible to set up a good health care arrangement for him because in private practice we have all types of specialties that he needs,” Dr. Garcés said. “And transportation could be arranged.” But the case could drag on for years.

On the day of The Times’s visit, before Mr. Jiménez ate a lunch of eggs, tortillas and sugar water, Mr. Banks, the lawyer, gave him a present from his cousins in Florida — a plastic bag bulging with tube socks, undershirts and oversize sweatpants. Mr. Jiménez fingered the clothing with little interest but when a reporter began to read him the accompanying letter in Spanish, he snatched it excitedly from her hands.

Much to the surprise of his visitors, Mr. Jiménez, despite his brain injury, could read. He smoothed out the yellow legal paper from Mr. Gaspar and began: “I am sending you some little things. Luis, I hope that you like them.”

At first, Mr. Jiménez read haltingly, then more fluidly. Later, when all his visitors had gone outside, he read the ending aloud again to himself.

“I want to tell you,” he read, “that we miss you and love you a lot. May God continue to bless you.”

Mr. Jiménez smiled, and repeated, softly, “May God continue to bless you.”

**Story Link
**Image Courtesy of Josh Haner (NYT): "Luis Alberto Jiménez, an illegal immigrant injured in a car accident in Florida, was treated at a community hospital, which eventually sent him back to Guatemala. He spends most of his days inside a one-room house; only the presence of visitors, who can help him into his wheelchair, gives him the rare chance to get out of bed."

Pushing Back on Immigration, By Spencer S. Hsu (WP)

A three-year-old enforcement campaign against employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants is increasingly resulting in arrests and criminal convictions, using evidence gathered by phone taps, undercover agents and prisoners who agree to serve as government witnesses.

But the crackdown's relatively high costs and limited results are also fueling criticism. In an economy with more than 6 million companies and 8 million unauthorized workers, the corporate enforcement effort is still dwarfed by the high-profile raids that have sentenced thousands of illegal immigrants to prison time and deportation.

Stewart A. Baker, assistant secretary for policy at the Homeland Security Department, recently told immigration experts the disparity can be traced to ineffective policies that need to be addressed by Congress.

"Companies tell me, 'We have an immigration system that allows us to hire illegal workers, legally,' " Baker said. Asked to defend President Bush's track record, he said, "Why are employers not punished more often? Because the laws we have don't really authorize that."

In the first nine months of this fiscal year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made 937 criminal arrests at U.S. workplaces, more than 10 times as many as the 72 it arrested five years ago. Of those arrested this year, 99 were company supervisors, compared with 93 in 2007.

The arrests have led to several convictions, including a union official at a Swift meatpacking plant; three executives of a Florida janitorial services company; a temporary-staffing agency manager for a Del Monte Fresh Produce plant in Oregon; two supervisors of a Cargill pork plant cleaning contractor in Illinois; and seven managers of IFCO Systems North America, a pallet services company, among others.

But Baker's comments acknowledged criticism by labor union leaders, immigrant rights' groups and Democrats about the limits of employer enforcement. His remarks also illuminate why the White House, Congress and some states have scrambled recently to adopt new steps to compel companies to identify illegal workers, and why such efforts will probably remain ineffective.

Political opposition from big business, labor and immigrant and civil rights interests has diluted immigration law for two decades, according to analysts in both parties.

"If you want law enforcement, you have to have laws that are enforceable," said Doris M. Meissner, who headed the former Immigration and Naturalization Service under the Clinton administration. The 1986 law banning the hiring of illegal immigrants, she said, "has just been chronically flawed from the time it was passed."

Raids against Swift packinghouses in six states in December 2006 highlight the administration's strategy to seek criminal indictments and felony convictions against corporate violators. An earlier approach that relied on administrative fines and forfeitures was increasingly dismissed by executives as a cost of doing business.

The tactics used now are similar to law enforcement techniques honed in developing cases against mobsters and drug lords. In June 2007, federal agents wired a Mexican slaughterhouse worker who had been arrested on immigration charges and sent him to call at the home of his former boss at a meatpacking plant in Marshalltown, Iowa.

The informant, nicknamed "Memo," carried a false ID. He told Christopher Lamb, now the plant's human resources manager, that he was free pending a hearing and wanted to return to work.

Lamb, 38, coached Memo but seemed to realize he was walking into a trap, court records show. "Where's the migra?" he asked later, using the Spanish term for immigration agents.

The informant's tapes led Lamb to plead guilty in March to one charge of harboring an illegal immigrant. In a deal with prosecutors, he agreed to serve a year's probation, pay $300 in fines and cooperate against others targeted after immigration raids in 2006 against meatpacker Swift, now JBS Swift.

An undercover agent taped union official Braulio Pereyra advising new employees at an orientation speech on how to protect false identities.

"You can lie to your boss or whomever, but not to the police," Pereyra was recorded as saying. "That's a federal offense."

He was convicted in May on one charge of harboring illegal immigrants, and faces as much as five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Pereyra's lawyer, Keith Rigg, said his client committed no crime and had a First Amendment right to give the speech. He is seeking a retrial.

Enforcement disparities were displayed vividly May 12 when ICE agents swept into an Agriprocessors Inc. kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. They arrested 389 illegal workers; 270 were convicted within days in expedited court proceedings at a cattle fairgrounds; and many were sentenced to five months in prison, mostly on criminal document-fraud charges.

By contrast, ICE agents arrested two supervisors and issued an arrest warrant for a third man on July 3. The firm remains in operation.

Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a newly formed group that promotes citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, said the raid shows the misdirected policy of criminalizing illegal immigration for workers while not shutting down the jobs "magnet" that lures them. Several critics, including a federal court interpreter who participated in the Agriprocessors hearings, said the government's legal tactics are coercive and threaten defendants' due process rights.

"There's no question this administration is coddling unscrupulous employers while arresting undocumented immigrants in order to make their statistics look good," Sharry said.

But he echoed Baker's frustration at politicians who seek to look tough on immigration and yet do not provide effective law enforcement tools or address the nation's labor needs and underground population. "The dysfunctional immigration system really is the fault of Congress, for failing to lead," Sharry said.

Piecemeal measures to combat illegal hiring are under way this year, but the moves remain controversial and their effects uncertain.

In March, the White House attempted to jump-start a campaign to notify 140,000 employers about workers' use of suspicious Social Security numbers, seeking to force businesses to resolve questions or fire workers within 90 days.

If companies do not respond to "no-match" letters, ICE could use that failure as evidence of illegal hiring. But the plan remains stalled by a federal lawsuit filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO and the American Civil Liberties Union, which allege that it will disrupt businesses and discriminate against legal U.S. workers.

Also in dispute is another effort to expand use of a voluntary online system that checks whether new hires are eligible to work in the United States. The Bush administration on June 9 ordered 60,000 federal contractors to use the government's E-Verify system, which checks workers' information against Social Security and immigration-status databases.

Still, 12 years after Congress mandated that such a tool be piloted in 1996, the change will enroll about 2 percent of U.S. companies.

Critics warn that the system has a high error rate that will exclude legal workers, cannot detect the fraudulent use of stolen Social Security numbers, and will permit some employers to harass workers.

Frustrated by the stalemate, Arizona, Missouri and South Carolina since January have passed laws or have begun requiring businesses to use E-Verify under certain conditions. But Illinois has gone the opposite direction, barring companies from participating until the government proves that E-Verify is 99 percent error-free.

The conflicting moves show how opposition has frustrated enforcement of the ban on hiring illegal immigrants. In 1986, Congress required law enforcement agencies to show that an employer knowingly violated the law, but provided few tools, agents or dollars to do so.

Under the law, employers need only to verify that a new hire present at least one "facially valid" form of identification. The overhaul simply created a huge fake-ID industry, while granting unscrupulous employers a ready defense since the government had no system to validate a document's authenticity. At the same time, employers face discrimination complaints if they unduly scrutinize new hires.

Few expect the situation to change soon with this fall's elections looming. Some GOP congressional campaigns are talking tough, but the party is wary of further alienating its traditional business base. Democrats in turn rely on labor and immigrant support, leading the House to propose a $40 billion DHS budget bill that would require ICE to prioritize $800 million in enforcement funding next year to deporting illegal immigrants with criminal records, not workers.

At a Georgetown Law School conference in May, Baker of DHS described a sense among voters that "both parties owed their base a kind of collusion of pretend enforcement of the immigration laws." He added, "I can't say that was completely misplaced skepticism."

**Story Link

Pushing Back on Immigration, By (NYT)

There is nothing good about the country’s ever more merciless campaign of immigration enforcement. But at least there are emerging signs of resistance, from one of the most important, yet curiously disengaged, players in the debate: employers.

States and cities complain about the broken immigration system, but they can’t create the intricate web of policies needed to fix it — that’s up to Congress. All they can do is try to crack down locally on illegal immigrants and the businesses that hire them. The result has been haphazard enforcement without reform, which only makes the problem worse.

States have passed overly punitive laws to revoke the licenses of businesses caught hiring the undocumented and to force employers to participate in E-Verify, the deeply flawed federal system for checking workers’ documents. More than 175 bills relating to immigrant employment have been introduced by states this year.

As Julia Preston reported in The Times, business has begun pushing back. In Arizona, home to some of the most rabidly anti-immigrant politicians and advocates, a business group had huge success gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would soften some of the most stringent employer punishments enacted last year.

In other states, business groups have helped to kill tough immigration bills. They argue that they need workers, that it is too hard to avoid hiring undocumented ones, and that ill-conceived laws go overboard in punishing well-meaning companies and their legal employees. They are also pushing measures to bring in more legal workers and to fix the error-plagued federal system for verifying documents of new employees.

Workplace raids by federal agents have vividly exposed the widespread hiring of illegal workers, but many employers counter that they are not all scofflaws. Antidiscrimination laws bar them from looking too closely at employees’ identity papers, or checking their immigration status after they are hired. “The system is just as broken for employers as it is for immigrants,” a lawyer for two California companies told Ms. Preston.

As with anything in the immigration debate, there are complicated truths at work here. Many companies have operated with impunity in hiring and abusing undocumented low-wage workers, people who are all the more compliant because they are illegal. Like immigrants, good employers need a path to get right and stay right with the law. Current immigration law — with far too few visas and no path to legalization for the undocumented — does not provide one, and misguided state and local enforcement efforts simply layer on the confusion. They impose undue hardships on by-the-books businesses and reward the exploiters.

If the country is ever going to emerge from the immigration chaos that Congress bequeathed it last year, it will be because business interests — largely seen as AWOL in the bitter debate — finally joined the fight.

**Story Link

AG now says college OK for illegals, by Kristin Collins (New Observer)

The state Attorney General's Office says it's legal for the N.C. Community College System to admit illegal immigrants.
That advice, given to the colleges Thursday and made public today, represents a reversal for the office of Attorney General Roy Cooper, which advised the colleges in May to bar illegal immigrants from degree programs. The colleges took that advice and issued a new policy prohibiting illegal immigrants from enrolling, even at out-of-state tuition rates. Cooper's office said at the time that post-secondary education might qualify as a public benefit to which illegal immigrants are not entitled under federal law.

But on Monday, Cooper's office got a letter from federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in response to a request for clarification of the law. The letter, from former Mecklenburg County Sheriff Jim Pendergraph, who now works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that admission to colleges is not considered a public benefit under federal law.

Federal officials made the same statement to the News & Observer in May, but officials with the community colleges and the Attorney General's Office said they wanted to wait for a formal letter.

J.B. Kelly, general counsel, advised the colleges in a letter Thursday that it is up to them to decide whether to admit illegal immigrants.

Community College System President Scott Ralls was not immediately available for comment on whether he would lift the ban on illegal immigrants.

**Story Link

Employers Fight Tough Measures on Immigration, By Julie Preston (NYT)

Under pressure from the toughest crackdown on illegal immigration in two decades, employers across the country are fighting back in state legislatures, the federal courts and city halls.

Business groups have resisted measures that would revoke the licenses of employers of illegal immigrants. They are proposing alternatives that would revise federal rules for verifying the identity documents of new hires and would expand programs to bring legal immigrant laborers.

Though the pushback is coming from both Democrats and Republicans, in many places it is reopening the rift over immigration that troubled the Republican Party last year. Businesses, generally Republican stalwarts, are standing up to others within the party who accuse them of undercutting border enforcement and jeopardizing American jobs by hiring illegal immigrants as cheap labor.

Employers in Arizona were stung by a law passed last year by the Republican-controlled Legislature that revokes the licenses of businesses caught twice with illegal immigrants. They won approval in this year’s session of a narrowing of that law making clear that it did not apply to workers hired before this year.

Last week, an Arizona employers’ group submitted more than 284,000 signatures — far more than needed — for a November ballot initiative that would make the 2007 law even friendlier to employers.

Also in recent months, immigration bills were defeated in Indiana and Kentucky — states where control of the legislatures is split between Democrats and Republicans — due in part to warnings from business groups that the measures could hurt the economy.

In Oklahoma, chambers of commerce went to federal court and last month won an order suspending sections of a 2007 state law that would require employers to use a federal database to check the immigration status of new hires. In California, businesses have turned to elected officials, including the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, to lobby federal immigration authorities against raiding long-established companies.

While much of the employer activity has been at the grass-roots level, a national federation has been created to bring together the local and state business groups that have sprung up over the last year.

“These employers are now starting to realize that nobody is in a better position than they are to make the case that they do need the workers and they do want to be on the right side of the law,” said Tamar Jacoby, president of the new federation, ImmigrationWorks USA.

After years of laissez-faire enforcement, federal immigration agents have been conducting raids at a brisk pace, with 4,940 arrests in workplaces last year. Although immigration has long been a federal issue, more than 175 bills were introduced in states this year concerning the employment of immigrants, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

State lawmakers said they had acted against businesses, often in response to fervent demands from voters, to curb job incentives that were attracting shadow populations of illegal immigrants.

“Illegal immigration is a threat to the safety of Missouri families and the security of their jobs,” Gov. Matt Blunt, a Republican, said after the Missouri Legislature passed a crackdown law in May. “I am pleased that lawmakers heeded my call to continue the fight where Washington has failed to act.”

But because of the mobilization of businesses, the state proposals this year have increasingly reflected their concerns. State lawmakers “are starting to be more responsive to the employer community because of its engagement in the issue,” said Ann Morse, who monitors immigration for the national legislature conference.

The offensive by businesses has been spurred by the federal enforcement crackdown, by inaction in Congress on immigration legislation and by a rush of punitive state measures last year that created a checkerboard of conflicting requirements. Many employers found themselves on the political defensive as they grappled, even in an economic downturn, with shortages of low-wage labor.

Mike Gilsdorf, the owner of a 37-year-old landscaping nursery in Littleton, Colo., saw the need for action by businesses last winter when he advertised with the Labor Department, as he does every year, for 40 seasonal workers at market-rate wages to plant, prune and carry his shrubs in the summer heat. Only one local worker responded to the notice, he said, and then did not show up for the job.

Mr. Gilsdorf was able to fill his labor force with legal immigrants from Mexico through a federal guest worker program. But that program has a tight annual cap, and Mr. Gilsdorf realized that he might not be so lucky next year. His business could fail, he said, and then even his American workers would lose their jobs.

“We’re not hiring illegals, we’re not paying under the table,” Mr. Gilsdorf said. “But if we don’t get in under the cap and nobody is answering our ads, we don’t have employees.” His group, Colorado Employers for Immigration Reform, is pressing Congress for a much larger and more flexible guest worker program.

Unhappy California businesses won the support of Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, who wrote a letter in March to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff criticizing immigration agents for aiming raids at “established, responsible employers” in the city and urging him to focus on those with a record of labor violations.

In Virginia, an employers’ coalition headed off bills that would have closed businesses that hire illegal immigrants and would have required all employers to participate in the federal system to check the working papers of new hires, which is known as E-Verify. Business groups nationwide oppose mandatory use of the system, which is now voluntary, because they say the Social Security Administration database it draws upon is full of errors that could lead to job denials for American citizens and legal immigrants and bureaucratic overload for the agency.

Virginia employers said they learned a lesson last year after the broad immigration bill they supported failed in Congress.

“The silent masses of businesses out there should have been on the phone with their Congressional representatives calling for rational reform,” said Hobey Bauhan, president of the Virginia Poultry Federation, whose members include some of the biggest low-wage employers in the state. Virginia lawmakers ultimately adopted verification rules aimed at employers who systematically hire illegal immigrants.

In this legislative session, Arizona businesses rallied behind a bill to create what would have been the first state guest worker program in the country. Their advertising campaign used the slogan “What part of legal don’t you understand?” — a tweak of the battle cry of their opponents, who use the same phrase with the word “illegal.”

Arizona employers said they knew that passage would be difficult for the bill, because only the federal government can issue visas to immigrant workers.

Although the bill never came to a vote, employers said the debate helped make their views known in Washington.

“It’s a message to the federal government,” said Joe Sigg, director of government relations for the Arizona Farm Bureau, “that we need a legal and reliable means to recruit workers.”

Employers’ groups have not succeeded everywhere. Under a bill passed this year, Mississippi is the first state to make it a felony for an illegal immigrant to work. The measure also allows terminated employees to sue their employer if they were replaced by an illegal immigrant.

President Bush on June 9 ordered all federal contractors to check new workers with E-Verify. The administration is pressing forward with a rule that would pressure employers to fire within 90 days any worker whose identity information does not match the records of the Social Security Administration, as frequently happens with illegal immigrants. The first version of the rule was held up last year by a federal court injunction.

While many businesses have come forward, they say they speak for many others with immigrant workers that are lying low after finding that the crackdown has left them in a perilous legal bind. While raids and sanctions are increasing, employers with low-wage immigrant workers are barred by antidiscrimination rules from examining identity documents of new hires too closely or checking the immigration status of employees after they have been hired.

“The problem for business is that despite their complete compliance with the law, it is inevitable for employers with large numbers of immigrant workers that a certain percentage will be unauthorized workers using false documents,” said Peter Schey, a lawyer who represents two California companies facing scrutiny by federal immigration agents. “The system is just as broken for employers as it is for immigrants.”

One employer facing this problem is the chief executive of a $20 million company on the outskirts of Los Angeles that assembles electronic parts. She said she had come to fear that her company — including its legal workers — is at risk of being crippled by an immigration raid.

The executive spoke on the condition that neither she nor her company be identified by name, for fear of attracting immigration authorities.

A human resources manager who worked for the company a decade ago hired a number of workers without conducting an extra check of their documents with the Social Security Administration, the executive said. Now she has received notices from the agency of mismatches in the identity documents of 20 workers who were hired 10 years ago, out of 90 workers on the assembly floor today.

Because of the antidiscrimination rules, the executive cannot check to be certain that the 20 workers, mainly Hispanic women, are illegal. Moreover, they have advanced through training, she said, and excel at their jobs, which require the repetitive assembly of tiny parts by hand, often under microscopes.

“I can’t replace those people,” the executive said. She said that despite offering competitive wages from $9 to $17 an hour, the company had failed over the years in repeated efforts to attract nonimmigrant workers because of the state’s tight technology labor market and because of the nature of the work, exacting and tedious. If the workers were fired or arrested, she said, she could fail to meet her contracts.

“If we have to terminate 20 people, that’s going to jeopardize 100 other jobs of people who are legal, Americans, people who are making a good living,” she said.

Angelo Paparelli, an immigration lawyer who represents the company, said: “This is not an employer who wants to turn a blind eye to lawbreaking. She is facing a tightening of the enforcement vise that does not take into account Congress’s failure to create a workable system.”

California employers were shocked by the raid earlier this year at Micro Solutions Enterprises, an established manufacturer of printer cartridges that is based in Los Angeles and has more than 800 workers. Officials said 138 workers were arrested. In a message to his customers, Avi Wazana, the Micro Solutions owner, said the company had been verifying the legal status of all new hires through federal programs for nearly a year.

Bush administration officials said the crackdown was the price employers must pay to persuade voters to agree to open the gates to immigrant workers. In an interview, Mr. Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, said, “We are not going to be able to satisfy the American people on a legal temporary worker program until they are convinced that we will have a stick as well as a carrot.”

**Story Link
**Image Courtesy of Monica Almeida (NYT): "An electronics plant in Southern California. The chief executive worries that an immigration raid could cripple the company."

Law Students Rush to Meet Needs In Booming Field of Immigration, By Karin Brulliard (WP)

Ann Kim made monthly trips this year to a Richmond area immigrant detention center, trying to free a mentally ill Honduran man. He ended up being deported, but Kim got something out of it: more experience in the burgeoning field of immigration law.

"Immigration is becoming more and more complex, and it's going against immigrants rather than for them," said Kim, 27, a second-generation Korean American who took the Honduran's case as part of her immigration law clinic at American University's Washington College of Law. "There's a great need for lawyers."

A subject that three decades ago was a secondary, technical field delegated to adjunct professors is booming at law schools nationwide. Elective immigration law courses taught by tenured specialists are filling lecture halls, immigration clinics are expanding and student groups devoted to the subject are mushrooming.

The momentum is partly driven by a high-profile, rancorous immigration debate. But it is also the result of an era of mass immigration that has fueled demand from foreigners and businesses seeking help navigating U.S. immigration statutes and has created a generation of law students intimately familiar with the issue, often because they are children of immigrants or immigrants themselves.

"Immigration is just one part of a much broader story about globalization, of movement of goods and movement of people and movement of ideas, and what used to be a backwater of the law has become mainstream," said T. Alexander Aleinikoff, dean of Georgetown University Law School, who co-authored the first major immigration law casebook in 1985. "This is certainly a very, very hot topic."

Unlike undergraduates, law students do not pick majors, so there are no statistics on the number studying immigration law. But professors say there is no question about the explosion in interest.

When AU created an immigration division within its well-known human rights clinic three years ago, administrators struggled to fill it; now, as many as 32 students vie each year for 16 slots. "We have to beat them away with a stick," said Richard Wilson, a professor. Two years ago, the school added two more sections of a basic immigration law course.

At least 50 law schools offer immigration clinics, which usually give students the chance to represent indigent immigrants who have no right to court-appointed lawyers. More sprout each year: This year, clinics have been launched at the University of La Verne and Southwestern Law School in Southern California, as well as at schools in areas that have seen recent influxes in immigration, such as Penn State and the University of Arkansas, where students circulated a petition in support of the idea.

Student teams can debate the finer points of the immigration code each year at the nation's first moot court competition, begun by New York University two years ago. The University of California at Davis started a second contest this year.

In the past three years, students at the University of Maryland, George Mason University and Harvard University have founded immigration law groups. At AU, an Immigrants' Rights Coalition formed by law students in 2005 has 50 members and has hosted a conference on a new visa category and panels of day laborers and refugees.

"We're a country of immigrants, and yet we're putting immigrants out," said the group's co-chairman, Amalia Greenberg, 29, who emigrated from Venezuela at age 6. "It's a continuation of the civil rights movement, and it feels like it's in our hands to do something about it."

Professors say the immigration law boom is part of a broader explosion of interest in human rights and international law, spurred by today's globally minded students. Immigration is by no means the hottest law school topic -- criminal law and litigation remain hugely popular, and environmental law is a new favorite.

And although practitioners' ranks are growing -- membership in the American Immigration Lawyers Association has nearly doubled since 2003, to more than 11,000, 15 percent of whom passed the bar exam within the past three years -- the majority of students in immigration law classes will not become immigration lawyers, professors said. Many students said they might specialize in another area and do pro bono immigration cases on the side.

But there is a growing realization, students and professors said, that policies on issues such as asylum and due process are evolving as never before, particularly since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A growing immigrant population also means that legal status often complicates what might have once been simple criminal or labor cases.

"It's not just that people think immigration is important, but they're seeing that it affects everything," said Hiroshi Motomura, an immigration law professor who will join UCLA in the fall.

Many students said their studies had underscored how thorny immigration is. Jennifer Khouri recently graduated from George Washington University Law School. As a student, she successfully argued at Arlington Immigration Court that an illegal immigrant from Colombia should be allowed to stay in the United States with her young son, a U.S. citizen. As proud as Khouri is of that victory, she is starting a job this fall as a U.S. Department of Justice attorney representing the government in immigration court.

"On both sides, the reaction is too emotional. . . . There's not enough actually looking at the numbers, empirical evidence about how immigrants are affecting the country," said Khouri, 27, the daughter of a Lebanese immigrant father and Cuban immigrant mother. "The reason I want to work for the government is because I want to push for the middle."

The topic's ultra-political nature frustrates some. Asha Allam, who recently took GW's immigration clinic, said the experience made her decide against the field because she thought the immigration system was unfair, in part because of documented disparities of approval and denial rates among immigration judges. Stalled federal immigration legislation also means lawyers can offer little aid to illegal immigrants, she said.

"Lawyers are telling a lot of their clients, 'There's nothing we can do for you right now,' " said Allam, 23, who plans to work in global trade in hopes that someday people will not have to migrate for opportunities. "That's not really legal advice," she said.

The challenges have only energized Karlie Dunsky, a GW law student. Unlike many of her peers, she had little experience with immigrants while growing up in Ohio. But she's set on a career in refugee and asylum law.

"I'm going to have to get used to my clients' claims being denied, but the first one is always hard," said Dunsky, 24. But, she said, "what makes immigration so compelling is that it's a human issue. . . . It's not some vague entity that doesn't have a face. It really motivates you."

**Story Link