Paying higher taxes?
Things like this:
Obama immigration policy splits families when parents are deported
Sulaiman Hakim, 17, and his sister, Janna, 18, showed a photograph in New York of their mother, Faten, who was taken from their home by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and deported to Ramallah in the West Bank.
Rony Molina, a landscaper pictured at his home in Stamford, Conn., was left alone to care for three children after his wife, Sandra Payes Chacon, was deported to Guatemala in 2010. Their three children — ages 8, 11 and 19 — are American citizens.
Sandra Payes Chacon, the wife of Rony Molina, pauses at a friend's house in Atlixco, Mexico, as she talks about her husband and their three children she left behind in the United States. She was deported to Guatemala in 2010.
Amelia Reyes-Jimenez carried her blind, paralyzed baby boy, Cesar, into the U.S. illegally in 1995 in search of better medical care. She had three more kids, all American citizens. She was arrested in 2008 and, two years later, deported to Mexico without her kids.
Alexis Molina was just 10 years old when his mother was abruptly cut out of his life and his childhood unraveled overnight. “She went for her papers,” he says. “And she never came back.” Alexis’ father, Rony Molina, a landscaper, was born in Guatemala but had lived here for 12 years and is an American citizen. Alexis and his 8-year-old brother, Steve, are Americans, too. So is their 19-year-old stepsister, Evelin. But their mother, Sandra, who lived here illegally, was deported to Guatemala.
“How can my country not allow a mother to be with her children, especially when they are so young and they need her?” Rony Molina asks. “And especially when they are Americans?”
It’s a question thousands of families wrestled with as a record number of deportations meant record numbers of American children being left without a parent — despite President Barack Obama’s promise that his administration would focus on removing only criminals.
Nearly 45,000 such parents were removed in the first six months of this 2011, said the federal department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
At least 5,100 U.S. citizen children in 22 states went into foster care, according to an estimate by the Applied Research Center, a New York-based advocacy organization, which first reported on such cases in 2009. An unknown number of those children were put up for adoption against the wishes of their parents, who, once deported, were often helpless to fight when a U.S. judge decided that their children are better off here.
“I had no idea what was happening,” says Janna Hakim of the morning in 2010 when a loud knocking at her Brooklyn apartment door jolted her awake. It was the first Friday of Ramadan. Her Palestinian mother, Faten, was in the kitchen baking the pastries she sold to local stores.
Janna, then 16, and her siblings were all born here. None knew that their mother was in the U.S. illegally — or that a deportation order from years earlier meant she could be whisked away by ICE agents.
“I am not a criminal. I am the mother of American children, and they need me, especially the younger ones,” she cried over the phone from Ramallah, where she is living with her own mother after 20 years away. “How can a country break up families like this?”
“When nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when all this is happening, the system just isn’t working, and we need to change it,” Obama said during his first run for president in 2008.
“That gave us a lot of hope,” said David Leopold, general counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “Now we are all scratching our heads wondering where is the discretion when many of our lawyers continue to see people being deported with no criminal record, including parents of American children.”
“Quiet, slow-motion tragedies unfolded every day as parents caught up in immigration enforcement were separated from their young children and disappeared,” Nina Rabin, an associate clinical professor of law at the University of Arizona, wrote in “Disappearing Parents: A Report on Immigration Enforcement and the Child Welfare System.”
Rabin, an immigration lawyer, says one of the most unsettling experiences of her life was witnessing the “cruel and nightmarish destruction” of one Mexican family whom she represented in a fruitless attempt to keep a mother and her children together.
The mother, Amelia Reyes-Jimenez, carried her blind and paralyzed baby boy, Cesar, across the Mexican border in 1995 seeking better medical care, Rabin said. She settled in Phoenix, illegally, and had three more children, all American citizens. She was arrested after her disabled teen son was found home alone.
Locked in detention, clueless as to her rights or what was happening to her children, she pleaded guilty to child-endangerment charges, and then spent a year fighting to stay with her children.
Twice her attorneys tried to convince an immigration judge that she qualified for a visa “on account of the harm that would be done to her three U.S. citizen children if she were to be deported,” Rabin said.
She lost and was deported back to Mexico in 2010.
Her parental rights were terminated by a court after a judge ruled that she had failed to make progress toward reunification with her children — something Rabin said was impossible to do, locked away for months.
Her case went before the Arizona State Court of Appeals, but the family was destroyed. “Tragically, we heard of cases like this every day,” Rabin says.
https://www.denverpost.com/2012/08/25/u-s-immigration-policy-splits-families-when-parents-are-deported/
Pelosi not pulling any punches
Republicans pray on Sunday.
Then, during the rest of the week, they prey on children and families through their tremendously indefensible and brutal policies.
It seems as if inflicting emotional and physical damage is part of their platform.
ONE-N-DONE, YOU GOT PLAYED; Time To Play-On
Remember ... ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES ... So STFU Bitch
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