NEWSIMMIGRATION DETENTION

Seven months ago, Rose Escobar’s worst nightmare came true. Her husband, loving father to then 1-year-old baby Walter and the main financial provider for the family, was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and placed in detention. A faulty lawyer had advised him not to attend a hearing to renew the Temporary Protected Status that was granted to him as an immigrant fleeing violence and natural disasters in El Salvador, and this had triggered a deportation order.

What followed were the most difficult months of Rose’s life as she struggled to make ends meet and provide for her son who stood in front of the window everyday calling for his dad. But an amazing thing happened—after Rose started a campaign on Change.org to free her husband, thousands began to sign. FIEL Houston, a local student-led organization, saw her petition and offered to help, staging a vigil in front of the detention center attended by more than 50 local supporters. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee got involved and contacted ICE on Rose’s behalf. And after more than 4,000 signed Rose’s petition and the story was covered by the Houston Chronicle and multiple local TV stations, Jose was finally freed and is now home with his family.

A dozen people gathered outside of Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark, New Jersey, on Tuesday to hold vigil for the release of Charbel "Charley" Chehoud. Among the people who attended and shared stories about Charley were faith leaders, advocates, friends and family, and even a Jersey City police officer. Charley has been in detention for over a year and has spent the last 32 days in solitary confinement. But he has committed no crimes. In fact, he helped solve them. After exhausting her resources fighting for Charley's release,  his fiance Veronica Garcia started a Change.org petition that to date has nearly 15,000 signatures.

Charley is known as a local hero in his community. New Jersey police had deemed a brutal murder an accident, but Charley bravely came forward with a tip he heard from a co-worker that solved the case. Since then, he has worked undercover as a police informant for years, risking his life to make his community safer.

Charley was detained after missing a court date in his battle for asylum. He continues to be held by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, in spite of the calls for his release -- some of those calls even coming from local New Jersey law enforcement officials who worked with Charley. Says Jessica Fernandez, a Jersey City police officer who attended Tuesday's vigil, "Charley had the utmost respect for police and people in uniform." And then later, "The conditions he's being held in - no time outside, visitors refused - are shocking. They are treating him like a hardcore criminal."

Update [Wed. 1/11/12]: The press  hits have been rolling in! Below is a round up of the coverage Charley's story has received.

Veronica spoke with Soledad O'Brien on CNN national news (this morning): you can watch the video here. The Editorial Board of the New Jersey Star Ledger wrote an op-ed this morning calling for Chehoud's deportation to be cancelled. The South Orange Patch reported on Chehoud's story. And Marie Diamond from ThinkProgress analyzed Chehoud's story and the implications of policies that deport immigrants who work with police, therefore jeopardizing public safety.

Community safety advocates often warn that increased ties between federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local police will lead to an erosion of trust in communities, making it less likely that immigrants will report violent crimes to law enforcement for fear of deportation.

Charbel Chehoud, an immigrant who has lived in New Jersey since 1989, certainly could have faced such fear. But he came forward to help police solve a high-profile murder that had gone unsolved, despite the risks, after a former co-worker confessed having witnessed the crime. Chehoud didn’t hesitate to do what he knew was right: go forward with the information that would help a victim’s family find some peace even though he was out of status and in the midst of applying for asylum.

At the time, Chehoud’s decision helped the police close a brutal case that had gone cold. But his involvement in helping law enforcement eventually led to a missed court date that triggered deportation. And now, even though the police and a former prosecutor have asked that he be allowed to stay, Chehoud is in detention and could face a sixth attempt at removal on Wednesday.

Join over 7,000 people who have signed Veronica Garcia’s petition asking ICE to listen to police and prosecutors and keep her fiancée home.

This is the Christmas Rose Escobar had imagined she’d be staying up late with her high school sweetheart and husband Jose, hiding toys for two-year-old Walter under the tree and anxiously awaiting the morning. Instead, the feeling in the house is tense. Money is tight this year as Rose has become the sole provider and much of it goes to lawyer fees. And Walter spends his days pressed up against the window, used to seeing his dad come home and not understanding why he’s not around.

Last week, more than 50 community members gathered in front of Joe Corley Detention Facility in Conroe, Texas, in a vigil to support Rose and her son. Rose told her story, and attendees chanted and rallied for Jose’s release. The 25-year-old Houston father, who arrived as a teenager from El Salvador and acquired Temporary Protected Status, has been in detention since June, after following faulty legal advice that led him to miss a hearing to renew his status. Jose has never been in trouble with the law and is married to a US citizen with a US citizen child. Under Department of Homeland Security guidelines, he should not be a priority for deportation and his case should be reviewed for dismissal.

After Rose started a petition calling for Jose’s release that has garnered more than 4,000 signatures, Familias Inmigrantes y Estudiantes en la Lucha (FIEL), a Houston immigrant youth-led organization, took up the campaign. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee also stepped in and asked ICE to release Jose. The Houston Chronicle, Univision, and Telemundo all covered the family’s plight. Yet Jose Escobar has remained behind bars for more than 6 months -- and the family faces the dismal prospects of a Christmas apart.

Ernest “Marty” Atencio is a US veteran who fought in the Gulf War and was “the most patriotic guy on the planet” according to his brother in an interview with Phoenix New Times. Described as having “special needs,” Atencio was arrested after he kicked a door and confronted a stranger shortly before he became “distracted by a passing vehicle and began chasing it,” according to a police report. In a booking photo, he is shown smiling, his eyes wide, and leaning into the camera—he appears to be unstable, likely because his medication was “not balanced,” his brother told the paper.

It is probable, had the case made its way through the system, that Mr. Atencio would have been found incompetent to stand trial or been given access to medical professionals to be put on the correct medications. We’ll never know. Because Mr. Atencio was placed in one of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s infamous Maricopa County jails. And several hours later, he was rushed to the hospital, brain dead from excessive force. He’d been tasered and thrown back in his cell for 15 minutes before officers noticed he didn’t have a pulse.

Join former investigative journalist John Dougherty’s campaign to demand the resignation of Joe Arpaio.

In 1991, the U.S. issued a visa to a well-known scholar in geographic information systems, Atanas Entchev. The brilliant specialist was courted by Rutgers University as the recipient of a prestigious fellowship to study urban planning issues in the United States and obtain a second masters degree. Entchev accepted the invitation, and did everything right: He obtained visas for his wife Mayia, then 2-year-old son Enislav, and daughter Christina.

He succeeded brilliantly at Rutgers, published articles in influential architecture magazines, and opened his own consulting firm Entchev GIS Architects. He applied for asylum from Bulgaria, and when that was denied, applied and was approved for a visa as an Outstanding Researcher or Professor. Nevertheless, on October 5, 2011, Atenas and Enislav were placed in detention and all family members except Christina were informed they would be deported.

Mayia knew what was at stake: A son who knew no other country but the U.S., siblings separated simply because one applied for a different visa than the other, and a lifetime contributing important research and building a prominent consulting firm in New Jersey abandoned. She started a petition on Change.org and 1,300 supporters later, the family was released from detention and given a one-year stay of deportation to continue fighting their case.

A few minutes: That is all it took to nearly separate a family. In 1993, Anibal Mazariegos, then 17 years old, had arrived to an immigration hearing where he was pleading for asylum from war-torn Guatemala. He got there just a few minutes late. The judge issued a deportation order “in absentia” even though Anibal was there.

And when Anibal was placed in detention this year, it looked like the devastating end to a frustrating story about a court mixup. Anibal faced deportation in two days, and his five U.S. citizen children faced an uncertain future without the sole breadwinner in the family. But thanks to more than 600 people who joined a campaign to stop Anibal’s deportation, he is now home with his family.

It wouldn’t have been possible without Manuel Guerra Casas. When the 26-year-old immigrant rights activist heard Anibal’s story, it struck a nerve. Casas also lives in Florida, and friends successfully fought his own deportation with a campaign on Change.org. Even though there was so little time to keep the Mazariegos family together, Casas decided to start a petition.

Thursday, November 3rd marked yet another month in detention for Andy Maytum, a British Royal Navy veteran married to a U.S. citizen whose daughter is serving in the US Navy. But for Andy's wife Kim, who started a petition on Change.org calling for Andy's immediate release from immigration detention, last Thursday was a nightmare she is hoping to never relive.

See, Andy found himself behind bars last May because of delays in filing his immigration paperwork. Maytum had endured those months behind bars rather than departing the country he had called home for one reason: he couldn't face the prospect of being sentenced to ten years apart from Kim LaBruyere, the love of his life.

Andy met Kim in Florida, in the neighborhood pub that they later purchased together in Kissimmee. But last Thursday, everything the couple had built together threatened to disappear. According to Andy's wife Kim, on Thursday Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers handcuffed and waist-chained Andy and took him from Broward Transitional Center to the airport where he was to forcefully board a flight. But Andy thought of his wife thousands of miles away from him and all alone, and he made a decision. He refused to get on the plane, firmly clasping on to the airport railing, even with his hands handcuffed behind his back. Andy peacefully resisted, so he could not be put on the flight. Now Andy finds himself behind bars again.

"When prisoners become units from which profit is derived, there is a tendency to see them as commodities rather than as children of God," - Wardens from Wall Street: Prison Privatization. With these words at the heart of her fight, Kathy O'Leary, started a petition to oppose a contract expanding an immigrant detention center at the Essex County Jail in Newark, New Jersey.

While Immigration and Customs Enforcement is touting this facility as a model of "humane detention" (isn't that an oxymoron?) and Essex county officials discuss it's expansion in terms of revenue, the new facility is located in the middle of a toxic waste site and within a dangerous distance of active polluters. This double threat - of inhumane conditions inside the facility and environmental risks in the area - is redefining "cruel and unusual punishment" according to advocates working to oppose the contract. Not only do immigrants face indefinite detention for civil immigration offense like lapsed visas, they face it amid toxic waste.

Even though opposition to the deal gained ground, the Essex County Board of Freeholders approved the contract on September 7th. Undaunted, Kathy O'Leary and a coalition of faith and community groups are redoubling efforts to stop the contract altogether -- or in the very least, improve the dire conditions that immigrant detainees and asylum seekers will face in the Essex jail.

This Sunday, groups and concerned community members will gather to protest the expansion and call for oversight to provide humane conditions in the new facility. The rally and march will be a show of forceful opposition to the contract itself and a call for more humane conditions. (You can find details about the event here.)

One call to the police to help a friend who was in danger, who was preparing to commit suicide. That’s it all it took to get Sergey Golubev, who has resided in the U.S. for more than 20 years, into deportation proceedings.

Never mind that he was brought to the U.S. on a visa when he was only 11 years old, escaping violence in the days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Or that his mother, mentally ill and homeless, was unable to care for him and allowed Sergey’s documents to expire, while he was shuttered between foster homes. Or that his U.S. citizen wife is currently 3 months away from giving birth to their daughter. Sergey Golubev has found himself behind bars, in a detention center in Florida, a thousand miles away from his home in New York for the past 4 months -- all for the crime of trying to prevent a friend from taking his life.

“He has nowhere to go in Russia—he is an American,” says wife Angela Zikherman, who started a campaign on Change.org that has attracted more than 770 supporters in just a few days. “He’s not home to find out the sex of the baby. He’s not home to feel the first kick. I don’t know how I could get through having a baby without him here. I want my best friend back.”