13-Year-Old and Family Deported Over 46 Cents

At a San Francisco school, a 13-year-old boy hit another youth and took 46 cents from him. He says the punch was meant as a joke, and the harassed student was unhurt; he apologized and returned the loose change. I have strong feelings against bullying, and I'm not even a fan of the roughhousing boys are often allowed to get away with. The kid definitely deserved after school detention; if the school wanted to be really tough, it might even consider suspending him.

Instead, he's being deported on felony charges, along with his mother and five-year-old brother, for "robbery, assault, and extortion," after the incident was reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and he was discovered to be undocumented. Not only is deportation a punishment totally out of proportion to the "crime," these overblown charges alone are ludicrous -- although I guess I shouldn't be too surprised, given that last month a 12-year-old was arrested for doodling in New York.

A spokesman for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newson, who has been tough on making sure any undocumented youth who meets the police gets deported right away, defended the deportation: "We don’t want to put at risk law-abiding San Francisco residents, including the undocumented, by shielding criminal behavior." Umm ... what? I'm sorry, but I find it hard to believe that taking less than a dollar (and giving it back) and some roughhousing by a 13-year-old puts S.F. residents at risk. I remember school, and if this kind of incident is such a huge danger, you're going to have to start arresting and locking up a ton of students -- American-born at that -- since this episode is not out of the ordinary. Like I said, I'm all for no-bullying policies and detention (not the ICE  kind), but arrest and deportation?

Charles Washington, the youth's stepfather, says, "I feel like they've taken my right to have a family." He plans to visit his family in Australia, their country of origin, but because his 12-year-old daughter from a prior marriage lives in America, he can't pick up and move halfway across the world. And his wife and stepchildren are now under a 10-year undocumented penalty ban against reentering the U.S. Even worse, Washington claims that the only reason his stepson and wife are undocumented is because of false information given to them by customer service at a federal immigration office.

When Washington married last year, his wife and her family were in the U.S. legally on a temporary visa wavier. Eligible for legal permanent resident status by wedlock, she and her husband called for information on how quickly they needed to file paperwork for a green card. The response? Take your time, the Washingtons say they were told. So the family decided to put it off until December, since there supposedly wasn't any penalty, and the application was going to cost them thousands of dollars.

Unfortunately, it was necessary to file new paperwork before the temporary visa wavier expired, which administrative violation then kept them from getting documented. Yet if the family had been advised that it was important to get the legal documentation straightened out ASAP, they wouldn't have been in a situation were they could get torn apart and deported all because of loose change -- and a deeply flawed immigration system.

H/T GrayRiv

Photo credit: ThrasherDave