As a terrified 13-year-old, huddling against his mother, Jose Mendez escaped El Salvador after his father was murdered. She’d received death threats and a warning: Bad men would kidnap her sons and cut off their fingers.
When they landed in the United States, immigration officials allowed them in. Within months, Mendez was speaking English in school.
He excelled in high school while also holding down a full- time job. After graduating, he worked his way up to running Qdoba restaurants around Denver. He enrolled in college, trying to be the first in his family to earn a degree.
But today the same U.S. system that for a decade nurtured Mendez, now 23, labors to deport him back to an El Salvador he barely knows.
He has been held without bail for 3 1/2 months in an overflowing immigration jail – one person among thousands nationwide awaiting deportation.
The U.S. government is deporting record numbers of immigrants as Congress and the public demand enforcement. It’s straining the immigration system to the breaking point, sweeping up immigrants such as Mendez, who has no criminal record, along with convicts and raising questions about fairness.
The surging deportations overload the detention centers where immigrants are held. Immigration courts also are swamped.
Next month, a federal judge must step in and handle the Mendez case. This happens more and more as immigration-court decisions increasingly are appealed.
The immigration bureaucracy that ordered Mendez arrested, based on documents from 2001 when he was a teenager, had also issued him work permits and welcomed his mother and brothers under a program to help people from war-, flood- and earthquake-ravaged El Salvador.
Tracing this one immigrant’s path – from a scared boy fleeing his country to a scared man forced to sleep on the floor of a jammed jail – reveals much about how a strained system can turn lives upside down.
“There really are some very deep injustices taking place,” said Doris Meissner, former chief of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and now a senior analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a bipartisan think tank in Washington. “The scales are out of balance right now.”
The government response: “We are restoring integrity through aggressive enforcement,” Homeland Security spokes man Marc Raimondi said. “There’s certainly a lot of work to be done on the immigration front.”
Jails, courts overwhelmed
A Denver Post review of federal immigration records found:
U.S. deportations of immigrants have increased by 78 percent from 99,213 in fiscal year 1999 to 177,436 so far this year. A growing share of those deported committed no crimes while in the United States – 53 percent this year, up from 37 percent in 2001 – even though Bush administration officials repeatedly have said their priority is deporting criminals.
The nation’s 24,331-bed system for detaining immigrants now is so crowded that officials requested an extra $541 million to expand detention and removal operations, on top of the $3.8 billion a year taxpayers devote to immigration enforcement.
New detainees at Colorado’s 356-bed regional detention center in Aurora, run by contractors, often must sleep on the floor. Immigration officials said they’ve housed 413 immigrants – 16 percent over capacity – using mattresses on the floor and other “portable beds.” Federal agents who arrested 120 suspected illegal workers in a raid at Buckley Air Force Base on Sept. 20 had to bus most of them immediately to Texas.
Immigration courts face such a surge that judges recently testified in Congress that fairness is threatened. The government’s 212 immigration judges completed 352,287 cases in fiscal year 2005 – an average of 1,662 cases per judge, 35 percent more than in 2001 with only four more judges.
The immigration-court workload in Colorado has doubled. Three judges and their staff handle more than 2,600 cases a year. Attorneys face four-month waits to have cases heard.
Repeated requests by administrators for more judges and staff failed to draw help from Justice Department officials in Washington who run the immigration- court system – which, unlike most courts, is part of the executive branch of government.
The court crunch means more detainees wait longer in jail, at taxpayer expense.
Attorneys increasingly challenge immigration-court rulings, appealing 11,741 decisions to outside federal courts in 2005, more than six times as many appeals as in 2001, according to federal court records. When independent federal judges in recent years reviewed immigration cases, they reversed from 4 percent to 14 percent of immigration- court decisions each year.
“Everyone who looks at the system, whether it’s the immigration courts or the processing of green cards or asylum petitions, agrees it is overwhelmed,” said Steve Camarota at the Center for Immigration Studies, a leading advocate for tougher immigration enforcement. “… If we want to detain more people and increase the number of people we deport, we don’t have the resources to do that.”
Legal entry for Mendez
Today’s strained immigration system seems a far cry from the one that once welcomed the world’s needy and harnessed their energy. The Mendez story began that way.
In April 1996, Mendez was 12, at school in San Miguel, El Salvador, when the principal called his name, he said in an interview. Armed assailants had sneaked into his family’s garage and murdered his father, Nelson Mendez, who ran a packaging business.
Then his mother, Marta Mendez, began receiving death threats over the telephone and from unfamiliar visitors. One warned that kidnappers would snatch her boys, cut off their fingers and mail them to her one by one to extort money.
The next day the family fled, lying flat on the floor of an uncle’s pickup as he drove to El Salvador’s main airport.
Landing in Los Angeles around midnight, Mendez and his brothers hung close by their mother. He remembers thinking: “Oh, God. We are leaving everything behind. We are losing our house, our family. Everything.” She told them: “Our life is more important.”
They entered legally – immigration officials had issued them tourist visas – and stayed with an uncle before moving into a converted garage. A stay-at- home mother before, Marta found work cleaning and caring for a wealthy family’s kids.
But she failed to apply for asylum within a year as required, court records show.
When she did apply in 1998 for herself and her sons, the application sat for three years and was denied in 2001. She then applied for her family to stay in the country under a program President Bush announced in March 2001 for people from El Salvador. Some 225,000 Salvadorans live legally in the United States under this program.
Each year, Mendez and his brothers submitted photos and fingerprints to re-register under the program, records show.
“In my mind, I was legally here,” Mendez said.
He moved to Colorado in 2001, working for Pizza Hut and Qdoba, the booming chain of Mexican fast-food restaurants, where he soon was promoted with the promise of running his own store. He enrolled at DeVry University.
Then, in June, immigration agents arrested him as he was opening the Qdoba at West 50th Avenue and Kipling Street. They clamped metal handcuffs on his wrists and led him away.
“They said: ‘You have a final order of deportation.’ … I just could not believe it,” Mendez recalled.
“Misplaced priorities”
At the immigration detention center, wardens gave Mendez two blankets and told him to sleep on the floor. After three nights, he was given a mattress on the floor for two more nights before a bunk opened. Gang members bullied him, he said, and he’s been sick with a fever.
Court records show immigration agents arrested Mendez under an order filed in 2001 when he was a teenager. Officials apparently failed to process his initial 2001 application under the El Salvador program until 2004, after he had re-registered three times along with his mother and brothers, who were approved, records show.
Officials apparently then deemed Mendez ineligible because he failed to submit fingerprints when re-registering in 2004, although he had submitted fingerprints before.
Mendez’s brother hired Colorado immigration lawyer Kim Salinas. She pushed the case before U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn, who is scheduled to decide Nov. 7 whether to order immigration authorities to release Mendez and review his case.
Jailing Mendez suggests “misplaced priorities,” Salinas said. “There are people in the country who have committed heinous crimes and could be in immigration custody. And there are people like this kid, who had a series of misfortunes and who has no culpability in any of this.”
Immigration officials “are doing their job,” Mendez said, but deporting him “is unfair.”
Mendez said he dreads El Salvador: “No home, no family, no job.” Gang members prey systematically on deportees from the United States.
“I don’t want to live in a country where I don’t trust people. They took my father away and didn’t do anything about it, even to investigate it,” Mendez said.
“Please let me stay here.”
Staff writer Bruce Finley can be reached at 303-954-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com.
