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Immigrant Activist Fights For Children

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By LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ, The Associated Press

Published: November 5, 2007

MIAMI - Experts say Nora Sandigo's bid to get the U.S. Supreme Court to stop deportation of illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children hasn't a prayer. Sandigo just nods. She has heard it all before.
Naysayers scoffed when the Miami immigration activist and former Contra rebel supporter pushed to stop the deportation of thousands of Central American immigrants who fled their region's civil wars in the 1980s. Then she helped bring a class-action lawsuit for them, prompting Congress to pass a law protecting them in 1997.

Experts said the same thing before she helped thousands more Central Americans win temporary protection after natural disasters struck several years later. "We have to try. The worst battle is the one not waged," said Sandigo, a single mother of two.

Illegal immigrants in Florida, New York, California and Illinois have asked Sandigo to become legal guardian of their 600 children, so she could help them if parents are deported. About 100 children are entered in the lawsuit.

Ultimately, it would cover about 4 million children of illegal immigrants with no criminal background.

Those born in the United States are automatically citizens, even if their parents are illegal immigrants. If the parents are deported, they are allowed to stay. But with whom? Most must return with parents to a country and culture they've never known.

Sandigo's lawsuit seeks to allow parents to stay in the United States until Congress passes an immigration bill that gives them legal status or until the Department of Homeland Security provides them another avenue to remain.

Works With Both Parties

Sandigo, 42, is in many ways an unlikely immigration activist. She has worked with Democrats such as Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy on immigration. Her strong opposition to Nicaragua's socialist Sandinista government won her respect among conservative Republicans in Congress, as has her free-trade support.

She visited the White House five times in the past year.

"It is so good to have Nora be so involved at the local, state and federal level on immigration reform because it balances the ideological spectrum," said U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., who has known Sandigo for more than a decade.
Sandigo fled Nicaragua as a teen, leaving her parents behind, after the socialist Sandinista government confiscated her family's farm.

In the 1980s, she provided U.S.-backed Contra insurgents with clothes and "everything that was needed" and later spirited her brother out of the country at age 16 before he could be drafted into the military. She became a U.S. citizen in the early 1990s.

Her support for free-trade agreements with Latin America also puts her at odds with many immigrant advocates who fear such deals won't sufficiently protect worker rights and small businesses. But she says free trade and immigration go together.

"I don't want people to say we are just trying to bring more immigrants to the U.S. I want people to be able to stay in their countries and find work," she said.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors strict immigration limits, said the lawsuit will only encourage more people to come.

"Family relationships and employment are what bring people here," he said. "On the other hand, if having a U.S.-born child is a guaranteed get-out-of-jail-free card, then it will become a magnet. No question about it."
Sandigo said she's not asking for open borders and favors more border security. She believes immigrants who've worked for years in the United States shouldn't be separated from their children or forced to uproot them.

Among children in her lawsuit are Teresa Flores, 15, of Yakima, Wash., and Ivan Torres, 8, of San Jose, Calif.

Teresa and her four siblings awoke in April 2006 to see her mother hauled off by immigration agents.

She left school to take care of a younger brother then returned to La Huerta, Jalisco, Mexico, where her mother works as a waitress.

In the United States, where she lived for more than a decade, Teresa's mother earned enough at a fruit packing plant to provide basics for her children. In Mexico, she did not. Teresa had to work and eventually returned to the United States to live with another family and catch up in school.

"As a citizen, I want to be heard. I want to be with her," Teresa said.

Ivan's mother hasn't been tapped by immigration agents, but she and her husband, who run a janitorial service, fear they will be caught any day. So they signed up Ivan.

"I don't want to get to that point. I was too afraid even to go to a lawyer, because you hear cases of fraud," said Noemi Salas, 29, of Durango, Mexico, who came to the United States in 1999 on a temporary work permit and never left.

Attorney Alfonso Oviedo initially filed the lawsuit in a Florida federal court, naming President Bush and Homeland Security. He withdrew the lawsuit and filed it directly with the Supreme Court because federal law has severely limited lower courts' abilities to hear deportation cases, in particular, class-action lawsuits.

Lawsuit Is A Long Shot

It is a long shot. The Supreme Court rarely takes cases that have yet to move through the lower courts.
Sandigo is lobbying Congress for a bill to support her case. But she said a lawsuit was the best option after the Senate failed Wednesday to revive a bill to allow some illegal immigrant students to seek U.S. residency - likely dooming immigration bills this year.

University of Virginia law Professor David Martin, who served as Immigration and Naturalization Services general counsel under President Clinton, says even if the Supreme Court accepts the case, the odds against Sandigo are great.

Courts have typically ruled that there is nothing unconstitutional about a U.S. child being forced to live outside the country, Martin said.

"It's up to the parents to figure out the custody case. The child suffers no risk to his or her citizenship status," he said.

Martin said that cases such as Sandigo's will likely bolster arguments by those who support removing the automatic citizenship of immigrants' children born in the United States.
Miami immigration attorney Ira Kurzban, who helped bring Sandigo's lawsuit on behalf of Nicaraguans in the 1990s, agreed the case has little chance.

However, he dismissed the notion that raising the issue would ultimately hurt immigrants.
Sandigo leaves the legal details to others.

But she is adamant about one thing.

"By sending parents back, what are you creating here? You're creating children who are going to be resentful, angry," she said.

"You're creating enemies within the country."

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