Legal Dominican Immigrant to be Deported for 28-Year-Old Crime

Friday, October 29, 2010

By Marianne McCune

With the United States deporting more immigrants than ever before -- almost 400,000 over the past year -- some of New York's elected officials and immigrant advocates are trying hard to draw attention to cases that, to them, seem blatantly unjust.

Dominican immigrant Eligio Valerio is one of them. He is a taxi driver and soon-to-be grandfather who has been working legally in the United States with a green card for decades. But last week, immigration officers made an early morning visit to his home. They took him into custody and began deportation proceedings because of a 1982 gun conviction. He has told advocates he kept an illegal gun in the Washington Heights bodega he had back then for protection. He did no jail time, just three years probation. But now, almost 30 years later, his name is on a list of criminal aliens to be deported.

Valerio was released on bail Thursday, and at a press conference, he made a brief, and almost tearful, statement thanking the press and local and state elected officials for the attention they have drawn to his case. City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez said, while stabbing his finger angrily into the air, that he is happy this happened to Valerio, "because Valerio is like Rosa Parks." With a heavy, Dominican accent Rodriguez explained, "He's the perfect person to be used as a sample, as a role model of why immigration law is broken and it has to be fixed."

Together, Rodriguez, City Council Member Diana Reyna and State Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat listed everything they believe is wrong with what has happened to Valerio:

Valerio is being deported for a crime for which he was sentenced only to probation and, since then, he has raised an American family and, they say, has been an upstanding, tax-paying, legal resident of the United States.

When Valerio was first taken into custody, Rodriguez says he was told he would be moved to detention in Texas. Immigrant advocates have long objected to a detention system that moves detainees all over the country with little notice, particularly among New York's immigrant advocate community -- because once a detainee is moved away from New York it is not only much harder to speak with family members, it is more difficult to obtain a lawyer. Immigration detainees are not automatically provided with a lawyer and it is easier to get one in New York than in many other locations. Valerio was able to get a lawyer and make bail, instead of being moved, in part because his daughter works at a law firm and a lawyer there got on the case immediately, according to Council member Rodriguez.

Valerio himself said in Spanish at the press conference that other inmates he met while in detention had too little access to telephones and that reaching family members was like 'reaching for the sky.'

And Valerio is a father and will be a grandfather within weeks, and the Department of Homeland Security is potentially breaking up his family without attention to any of the details of his case. Since the 1996 immigration reforms, anyone who is convicted of a certain class of crimes loses the right to stay in the U.S., almost entirely without regard to his subsequent behavior or to the circumstances of his life. Advocates want more discretion for immigration judges.

Opponents of immigration reform support the deportation of immigrants who have committed crimes, whether or not family members are left behind. They say the Obama administration is doing too little to enforce immigration laws.

Obama administration officials are pushing for immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for immigrants here illegally, as well as more discretion in cases involving families. But they have said that, in order to enact that kind of reform, the federal government has to step up enforcement of existing laws. Meanwhile, immigrant advocates say the Department of Homeland Security is deporting the very immigrants President Obama has said he wants to allow to stay here with increasing speed. And they see Eligio Valerio as the perfect example.

One possible remedy for Valerio would be for New York Governor Paterson to pardon his conviction. Earlier this year, Paterson initiated a pardon panel with the aim of pardoning immigrants whose crimes were minor and who have otherwise been upstanding citizens. The New York Immigration Coalition is contacting the state about Valerio's case.

Public officials are also using Valerio's case to warn against what they see as the dangers of the federal Secure Communities program, which New York is signed up for but is not yet using. Secure Communities allows police to submit the fingerprints of anyone they arrest to immigration officials. The Department of Homeland Security says this will allow them to identify and detain immigrants who commit crimes, with the goal of deporting them.

Officials have said the goal of the program is to deport immigrants -- who are here illegally or with green cards -- who commit serious crimes. But advocates say Secure Communities will also result in the deportation of thousands of immigrants with no criminal convictions, or minor ones that are decades old. Current deportation statistics show that despite the government's stated priority of deporting violent criminals or those who threaten the security of Americans, about half of those deported over the past year have no criminal conviction and among those with convictions, many of the crimes do not rise to the level the administration says it is prioritizing.

Something is wrong here. where is justice? Who is it exactly running the show? How can something like this happen? Does this have to do with the misinterpretation of the law or instructions miscarried out by overzealous immigration agents?

We need to analyze this carefully, because it is not the firt time I have seen and heard something like that. This is totally ludicous, you don't have to be a lawyer to see this does not make any sense what so ever. There is something going on behind the scenes that we know nothing about. There are millions of known illegal aliens all over the country, that freely roam US streets and the law does not touch them. WHY? However, here is a law abiding, hard working, tax paying legal resident, a good father and husband, who has raised an exemplanary family, many years ago made a technical error, yet he is up for deportation. Does this make sense to you?

Why are honest, humble, hard working people being targeted, I want to know exactly what is going on here? Is this a matter of an admistrative error or what? God I hate to see injustice and harm done on innocent people. It just tears me apart inside.

Convicted of a crime....Kick his ass out.

The only problem I see is that they took way too long.

Funny how after 30 years with a green card he never applied for citizenship........Hmmmm.

maytbe, with a criminal record, he is not eligible to become a citizen. but, you should know...after all, you know the law very well, to hear you tell it.

He was protecting his business AC. And he did his three years of probation without incidence. I say cut the guy some slack.

No slack.

Justice is only truly justice when blind.

Woman Wanted by E.P.A. Is Arrested
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Published: November 2, 2010



Albania Deleon
Green
A woman who landed on the Environmental Protection Agency’s fugitives list upon fleeing the United States after a criminal conviction has been captured in the Dominican Republic, the agency said Tuesday.


Albania Deleon was convicted in November 2008 in Massachusetts on environmental and other charges related to a fraudulent asbestos training institute she ran there. She fled the state in March 2009, two days before her sentencing.

Carrying a false identity card and having dyed her hair blond, she was arrested Saturday when Dominican agents pulled over her vehicle in Santo Domingo. The State Department had submitted an extradition request to the Dominican Republic after realizing she had left the country.

Ms. Deleon, 40, is the first woman to be listed on the E.P.A.’s two-year-old fugitives list, which includes people wanted for crimes ranging from dumping oil or contaminated soil to importing vehicles that fail to meet United States emissions standards.

She could face substantial jail time after extradition to the United States, given that she was convicted of 28 counts that carried penalties of 5 to 20 years, the E.P.A. said.

The trail of crimes goes back to roughly 2001, when Ms. Deleon began operating Environmental Compliance Training, a certified asbestos-removal training school in Methuen, Mass. Over the next five years, she granted hundreds of certificates to people who had taken no courses.

The authorities estimated that 65 to 80 percent of those who received certificates from the school had not received the necessary training. Many of those were illegal immigrants who could not afford to take four days off from work to obtain their credentials. Environmental Compliance Training became Massachusetts’ largest asbestos training business.

Many of the graduates obtained jobs through a temporary staffing agency that Ms. Deleon also owned, the E.P.A. said, and were sent out to do dangerous asbestos demolition work. She paid them under the table so she would not have to pay taxes or obtain workers’ compensation insurance for them.

She was convicted in federal court in 2008 on charges including fraud, hiring illegal immigrants, making false statements and procuring false payroll tax returns.

The E.P.A. created its most-wanted list, complete with mug shots, to draw more attention to environmental crime, which has been rising as agency regulation has expanded. Sixteen fugitives remain on that list, and five, including Ms. Deleon, are listed as former fugitives with “captured” stamped on their mug shots.

Cynthia Giles, an assistant E.P.A. administrator, declined to say whether the list had led to any tips that aided in Ms. Deleon’s capture.

“Posting defendants on the fugitive Web site creates more visibility, thereby providing an opportunity for the public to provide information about their potential whereabouts and for law enforcement authorities to be aware that these individuals are wanted by the United States,” she said.

May we receive the same compassion and mercy we extend to others!