Sunday, December 13, 2009
Church Works With U.S. to Spare Detention
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Taking a Risk and Hoping for the Future
(Slide Show)
The Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale, left,
prayed at his New Jersey church
with Indonesian immigrants. More Photos »
HIGHLAND PARK, N.J. - When the young pastor started his ministry here at the
century-old Reformed Church in 2001, he gave little thought to the separate
congregation of Indonesian Christians who shared the sanctuary. They worshiped
quietly in their own language on Sunday afternoons, at the end of a hard week’s
work in the factories and warehouses of central New Jersey.
But by May 2006, when they began pleading to sleep at the church, the pastor,
the Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale, had to pay attention. At the apartment complex where
many Indonesians lived, armed federal immigration agents in a single night had
rounded up 35 men with expired visas and outstanding deportation orders, as
their wives and children cried and other families hid.
Suddenly a prosperous suburban congregation was confronted with the
labyrinthine world of immigration law and detention. This year, when one of its
own leaders, an Indonesian, was detained for months, only the pastor’s
passionate, last-ditch efforts saved him from deportation. And the church
reached a new level of activism — with extraordinary results.
Under an unusual compact between the pastor and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement officials in Newark, four Indonesians have been released from
detention in recent weeks, and 41 others living as fugitives from deportation
have turned themselves in under church auspices. Instead of being jailed - as
hundreds of thousands of immigrants without criminal records have been in
recent years - they have been released on orders of supervision, eligible for
work permits while their lawyers consider how their cases might be reopened.
Though agency officials say the arrangement is simply an example of the
case-by-case discretion they often use, the outcome has astonished advocates
and experts in immigration enforcement, and raised hopes that it signals some
broader use of humanitarian release as the Obama administration vows to
overhaul the immigration system.
Still, for those who turn themselves in, the leap of faith carries big risks.
For now, they can check in at a federal office every three months and, if
granted a work permit, can secure a driver’s license. But they are also
vulnerable to immediate deportation. Just this fall, nine Indonesian Christians
in Seattle who had been on supervised release for years were abruptly detained,
and some were deported.
The immigration agency issues about 10,000 orders of supervision annually, but
they typically involve people who cannot be deported for practical reasons,
like a homeland that will not take them back. The agency detains roughly
380,000 people a year.
“I’m totally on uncharted waters,” Mr. Kaper-Dale, 34, a Vermont native who
shares the pulpit with his wife, Stephanie, said in October as he began seeking
volunteers willing to place themselves in the government’s hands, from about
200 candidates not only at his church, but at several other New Jersey
congregations.
The first ones to step up had to overcome fear born of experience.
“Very, very scary,” said Augus Alex Assa, 46, who fought tears as his
5-year-old daughter, Christia Celine, clung to him in the van from the church,
in Middlesex County, to an immigration enforcement unit in Newark. “In my
heart, I hope I will stay in the United States.”
Like most of the Indonesians, Mr. Assa and his wife, Grace, came on tourist
visas that were suddenly easy for poor people to get in the 1990s, when a
booming economy welcomed foreign labor with a wink and a nod. Everything
changed after 9/11, when a government directive required the “special
registration” of men ages 16 to 65 who had entered the country on temporary
visas from a list of predominantly Muslim countries, including Indonesia. If
they did not register, it was understood, they would be considered terrorist
fugitives.
Most of the Indonesian Christians complied, on the advice of pastors. They
hoped that honesty would open a path to legal status rather than deportation to
their homeland, where many had faced discrimination and sectarian violence.
Instead, their appeals for asylum were denied in most cases, some through
inattention by inept or overburdened lawyers. And those who registered became
easy targets when national immigration politics demanded a crackdown.
During the 2006 raid, Mr. Assa hid in a closet when immigration agents came to
the door, as his wife covered their daughter’s mouth. For two weeks afterward,
they and others slept at the church.
About 50 men were eventually deported, typically after lengthy stays in
immigration jails, leaving wives struggling to support American-born children.
“We were shocked, but we were kind of paralyzed,” the pastor said.
On Jan. 12, the detention of one of their own spurred the congregation to
action. Harry Pangemanan, a popular Bible study leader, was picked up by
immigration agents as he left for work as a warehouse supervisor. He and his
wife, Mariyana, parents of two American-born daughters, were the only
Indonesians among the 300 people in the main congregation.
Church members organized daily visits to the detention center, a 40-minute
drive away in Elizabeth, N.J., while the pastor appealed to Congressional and
immigration offices. When Mr. Pangemanan reached out with his Bible to fellow
detainees, the congregation visited them, too. Appalled to find asylum-seekers
behind barbed wire and plexiglass, they began holding vigils outside the
center, run for profit by the Corrections Corporation of America.
Some church members resisted. “As a construction worker who is directly
affected by immigration, it’s very hard,” said Rich Lord, 39. “I felt like,
they’re taking my jobs away.”
But his union and his faith changed his mind, he said: “There’s pregnant women
so desperate in Mexico that they’re willing to cross the desert so their child
will be born in the United States. And as a Christian, I have to remember that
Mary, the mother of Jesus, had to flee their homeland.”
Then, at 5 a.m. on March 31, came bad news: Mr. Pangemanan was being put on a
plane to Indonesia. The pastor threw on his clerical collar and ran through
Newark Liberty International Airport in a frantic search for the right gate,
determined to pray with his friend before he was sent away.
By the time the pastor found the flight, the passengers had already boarded. As
he tells the story, he prayed at the gate, so visibly upset that an airline
worker let him on the plane.
Mr. Pangemanan was in the last row between two immigration agents -- bound not
for Jakarta but for a detention center in Tacoma, Wash. -- when he saw his
pastor coming down the aisle. An astonished agent asked, “How did this guy get
in here?”
“And I just put my finger up,” Mr. Pangemanan recalled, pointing heavenward.
The agents let them pray briefly; the pastor said goodbye but vowed to keep
trying. Back at the church, he phoned every number on the immigration agency’s
Web site.
He still cherishes the recording of the only message that came back, from Dora
B. Schriro, who has since left the agency but was then special detention
adviser to Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security. Within a week of
their conversation, Mr. Pangemanan was back in New Jersey with his family, his
case under reconsideration by the Board of Immigration Appeals.
When immigration agents arrested several more Indonesian men in late September,
church leaders took their effort to a new level, meeting with Scott Weber,
director of the detention and removal field office in New Jersey, and agency
envoys from Washington.
David J. Venturella, acting director of the agency’s national detention and
removal operations, said he approved the discussions. “We encourage all of our
field office directors to exercise prosecutorial discretion on a case-by-case
basis,” he said. “This is a perfect example.”
Mr. Weber rejected the ministers’ proposal for a church-run alternative to
detention, but offered his own: In groups of 5 or 10, twice a week, the church
could bring in the Indonesians they vouched for, and lawyers committed to the
lengthy process of seeking their full case files.
Unless something was amiss -- a hidden criminal conviction, a false address --
the former fugitives could walk out the same day. Even before the details were
arranged, Mr. Weber released four recent Indonesian detainees, one a Muslim.
Amy Gottlieb, immigrant rights director for the American Friends Service
Committee in New Jersey, who has been dealing with the field office since 1996,
called it “an amazing moment.”
“One, you just never believe that ICE is going to work with you on anything,
given the history,” she said. “And given the intensive arrest efforts for the
last two or three years, it’s hard to believe that people are ready to
recognize that every single case has a human angle.”
Rex Chen, the supervising lawyer at Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of
Newark, remains more pessimistic, likening himself to a financial adviser who
warns, “This mutual fund could collapse.”
While the arrangement may buy the Indonesians a year or two, he said, unless
grounds are found to reopen their cases, or Congress changes immigration law,
they could find “they just moved up from not known, to on the list, to you’re
taking the steps up to the airplane.”
There are no guarantees, acknowledged Melinda Basaran, another participating
lawyer and chairwoman of the New Jersey chapter of the American Immigration
Lawyers Association. But many of the Indonesian wives, who did not have to
register after 9/11, will soon have been here 10 years without drawing official
attention, making them eligible to apply for green cards.
The more pressing question is who is included in the supervised release, said
Joan Pinnock, another lawyer involved. Word of mouth has brought calls from
Washington State, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, where many Indonesians fled
after the New Jersey raid — and where their detention and deportation continues
unabated. But Newark immigration authorities have ruled out their return to New
Jersey.
“I would love to get this for my Jamaican clients,” Ms. Pinnock said, echoing
others who pointed to different groups, like the many Muslims affected by
special registration.
On a recent Wednesday night, in a church meeting room hung with the quilts of
four generations of grandmothers, fathers restored to their families thanked
God and the congregation.
“I’m proud of my church,” Mr. Pangemanan said. “Not just the pastor, the whole
church.”
Source: NYT - Page One
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company.
