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Mexican mother organizes from inside Chicago church
2006-12-23
With Christmas fast approaching, Elvira Arellano dispatched her 8-year-old son to Washington to plead her case and that of other immigrant families who fear being torn apart by deportation. The Mexican-born Arellano, 31, cannot go herself because she has been fighting a deportation order since August from inside a Chicago church where she has imprisoned herself, invoking the ancient medieval protection of sanctuary. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, there are 2 million families in the United States with mixed status, meaning some members are undocumented. The families have nearly 4 million children, most of whom are U.S.-born. The U.S.-born children must wait until they turn 21 before petitioning to have their immigrant parents join them legally in the United States. Clutching a nervous Chihuahua that appeared to be the church's sole alarm against intruders, Arellano said she lived in fear that immigration agents would burst in at any time and take her away for deportation back to Mexico. The idea his mother could disappear weighs heavily on Saul, her son. "Most of the time I work diligently to continue the struggle," Arellano said in Spanish, translated by assistant pastor Beti Guevara. "I'm organizing people so this kind of thing won't happen and families can be together." At first she said she procrastinated out of fear, but has since thrown herself into organizing work. The isolation led her to read more, meditate daily and become more "spiritual." Saul, who was born in the United States, was among some 20 children of immigrants who marched on Thursday to the White House to demand an end to federal raids on homes and workplaces. It was Saul's second trip to Washington and he has made excursions to Mexico City to seek support for his mother's cause and to Miami to demand an end to the raids. Earlier this month, hundreds of undocumented immigrants working at meat packing plants were rounded up around the country -- sometimes leaving children who are U.S. citizens in limbo. DEPORTED TWICE Arellano was ordered deported for a second time after being convicted of Social Security fraud following a 2002 sweep at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport snared her working with false documents. She was first deported in 1997 when she attempted to cross the U.S.-Mexico border with fraudulent documents. She was temporarily spared deportation because of intervention by local congressmen until this August, when she ignored a government order to appear and instead took sanctuary in the Adalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago. In the process she became a symbol for rising immigrant anger at U.S. policies. For others, she became a symbol of illegal immigration run amok and denigrated for trying to earn the right to stay in the country by producing an "anchor baby" -- a term her pastor calls racist. The Minutemen, a group seeking to enforce strict immigration laws, has demanded authorities arrest Arellano. A December online poll by the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper found most opposed Arellano's stance, with some respondents calling her "a law-breaking foreign criminal" who has nothing in common with civil rights heroes of the past. Outside the brick storefront church, a frayed white bedsheet with the words "holy sanctuary" hangs. A laptop computer and ringing telephone on a desk inside the stuffy upstairs apartment testify to Arellano's labors. Alongside is a Time Magazine story about her. She gets a rare whiff of fresh air in the church's backyard, and never ventures out the front door or beyond the church's boundaries. "We don't have plans to enter the church," said Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Gail Montenegro, adding Arellano is one of 600,000 "fugitive immigrants" who are tracked down based on the threat they pose. (Additional reporting by Adriana Garcia in Washington)
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