Minnesota echo - will the US pay for a border wall to protect Canada? IDTS

An echo opinion letter about the integrity of immigrants, published in the Minnesota Post-Bulletin news: 

Contrary to Donald Trump’s fear mongering about illegal immigrants pouring into our country, through the southern border, to commit violent crimes and bring in drugs (most of which come in through ports of entry), there are multiple studies, including by the Cato Institute (founded by Charles Koch, a Republican) and the Journal of Criminology, that have shown that undocumented immigrants are considerably less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. 

Legal immigrants are even less likely to commit crimes. Furthermore, these studies have shown that states with larger shares of undocumented immigrants tend to have lower crime rates than states with smaller shares.

Yet Donald Trump, who is obsessed with building a wall on the southern border, never talks about what he is going to do to protect us from violent native-born citizens, (and gun violence!) from whom we are in much greater danger.

Perhaps Canada should consider (if they haven’t already) building a wall along their border with the U.S. to keep our violent citizens out of their country and ask the U.S. to pay for it.

Carole Mataya, Rochester Minnesota  

Immigrant children rescued by Nora Sandigo Children Foundation

Nora Sandigo Children Foundation

Angels among us ~ Florida humanitarian helps immigrant children

A mom in Florida is caring for 1,250 children of illegal immigrants in case their parents are deported ~ God Bless Her!

Gisela Salomon, Associated Press pubished in Business Insider

• Nora Sandigo cares for 1,250 children of undocumented immigrants who are at risk of being detained or deported.
• Parents who are worried about what may happen to their children if they are detained sign a document known as a power of attorney that allows Sandigo to become the children's caretaker.
• Sandigo is an immigrant herself. As a teen, she fled the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua and came to the US.

MIAMI (AP) — The 29-year-old Mexican farm worker was stressed and afraid. Her husband had just been detained by immigration authorities as he left a South Florida construction site and was about to be deported. She feared the same would soon happen to her. What would become of her two kids?

So she called Nora Sandigo, an immigration activist who has accepted responsibility for 1,250 children, becoming an essential part of emergency planning for people who are in the U.S. illegally and now face an increasing prospect of being caught amid a crackdown under President Donald Trump.

"Don't worry," Sandigo told her on a recent morning. "Come see me tomorrow."

Nora Sandigo Children Foundation

Hundreds of immigrant parents have signed a document known as a power of attorney that enables Sandigo to care for their children if they are detained, at which point it might be too late to make such an arrangement.

"People are desperate to do this to protect their kids," she said after hanging up with the woman from Mexico. "Once they are detained there's very little that can be done for them."

The power of attorney allows Sandigo to sign documents on behalf of children at schools, hospitals and court. She can help the minors pursue legal residency if they are not citizens or travel abroad to be reunited with their families.

At least once a week, Sandigo, a 52-year-old mother of two daughters, drives south to the city of Homestead and drops off donated clothing and food for some of them, mostly people from Mexico and Central America who work on nearby farms.

Every two weeks, many of the families gather at her home on the rural southern fringe of Miami. Sometimes several hundred show up.

She hands out donated supplies to the adults while the kids play with a menagerie of animals on the five-acre property, including ponies, a goat, pigs and a peacock.

Most of the kids still live with at least one parent, and in the end she may never have to take care of most of them.

Sandigo, a deeply religious woman who makes frequent references to God and Jesus, gets more involved if the parents are detained or deported. In December, she accompanied an 8-year-old Mexican girl to the hospital because the child couldn't sleep, eat or stop crying after her father was detained and went with another child to an asylum hearing in downtown Miami.

Two kids from Nicaragua whose parents were forced to leave the U.S. lived with her for two years. One now attends Georgetown University and the other lives with an uncle and plans to join the Army.

A 16-year-old who was born in the U.S. to parents from India has been living with her since September 2016, getting an education at a local public school that his parents felt he couldn't get after they were deported to their homeland. Sandigo refers to the boy, Ritibh Kumar, as "my lovely son."

Kumar, who is tall and athletic and has lived in the U.S. most of his life, said Sandigo checks his homework and watches him play tight end on his school's football team. "She is my No. 1 fan," he said. "This is my second home, my second mother."
When Lucia Ambruno was forced to return to Colombia, she placed her two children in Sandigo's care after hearing media reports about the foundation. The two teens lived with her in Kendall for several months until they were able to move in with family friends in another part of the U.S.

"She inspires a lot confidence, a lot of love," the 42-year-old Ambruno said of Sandigo. "I trusted her with my little ones and she didn't let me down."

Sandigo can relate to the immigrants she helps. She fled Nicaragua as a teen, leaving her own parents behind, after the socialist Sandinista government confiscated her family's farm. 

During the 1980s, Sandigo provided the U.S.-backed Contra insurgents with clothes and other supplies 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 1996 and became active in immigration issues, helping fellow refugees from Nicaragua. Sandigo has since become well known for broader efforts, which include filing a lawsuit last week against the Trump administration on behalf of children with citizenship whose parents have been deported.

"Nora has proven that she has a deep, caring heart and is committed to giving many immigrant kids a good start in life," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a South Florida Republican.

The first time Sandigo signed a power of attorney to help someone being deported was in 2006, when a woman from Peru needed help getting a young child back to the South American country.

"I'm a mama warrior, ready to protect children and their parents," she said.

Money for the effort comes from donations to the Nora Sandigo Children Foundation or from the businesses she runs with her husband, which include a plant nursery and an elderly care home. Some lawyers also offer voluntary help.

Sandigo has been setting up agreements with migrant parents for nearly a decade, but over the past 12 months the number of new ones has grown nearly 40 percent. She gets barraged with email, Facebook messages and phone calls from interested parents.

More than 110,500 immigrants were detained on suspicion of being in U.S. illegally in the first nine months under Trump, a 42 percent increase over a year earlier, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The administration has also ended programs that spared some categories of immigrants from deportation, including people from countries devastated by natural disaster such as Haiti and El Salvador.

The power of attorney forms don't confer full legal guardianship or transfer parental rights. No court order is required. State and local officials don't get involved unless there are allegations of fraud or abuse, in which case a judge can be asked to void the agreement. Similar arrangements are often used by elderly people who want someone to look out for their interests.

Others provide this service for immigrants around the U.S., though immigration experts say they know of no one who has done it to the extent of Sandigo.

For the Mexican woman who called Sandigo on a recent morning, it's a way to make sure her kids have someone to call and take care of them if she is suddenly arrested, someone who could send them to her in San Luis Potosi.

The woman showed up at Sandigo's house the following evening with her 2-year-old son after her eight-hour shift picking squash near Homestead, leaving her 11-year-old daughter with a neighbor. The woman, who asked that she be identified only by her first name, Lucia, said the drive was tense because she was afraid she would be pulled over and turned over to immigration.

Sandigo, who seems to always have a cup of coffee in her hand, embraced Lucia as if they had known each other for years. The boy headed off to play with a ball while they sat down to talk in the living room. Lucia said her husband crossed the border in 2006 and she followed the next year. Now, they fear their time in the U.S. is coming to an end. The husband was detained as he came back from a construction job near Miami.

She had heard of Sandigo through the immigrant grapevine. "She's a good person and that's why I'm going to her for help," Lucia said, still in tears after talking about what happened to her husband.

Sandigo tries to offer comfort, but as the woman drives away into the night, Sandigo says there is only so much reassurance she can give. "People are afraid, knowing that at any moment there's a possibility that their family can be destroyed," she said.

Trails of Skeletons of Illegal Immigrants in Texas- Where are the Pro-Life Posters?

As Texas closes women health clinics, for fear they provide poor women with health care which might include medically safe abortions, the state legislators who passed this bill might think about recycling those anti-abortion signs.

When Pro-Life zealots stand in self righteous rage outside of women's health clinics, I wonder if they would consider loaning those "choose life" anti-abortion signs to the Texas fields cluttered with skeletons.  Those signs are just as relevant where many skeletons are being collected, the remains of illegal immigrants, who just didn't make it to a safe place.  Apparently, these unfortunately dead immigrants are leaving their skeletal bones littering the Texas geography like animal carcasses after a forest fire.  Yet, where are the "choose life" advocates, to help protect the lives of innocent people, who are just trying to find their way out of poverty and oppressive governments? The bones of these once humans are just as precious as the babies the anti-abortion activists are trying to save with signage and protests.

"They are excavating the bodies --dozens so far..." ABC News


In 2011, Chief Deputy Benny Martinez and his team recovered 129 bodies, and this year he said he expects the death toll to double.

Following a Trail of Skeletons and Trying to Identify Them

By ALYSSA NEWCOMB (@alyssanewcomb)   

July 10, 2013

As illegal border crossings have shifted from Arizona to Texas, the surging tide can be measured with grisly markers -- a growing number of skeletal remains being recovered and interred in unmarked graves.

For many the covert trip through Brooks County, 70 miles from the Rio Grande Valley border crossing, has become a death trap of temperatures in the triple digits, thick mesquite brush and sand that is a foot deep in places.

While Congress struggles to fashion a reform of the immigration law that could include more officers to patrol the border, a Baylor University professor and her students have taken on the grim task that no one else has tackled -- identifying the dead.

They are excavating the bodies --dozens so far -- cleaning them down to the bones and preparing them for DNA in an attempt to put names to the bodies and reunited them with their families.

With no identification on them, not even a country of origin, the Baylor team plans to use forensic science to gain profiles of the dead. That information will be entered into a national database with the hope that it will help families of the missing know what happened.

Terrain Offers 'Good Concealment' But At A Risk

Miles before the only U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Brooks County, located in Falfurrias, Texas, undocumented immigrants are often dropped off by smugglers and left to circumvent authorities by cutting through private ranches, knee-deep sand and thick brush.

"The constant walking and the vegetation being the way it is, it's good for concealment and hard to extract them," said Chief Deputy Benny Martinez of the Brooks County Sheriff's Office.

The biggest indicator of the flow of undocumented immigrants into the United States, the number of apprehensions at the Mexican border, has steadily declined, with 356,873 cases reported in 2012, compared with 1,649,884 in 2000.

These declining numbers of illegal crossing don't take into account the individuals, the faces of the many who are risking their lives. We'll never know how many of them or identify them.  This anonymity shelters us from having to put a face and tragic story to each  body.  It's not dignified or fair for them to be simply put in a plastic bag, like a science experiment and moved to a morgue and possibly placed in paupers graves.  

Americans are a nation built entirely on the genious and creativity of immigrants.  To deny others the same opportunities as our own ancestors shared is plain wrong and hypocritical.  

Nevertheless, right wing extremists who believe illegal immigrants aren't worthy of being Americans are just as likely to be anti-abortion zealots.  I can't explain the cause and effect, but the correlation is evident among those who share right wing ideologies. Therefore, I'd like somebody to explain why the right wing obsession against abortion doesn't translate into a similar outrage against leaving dead bodies littering Texas, the remains of illegal immigrants who won't get a chance to start a new life.  

• Protecting life means just that.
• Protecting life means opposing the death penalty.
• Protecting life means supporting those who are at the end of their life, allowing them to experience a natural death.
• Protecting life means allowing illegal immigrants to live, rather than die,  to live in freedom and provide them a path to American citizenship.
• Protecting life means providing preventive health care to all women, so they are never in a position to need an abortion.
• Protecting life means providing all people with  access to quality and affordable health care.

It's a terrible statement about our nation's lack of respect for life, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, to have teams of people carting off human skeletons in Texas, as though the bodies are road kill.  Those who support the pro-life movement should find another location in Texas for the signs they won't be needing now that abortion clinics are being closed.  

No sense letting these signs go to waste.  They're badly needed by dying immigrants who are desperately trying to start a new life.