Children stolen from their mother

Deported mom seeks return of her children

Wednesday, October 1, 2003 Posted: 10:22 AM EDT (1422 GMT)
LINCOLN, Nebraska (AP) -- A Mayan Indian woman is relying on seven judges some 2,000 miles from her home in Guatemala to help her regain custody of her two young children who were placed in foster care after her arrest on immigration charges.
Mercedes Santiago-Felipe will ask the Nebraska Supreme Court next week to rule that state officials violated her rights in taking custody of her children before her deportation more than 21/2 years ago.
She has neither seen nor spoken with her children since her arrest in March 2001.
"With the faith of God ... the judges will be able to see that what happened to me was not right," she said through an interpreter Tuesday. "I really don't know what to do. All I know is that I want to see my children."
Santiago-Felipe, 33, sought asylum in the United States 10 years ago during Guatemala's civil war. Her father was among an estimated 200,000 killed in the war, which ended in 1996.
She eventually settled in central Nebraska with her son, now 8, and daughter, now 6. The children were born in the United States. Their father, also from Guatemala, later abandoned the family.
Two red marks

Santiago-Felipe eked out a living at a meatpacking plant and doing housework around Grand Island. But that all started to unravel in November 2000, when her son went to school with a red mark on his face.
School officials and police said they counseled Santiago-Felipe, who speaks some Spanish but is fluent only in her native Mayan dialect, on proper ways to discipline her children and warned her that she could be arrested if she didn't comply.
She said the police officer spoke only limited Spanish, and she did not completely understand what he was saying.
Four months later, a counselor noticed another red mark on the boy's face -- punishment for not getting ready for school, the boy said.
Police charged Santiago-Felipe with misdemeanor child abuse and the children were placed in foster care.
Santiago-Felipe was jailed and deported two months later because immigration officials say she missed an asylum application hearing years earlier. A county judge then authorized the permanent placement of her children in foster care and her parental rights were terminated in September 2002.
Terror backlash

Santiago-Felipe said she was not provided a lawyer in jail and did not know that she could contest her removal and remain in the United States to seek reunification with her children.
"It shows the human and economic implications of what is happening to immigrants in the wake of 9-11 as rigid bureaucratic requirements are being imposed on poor people who, often unable to afford counsel, are not able to exercise their rights," said Neil Shister of the Appleseed Foundation, a Washington D.C.-based legal advocacy group that is representing Santiago-Felipe.
Milo Mumgaard, an Appleseed lawyer, said that once Santiago-Felipe was deported, "the judge and the legal system treated her as if she had abandoned her children."
Lawyers on the other side argue that Santiago-Felipe has made no attempts to contact state officials or her children. They also say the children seem well-adjusted in their foster home, and that her son has said he is scared of his mother.
The state's Foster Care Review Board, which only serves in an advisory role, has determined the children were inappropriately removed from Santiago-Felipe's home.
"The case is now in a very bad situation," the board said in a report filed last year with the court. "One can only imagine the sorrow this mother must be feeling."
It makes you wonder about the tyranny of justice in the US and how it at times has not an once of humanity.