Blind justice

In my opinion it is a case of blind justice. What is your opinion was a little compassion inorder.

Caught Between Parents and the Law

By NINA BERNSTEIN

Published: February 17, 2005

en-year-old Adnan Thakur was born and raised in Jamaica, Queens, in the kind of immigrant family that transformed New York's neighborhoods in the 1990's. His father, a legal permanent resident from Bangladesh, drove a cab. His mother, who had entered the country illegally, worked as a cashier in a hardware store. Adnan, a fifth grader at Public School 95, excelled at math and Dragon Ball Z video games.

But one morning last fall, while Adnan and his 2-year-old sister, Rifha, were asleep, the bottom fell out of their life in America.

In a predawn raid, immigration agents from the little-known National Fugitive Operations Program, part of the Department of Homeland Security, took their mother away in handcuffs on an old deportation order, to hold her in detention until she could be sent to Bangladesh. Their father, unable to manage alone while he worked to support the family, asked deportation officers to help him send the children on the plane to Bangladesh along with their mother.

At Kennedy International Airport, the children waited on the plane for their mother, Shilpi Thakur. Immigration agents drove her to the airport, but Kuwaiti Airlines refused to let her board because the agents had not secured her a transit visa for the flight's layover in London. As the agents drove her back to detention in distress, the plane took off with her children, who were accompanied only by a Bangladesh-bound colleague of their father who had expected to put them in their mother's care.

By the time Mrs. Thakur was allowed to join them, the children had been stranded with strangers in Bangladesh for 10 days.

"I wanted to go home to America," Adnan recalled in a telephone call from Dhaka, the capital, describing his first tearful call to his father, Soyeb Thakur, a world away in Queens. "And my dad said, 'There's no way.' "

As the government steps up its enforcement of immigration laws, the Thakur children's sudden journey into an alien life illustrates some of the complications of repairing an immigration system that all sides agree is broken. Government officials say that while they often help arrange for children who are citizens to accompany their deported parents, they are not responsible if plans do not work out.

About three million young American citizens have at least one parent in the United States illegally, demographers estimate. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency within Homeland Security, removed a record 157,281 foreign people from the country in the last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30. The agency does not keep track of how many adults took along children who were citizens. But immigration experts say that just as thousands of such children are being left behind, thousands of others have been thrust, helter-skelter, into foreign lives.

"We're exporting a problem, and it will come back to haunt us," said Jacqueline M. Hagan, a sociologist and a co-director of the Center for Immigration Research at the University of Houston, an advocate for immigrants. "In the short run, it's going to be devastating for that child emotionally, psychologically, financially. And in the long run, nobody wins from this."

But Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which favors restricting immigration, calls such children "collateral damage of their parents' lawbreaking" and of a crackdown that is long overdue.

From the government's perspective, said Manny Van Pelt, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Thakur case was a success.

"We did the part that we were responsible for," Mr. Van Pelt said. "We carried out the successful removal of a person who had violated the nation's laws and that the court had determined had to be removed from this country."

The case demonstrates, he added, how complicated it is to remove people like Mrs. Thakur, who applied for political asylum in 1993, was rejected in 1997, exhausted a series of appeals to stay in 2003, and ignored orders to leave the country.

Mrs. Thakur, who used Shilpi as a first and last name before her marriage, said she tried to follow the path used for decades by immigrant New Yorkers who arrived first and were granted legal status later. She paid Social Security taxes for years while she worked at Metropolitan Lumber and Hardware in Jamaica, and she carried a New York State driver's license with her correct address. She tried to gain legal status based on her marriage to Mr. Thakur, who had won a green card in 2001 through the diversity lottery. But the judge who ordered her removed called the effort part of "years of fraud and deception." With a mission to shrink a national backlog of nearly 400,000 unenforced deportation and removal orders, the National Fugitive Operations Program, also known as the Absconder Initiative, was started in 2003 with 18 teams nationwide, including one in New York. The program, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is seeking to expand to 30 teams. The agency showcases arrests of "sexual predators" and drug dealers, and stresses that because it has resources to arrest only about 35 people a day nationwide, its priority is hunting down the most dangerous. Yet many, if not most, of those seized in the fugitive team's predawn raids in New York, like Mrs. Thakur, have no criminal record. Mr. Van Pelt dismissed the distinction between felons on the run and ordinary people who had dodged deportation and put down roots. "As far as this agency goes, when the court issues an order, it doesn't matter who that person is," he said.As a practical matter, he acknowledged, it may be harder to locate those with a criminal past. When agents plan a raid on the last known address of a felon, he said, efficiency dictates that they come prepared to apprehend others with outstanding deportation orders who live nearby. Typically, the information comes from eight databases of about 26 billion electronic records at a support center in Williston, Vt.When the fugitive team stepped over the Thakurs' threshold, normal life unraveled. Sitting in the dismantled family apartment in Queens recently like a man in a shipwreck, Mr. Thakur, 44, recalled pleading with the agents as they arrested his wife. "I said, 'She has two children - one is 10 years old, one is 2 years. Please, what is going to happen to them?' " The answer, as he remembers it: "We don't know, 9/11 changed everything." Since children who are citizens are outside the scope of official duties, it is easy for them to fall through the cracks during a deportation, said Rosa Barreca, who worked as a deportation officer from 1996 to 2000 for what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service."Sure, we'll see more of it," added Ms. Barreca, 30, now a law student and a recent intern with American Friends Service Committee, a charitable and advocacy group that has addressed the issue of immigrant detainees. "The laws to begin with are restrictive, so you have lots of breaking up of families."Missing travel documents, missed flights and multiple trips to the airport are commonplace, in part because the number of deportation officers has not kept pace with arrests, detentions or demands by foreign governments for transit visas, according to advocates for immigrant detainees. More important, they contend, is lack of public accountability."Nobody's watching what they're doing," said Bryan Lonegan, an immigration lawyer with the Legal Aid Society. "They're given tremendous authority and at the same time, no authority."In the Thakur case, the father said he only learned that his wife had not been put on the plane when Adnan called, crying, from Kuwait City the next day. Mrs. Thakur said she had been unable to alert her husband from the detention center in Elizabeth, N.J., because she was not allowed to make a phone call."In center, I'm mad and crying," she said in halting English on the telephone from Dhaka. "My two children going far away. Who take care of my two kids? One officer is coming: 'Unfortunately this very sad, but we don't have anything we can do.' "In a telephone interview last week, after his worried father joined the family for a visit, Adnan said he had no friends in Bangladesh. "I can't speak Bangla, so my school is hard for me," he said. "There's no park or playgrounds, and I'm scared to go out." His mother says she tells him, "You just got to grow up, my son. Maybe one day coming, you go back."