Putting a face on deportation

Suresh Kumar Goel shows the scars on his arms and back, reminders of why he fled India in 1989 and became an illegal alien.

The 42-year-old Hindu struggles with the English language as he tries to tell his story, one not unlike thousands of other stories that could be told by people from China, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Middle East, Africa, South and Central America and, of course, Mexico.

Though most illegal aliens are fleeing poverty, many slip across America's borders to escape civil wars or political turmoil in their own countries.

Some marry and can stay legally, if the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service decides the marriage is for love and not money.

Some buy forged documents, creating a multi-million dollar subterranean business operating out of unnamed buildings and basements and offices.

Some do neither, taking their chances they won't get caught -- and because of the enormous number of illegal aliens and the small number of INS agents, a gambler would say the odds are pretty good in the favor of the immigrants; according to one estimate by an INS official, for each one caught, probably two get away.

Though many illegal aliens accept their fate when they are caught and willingly return to the country of their birth, others apply for political asylum.

Attorney Bill O. Hing says the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in a case he argued on behalf of political refugees, that the benefit of the doubt should be given to a person seeking asylum.

"The asylum statute is meant to be generous," Hing, director of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco, said. "It is humanitarian. The court said if we are going to make a mistake, then we're going to err on the side of the person -- even if there is only a 10 percent chance a person might be persecuted."

Hing, author of two books on immigration issues, said he doesn't believe the INS is following the desire of the Supreme Court.

"Some adjudicators don't understand what asylum is about, and I've talked to many of them," Hing said.

He said the judges and lawyers tend to make their decisions on whether they think someone is going to be persecuted.

"But the Supreme Court said you grant it when there is a chance the person might be persecuted," Hing said.

He said Congress last year made it more difficult to apply for asylum.

"You can't get judicial review and you have to apply pretty quickly, within 30 days after arriving," Hing said.

Goel, whose name is pronounced to rhyme with toil, says he fits two categories that should qualify him to remain in this country -- he married an American, 46-year-old Genie Collins, and he is a political refugee.

Yet Goel is fighting a deportation order, though technically he is leaving "voluntarily."

He was told to be on a plane no later than May 24, but he couldn't get a ticket for anything before May 30, though he has not yet told authorities of the delay. He's fearful INS agents, once again, will come to his home and take him away in shackles on the date he was told to get out and that he will be held in jail until the date of his ticket.

"We're terrified of the INS," his wife said.

She suffers from a variety of ailments, including a weak heart that forced her to be hospitalized for several days as a result of stress after her husband was arrested by INS agents March 5 -- he was released a day later.

"I feel like a foreigner myself," she said.

She swears their marriage, which took place at a Las Vegas wedding chapel last July, is not a farce.

"We married because we love each other," she said. "The INS said he shouldn't have married me, knowing he was under a deportation order."

Goel says the order amounts to a death sentence.

"I will get killed," he said.

Goel said he fled India because he was being persecuted and tortured by the police and by militant Sikhs after innocently becoming trapped in the middle of an ongoing battle between the two groups.

He said the police in Punjab province arrested him without a warrant and beat him because he had been seen associating with Sikhs.

His only association with Sikhs, he said, was to deliver food to them.

Goel was in the catering business.

After he was seen in the custody of the police, he said, the Sikhs abducted him and used a knife to cut his arms and back to find out what he told the authorities.

Goel belonged to an organization called the Shiv Sena, a group that is supposed to protect the rights of Hindus and to honor their religion.

But, he said, the Shiv Sena could not protect him.

He hid from the police, who harassed his family in an effort to find him. And he hid from the Sikhs.

Finally, he decided he had to leave India before he was killed or caused his family to be killed.

A 1997 report by Amnesty International reported that India, especially in the Punjab province where Goel is from, held thousands of political prisoners without charging them with a crime or holding a trial.

According to the watchdog organization, prisoners are routinely tortured and abused and mistreated, resulting in the deaths of at least 200 people who were in custody last year.

"Human-rights defenders continue to be targeted," the report said.

An Amnesty International report released in 1988, not long before Goel fled India, said political activists routinely have disappeared, including 30 residents of one village.

Goel saw the injustice firsthand, so he sold all his belongings and paid someone in the underground $12,000 to smuggle him into the United States. That began an arduous journey taking him and 17 others by plane, car and foot from India to Holland, Panama, Belize, Mexico and finally into this country at Brownsville, Texas.

Today, Goel has an $800, one-way ticket for a quick trip to his native India.

In 1992 he first applied for political asylum. While that issue was under investigation, he was given temporary permission to stay in this country and work. However, that permission was revoked after a 1995 hearing in which a judge denied the request and issued a deportation order.

He claims he didn't turn himself into the INS as ordered following his 1995 hearing because his English was very poor at the time and he could not understand the proceedings -- even though a Hindu interpreter was provided.

"The interpreter spoke Hindu, but not the kind I speak," Goel said. His native country has hundreds of dialects, often making it difficult for a person from one part of the country to understand someone from another part.

Goel says that also is the reason he did not appeal the judge's decision on political asylum. He was expecting further direction from his lawyer or the INS, but he received nothing. So he went home to Los Angeles to await the next step.

While waiting, he met Collins. They fell in love and, after about three years of hearing nothing from the INS, they moved to Las Vegas and got married. Goel says they did not realize he was being sought by the agency for deportation.

In spite of his marriage, his wife's poor health and his contention that he should have been given asylum, Goel still is slated to be sent back to India.

The INS says Goel got married while he was under order of deportation, making the marriage irrelevant.

And it says his wife's health problems, which prevent her from working, are not serious enough to warrant Goel to remain in this country -- which he entered illegally in the first place.

"We can't make concessions for everyone," one INS agent said. "Where do you stop? Where do you draw the line?"

As to the issue of political asylum, at the conclusion of the administrative hearing held in San Francisco in 1995, the INS judge apparently didn't believe Goel's story and ordered him to leave.

But Goel stayed.

As he discussed his predicament, struggling with his English to make himself understood, Goel seemed perplexed and frustrated that the bureaucracy of the INS was not more sympathetic to his plight.

But underfunding and understaffing in an agency that has literally millions of case files leaves little time for sympathy.

According to the INS office in San Francisco, it is just now processing employment-permit applications that were received in 1996 from people who want to come here legally to work.

A study released in March by the Citizenship Now Collaborative, an organization of six immigration groups, says 1.7 million immigrants in this country are waiting for their naturalization applications to be approved, their lives on hold because of the overwhelming backlog.

Peter Ahr, INS spokesman for the Phoenix region, said it is impossible to determine accurately the number of illegal aliens in this area, much less in the entire country.

According to one report, there could be 1 million or more illegal aliens in California alone.

"Our own headquarters estimated a year ago that the undocumented population in Arizona was 115,000, which I feel is a very conservative estimate," Ahr said. "The figure for Southern Nevada was 50 to 60 percent of that, but that also is a conservative estimate."

Phoenix has 50 special agents, and not all of them are assigned to intercepting illegal aliens.

The Las Vegas office of the INS has only nine agents assigned to criminal investigations, Stephen Usiak, the agent in charge, says.

And, based upon orders from Washington, their main focus is on businesses that hire illegal aliens -- not the aliens themselves.

According to the latest political philosophy, if those here illegally can't work, they will go home.

Goel, who used to work in a convenience store, believes he has become a faceless person in a sea of faceless people who are nothing more than numbers to the INS, numbers that are tabulated and processed without any thought given to the lives that are being affected.

Except for coming to this country illegally and then not presenting himself to the INS in 1995 to be sent home, Goel said he has broken no laws and has stayed out of trouble.

A month after he was married, Goel applied for citizenship.

The couple hired another lawyer, Dario Aguilar, to do the application for them.

Aguilar, who has since moved to Phoenix, said the application raised a red flag at the INS -- in essence pulling Goel out of the faceless sea -- and agents began the slow, tedious process of deporting him.

On March 5 agents finally caught up with him, even though he was not hiding and had been working, and arrested him at his apartment.

He spent one night in jail and was denied his vegetarian diet.

Aguilar, a former lawyer for the INS, said he's doing everything he can to keep his client from being sent home, but it will be difficult to meet the fast-approaching deadline.

"The barrier we have is a warrant of deportation," Aguilar said. "The government's position is that they can execute the warrant and effect the deportation.

"What we have done is to try to reopen the case, trying to convince INS this is the humane, just and correct thing to do."

Even though the case is beyond the time period during which Goel has the right to ask INS to reconsider it, it remains the agency's option to open it again.

"If they agree, then we win. But so far they have declined to agree," Aguilar said. "As a matter of policy, they just don't do it, regardless of human concerns.

"Essentially, they're saying, 'It's been adjudicated, and the judge didn't believe you and denied your request for political asylum, and you didn't appeal.' "

Aguilar said sometimes you need to forget the law.

"The law doesn't always do the right thing," he said. "It is not difficult for the INS to reopen the case."

Aguilar said the INS has a lot of good people in its ranks, but often it is easier to hide behind policy than to think a lot about any one case, considering the overwhelming number of cases.

"They feel if they make one exception, then they will have to make another and another," Aguilar said.

Another option is for a judge to request that a case be reopened, an avenue Aguilar is pursuing. That request has not been acted upon.

Aguilar said the INS is a highly political organization, a complex agency subject to the winds of politics, much like the Internal Revenue Service.

"In no area of law does Congress have greater impact than the INS," Aguilar said.

And Congress has decided to create a system of courts that is only a shadow of the court system afforded U.S. citizens.

"It is designed to have due process," Aguilar said, "but at the lowest possible cost. It is strictly an administrative court."

He said people don't realize how politically driven the INS is.

"Immigration laws are a lot like the tax code," he said. "They don't have to make sense and they may not reflect the will of the people, just the will of Congress."

The jurisdiction of the immigration court is limited, defendants are not entitled to a free lawyer, rights of discovery are limited to what the government wants to introduce and rules of evidence are not strictly enforced.

"It's a very loose system," Aguilar said.

Aguilar believes the system could be improved, but a lot of the problems are with the INS itself.

"We need to focus on the INS," he said. "The agency is the problem. It's easy to beat up on aliens -- they don't fight back. And I don't think justice is being served."

Carlos Cantu, a lawyer with Catholic Charities, represented 296 immigrants last year.

Though he has not met Goel and is not familiar with the facts of the case, he said that, as a rule, if an illegal alien can show he was persecuted in his own country, political asylum is granted.

And, he said, it is rare that a marriage is determined to be fraudulent.

Cantu has been representing aliens for three years.

He spends most of his day at Immigration Court, located in a mall-like setting at Pepper Lane and Pecos Boulevard, where INS is located.

The court has two judges and soon will get a third.

Ahr said Las Vegas' growth is a magnet, drawing illegal aliens from every corner of the world.

"In Southern Nevada you had a tremendous growth rate that has fueled certain kinds of industries that attract undocumented workers," Ahr said. "There are not a lot of illegal alien CPAs, but on the other hand there are a lot of construction workers -- there have been cases where 40 percent of the workers at one construction site were undocumented aliens.

"And there are related industries that attract them -- like landscaping and gardening.

"And there are a lot of fast-food places and convenience stores."

The casino industry rarely has a problem with illegal aliens -- there is too much to lose and too little to be gained by hiring them.

One authority on the immigration issue, who requested anonymity, said that until the early 1990s the problem of illegal aliens was winked at by Congress.

"They underfunded the INS and appointed commissioners to head the agency who knew nothing about the issues," the source said. "Plus, the agriculture industry was highly dependent on illegal immigrants and the farmers pressured the administrations not to enforce the laws so they could have illegals.

"But things changed. California has 50 percent of undocumented aliens -- and Nevada is getting some of that.

"In the '90s things became worse in California, and in '94 Proposition 87 was put on the ballot to keep out illegal aliens. It passed three to two."

When polled about why they voted the way they did, 92 percent of those questioned said it was to send a message to Congress to do something.

Congress got the message.

It passed a law in 1996 to curb illegal aliens, put money into the INS budget and added more people.

But, some say, the law has gone too far, trapping many innocent people in its net and failing to treat many with justice and fairness.

One effect of the law was to tighten up processing at the Canadian border, which in many locations resulted in long lines and two-hour waiting periods for Canadians who came to this country to shop.

Now they shop in Canada, which has upset many businessmen in this country.

Ahr said the number of agents along the Mexican border has tripled in the past four years, from 2,500 to 7,500.

The area around San Diego received special focus and, in fact, there has been a dramatic reduction -- about 60 percent -- in the number of illegal aliens crossing into this country at that location, Ahr said.

But there has been an increase in the number crossing the border into Arizona and Texas.

"We have a dual track on enforcement -- to make initial entry difficult and to identify the undocumented aliens after they have gone underground," Ahr said.

Usiak said his agents go to businesses to check supporting documentation accompanying the employees' I-9s. That's the federal form all U.S. workers now must sign proving their qualifications to work here based on a birth certificate, green card or other document.

A year ago, Las Vegas INS agents arrested 20 people selling counterfeit identification -- including Social Security cards, driver's licenses, green cards, birth certificates and sheriff's cards -- for a price ranging from $100 to $3,000 or more, according to Usiak.

Businesses may be fined or face criminal charges if there are flagrant violations.

"We have a pilot program now in which we will supply software to a company that has the computer and modem set-up so the company can check the alien's number to make sure it is valid," Usiak said. His agents cover Southern Nevada and occasionally assist in Southern Utah and Kingman, Ariz.

He said the latest priorities set by Washington are businesses, criminal aliens and fraud.

Aliens, whether here legally or not, may be deported for a wide variety of criminal acts.

Those facing deportation have the option of buying their own travel tickets or having the government buy them, if the alien can't afford to. If the government pays, the alien must put up a bond.

The benefit to an alien of buying his own ticket is that he won't have the stigma of being "deported." Rather, he will have left voluntarily.

"Being deported is a bar to returning legally," Usiak noted.

But it is a bar that can be hurdled through a legal marriage or other qualifying factor.

Usiak said Goel can apply to come back to this country, but it could take a while for his application to be approved.

The Goels said it could take five to 10 years for him to return, if at all.

"My husband was born at home. He doesn't have a birth certificate," his wife said.

Goel recently received something in the mail from Clark County that he and his wife found amusing -- a summons to jury duty.

"He can be prosecuted if he doesn't show up," she laughed.

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