Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses - We Have Private Prisons to Fill Forrest Wilder - The Observer
go to original May 8, 2013

When Jose Rios walked into a Bank of America branch last year, he hoped to open an account for the car repair shop he owned. He didn’t expect to end up with a prison sentence.

Days after Rios provided the bank with a home address and Social Security number, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents showed up at his house looking for him. (Rios said ICE agents later told him that Bank of America, which has acknowledged a policy of reporting undocumented immigrants to immigration officials, turned him in.) Rios wasn’t home. His wife, a pretty, sad-eyed woman of 38, answered the door.

“They said, ‘if we don’t find [Jose], we come back for you,’” she said, sitting outside her daughters’ elementary school on a gorgeous California day while her smiling 2-year-old brought us handfuls of dainty red geraniums. Her daughters, the agents warned, could end up in foster care.

Both Jose and his wife, Marta, are undocumented immigrants. (The Observer has changed their names to protect their identities.) Their three girls—ages 2, 7 and 12—are U.S. citizens. Facing the prospect of a shattered family, Jose turned himself in to ICE.

In an audition for a model undocumented immigrant, Rios, 34, probably wouldn’t make the final cut. His parents brought him and his two brothers to California from Mexico when Jose was 3. He graduated from high school in Fresno, a rough-around-the-edges city in California’s Central Valley. Rios had a green card until, in 2000 at age 21, he was caught with 35 pounds of marijuana in San Diego and charged with possession with intent to sell. He spent 37 days in jail, was stripped of his green card and sent to Mexico, a country he hardly knew. That same year he and Marta married; she was pregnant with their first child. There was no way he was staying in Mexico. “I don’t have nothing in Mexico,” he says. “My brothers, my sisters and parents, my wife and my daughters are in California.”

In the estimation of the federal government, Rios is a “criminal alien.” When he was caught with that marijuana, he lost his legal claim to his adopted country. He became a double-outcast: an unauthorized immigrant with a criminal record.

Read the rest at The Observer

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