AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - In the little, tidy living room in a house off Stassney Lane, Nicolasa Velasquez raised the right hand of her older brother, looked immigration officials in the eye and pledged on his behalf to defend the U.S. Constitution. He is an invalid, her brother Antonio, and in such cases the law encourages a court-appointed legal guardian to handle the application for citizenship.
Even, apparently, if that is a guardian who has no legal standing within the borders of the United States.
Nicolasa Velasquez has approached federal immigration officials in San Antonio about establishing residency, but they will neither grant her request nor deport her. It is a rare situation, but one that some immigration-reform groups say is borne of a system that is enforced inconsistently across the nation, makes pseudo-citizens of millions of people who enter the country illegally and prompts politicians of both parties to call for change.
“Before his accident, my brother would say, ’This is the country of great opportunity, and everything is possible,’” Nicolasa Velasquez told the Austin American-Statesman (https://bit.ly/K4iuMe ) in explaining how the family arrived here.
There are three members of the Velasquez family living in the house off Stassney Lane, two brothers and a sister. According to federal officials, they are of Mayan descent, born and raised in Guatemala. The oldest, Antonio Velasquez, 43, fled Guatemala in 1995 to escape the threat of persecution that endured in the aftermath of a Cold War-era regime led by a dictator convicted earlier this year in Guatemalan courts for the genocide of indigenous people.
Antonio Velasquez traveled by foot and bus through Mexico to Brownsville, where he was arrested. In 1997, he was granted asylum, according to federal officials.
He worked as an auto mechanic and a baker. He had a son, Juan Antonio Velasquez, now 15, as part of a relationship that ultimately failed. In October 2002, he was visited by Nicolasa and their younger brother, Jose, who was looking to improve his English after having studied environmental science at Berkshire Community College in Western Massachusetts.
On Feb. 25, 2003, toward the end of the siblings’ visit, Antonio Velasquez was working beneath a car when the jacks holding it up failed. The car fell on his chest and crushed it, causing a heart attack and severe oxygen deprivation that left him in a coma, according to medical records provided by the family’s attorney. Velasquez was unconscious for 20 days. Doctors warned the siblings he might die. When he awoke, he was totally disabled, according to the medical records. He appeared unaware of the world around him.
His siblings were granted extensions to remain in the country and care for their brother. They paid for his therapy through Medicare payments, a pension from Randall’s and the money they made, she cleaning houses and he selling his paintings over the Internet.
“We had to stay here for our brother,” Nicolasa Velasquez said through an interpreter.
After minimal improvement, it looked as if their brother would get no better. They then carried out therapies at home that they had observed, for instance putting him on a treadmill and moving his legs for 10-minute sessions. She made double-entendre jokes in their Mayan tongue, K’iche’, a language in which many words sound like English ones. She said there were plenty of ways, for example, to play on the fact that in K’iche’, “kiss means, um, number two.”
As the third one-year extension was running out, federal officials worried Nicolasa and Jose were not earning much if any income, she said. There was no fourth extension. They stayed anyway.
In time, Antonio Velasquez regained the ability to twitch his fingers and move his head slightly. Recent medical reports classified his state as a stupor with permanent brain damage and almost no muscle control. His siblings think he understands the world around him, however. During the citizenship ceremony, his eyes darted from one person to another. As his brother recounted the family’s story, his sister fetched a jacket, pulling Antonio Velasquez’s arms through it and dabbing at a bit of saliva on his chin.
“If not for his brother and sister, he would have been a ward of the state living in Austin State Hospital,” said Thomas Esparza, the family’s lawyer. The family said Antonio Velasquez said his first words on Christmas, mumbling thanks to nurses during a stay in the hospital after he contracted pneumonia.
“We always thought he was still in there,” Nicolasa Velasquez said. “We just never saw it. But he’s not lost inside himself.”
Nicolasa and Jose Velasquez said they decided to seek citizenship for their brother after nearly 10 years had passed for two reasons. Citizenship was his dream, they said - and it was also the only way to ensure that if anyone took him to see his parents, still in Guatemala, that he would be allowed to return to the United States.
The first few lawyers were doubtful he would win citizenship, possibly because he was given deferred adjudication in 2002 after being charged with assault. Finally, the family found Esparza, a more aggressive immigration lawyer who concocted a three-part legal strategy.
Before the family sought citizenship, Nicolasa Velasquez needed official guardianship of her brother. As someone who is totally disabled, he is incapable of taking the citizenship test. But the law allows immigration officials to waive the test for someone who is medically incapable of passing it if, among other general requirements, a guardian can speak on that person’s behalf. Once Nicolasa Velasquez was granted guardianship, she could make his desire for citizenship official.
Travis County Probate Court No. 1 held hearings, complete with a lawyer appointed to represent Antonio Velasquez and determine if his sister was an honest caretaker. On July 25, the court granted her guardianship until this coming November.
That done, the federal government approved Antonio Velasquez’s application for citizenship.
“He met all the criteria,” said Felix Velazquez, a supervising immigration officer with the Department of Homeland Security’s Citizenship and Immigration Service. Velazquez (no relation to the family) said he could not comment on specifics such as Antonio Velasquez’s assault conviction. “But we screened his file. We did a background check on him, like everybody else. We found nothing that would disqualify him. He’s fully qualified.”
There was one final piece to Esparza’s legal strategy: helping Nicolasa Velasquez apply for “deferred action,” the first step toward residency. Esparza said that “is the only way she can be sure she’ll be able to care for Antonio.”
But that application goes to another arm of Homeland Security - U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Esparza said he and Nicolasa Velasquez drove to the San Antonio field office twice to start the process of applying for residency. It was a gamble. Immigration officials could have arrested her, though Esparza thought that was unlikely because of the possibility of bad publicity. The customs enforcement office twice said it was too busy to meet with her, Esparza said.
In early January, the family received word from the office that it was denying the request. The letter noted that even if the department had approved the initial step Nicolasa Velasquez wanted, the government would not be conferring “any immigration status upon an alien” and would not be altering “the status of any alien who is present in the United States without proper authorization.”
Thus, on Jan. 8, as they sat on a couch above which six miniature American flags hung, a woman living in the United States illegally swore, based on the guardianship a court had conferred on her, to uphold and defend the United States Constitution, thereby earning citizenship for a brother who had himself entered the country illegally.
The situation is odd - so odd that it does not speak so much to the nation’s laws as the quirks of particular government officials, said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for tighter border security and slower immigration rates it considers more in line with national needs.
“We all run into government bureaucracies that operate in mysterious ways,” Mehlman said.
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Information from: Austin American-Statesman, https://www.statesman.com
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