In the end, their flights almost overlapped: The 11-year-old boy on his way to the U.S., granted a one-year parole to escape violence in his home of El Salvador, arrived in Dallas just a week after his uncle, Elvin Marroquin Diaz, whose testimony helped earn the boy his parole, was deported back to El Salvador.
Now, just a few weeks later, it’s the boy’s father, Elmer Marroquin Quintanilla, who faces deportation this Thursday after federal immigration officials decided that despite having a family here, including two U.S. citizen children — the 11-year-old boy Alexis and 15-year-old Sylvia, who was raped on her own journey north from El Salvador — he still meets President Obama’s new priorities for being kicked out of the country.
It’s the latest twist in the case of the Marroquin family, which has seen major ups and downs, years where Alexis and Sylvia didn’t see their parents at all, several joyful reunions in the U.S. and now the possibility that two men in the family would be kicked out and shipped home within weeks of each other.
“Why would you separate a family that we just spent almost two years fighting hard and finally got permission to unite? That makes no sense whatsoever,” said Ralph Isenberg, founder of the Isenberg Center for Immigration Empowerment in Dallas, a help center that has taken on the family’s case.
Mr. Isenberg, who provided the information about the cases over the course of dozens of conversations stretching back more than a year, said he was making a last-ditch plea with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to stay Mr. Marroquin Quintanilla’s deportation, which is scheduled for Thursday.
ICE has already paid for a ticket on a commercial airline to send Mr. Marroquin Quintanilla back to El Salvador on Avianca Flight 441 Thursday afternoon, nonstop from Dallas to Sal Salvador.
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The agency says the man is a target for deportation because of his checkered history. He was first caught sneaking into the U.S. in 2005 and issued a notice to appear before an immigration judge — though he was released to await that hearing. Five months later, he didn’t show up for the hearing, and a judge ordered him kicked out in absentia, ICE said.
In 2012, authorities again caught up with Mr. Marroquin Quintanilla when a Dallas judge sentenced him to 30 days in jail for a drunken-driving offense. Local authorities turned him over to ICE in February 2012, but the agency granted him a one-year stay of deportation. He asked for the stay to be extended, but those requests have been denied three times, and the agency says it’s now serious about removing him.
“As a convicted criminal alien, Marroquin Quintanilla meets ICE’s immigration enforcement priorities, which includes carrying out the deportation orders of the federal immigration judge,” the agency said.
Mr. Isenberg says that’s senseless. He said the man supports a common-law wife and their four children, two of whom were born here and are U.S. citizens, and the other two — Alexis and Sylvia — both struggled to get to the U.S., and clearly benefit from being with their father.
On Wednesday, Mr. Isenberg was rushing from Dallas to San Antonio to file a petition asking an immigration court to reopen Mr. Marroquin Quintanilla’s case, arguing that he was never given appropriate notice of his initial immigration hearing in 2005.
Mr. Isenberg said he believes federal authorities are sending conflicting signals to the family. One agency approved bringing Alexis into the U.S. from El Salvador, granting him a yearlong parole into the country. And multiple agencies are helping Sylvia stay in the country after her harrowing journey here. But both the Justice Department, which ousted Mr. Marroquin Diaz last month, and Homeland Security, which is now trying to deport Mr. Marroquin Quintanilla, have taken a hard-line approach to the same family.
Priorities
Mr. Marroquin Quintanilla’s case is the latest recent instance where advocates say he should qualify for the temporary deportation amnesty Mr. Obama announced last year.
Stung by taunts from immigrant rights advocates that he’d become the “deporter in chief,” the president laid out a host of new policies, including a list of priorities for who should be deported. Tops on that list were national security risks and serious criminals, the second tier were less-serious criminals and recent illegal immigrants, and the third tier were those with lesser immigration violations on their records. By contrast, those with family or community ties to the U.S. were supposed to be shown leniency.
In March, activists rallied around the case of Max Villatoro, a pastor at a Mennonite church in Iowa and a married father of four children, whom his supporters called “Pastor Max” and said was the epitome of someone who should have qualified for prosecutorial discretion.
But an immigration judge had refused his appeals and ICE deported him, citing his 1998 drunken driving conviction and another conviction a year later after he bought a Social Security number to use to blend into the shadows.
Some activists have accused ICE of being a runaway agency, and have pleaded with Mr. Obama to exert more control. In an immigration-focused town hall in February, MSNBC and Telemundo network newscaster Jose Diaz-Balart prodded Mr. Obama over those concerns, and the president seemed to respond, saying agents must follow his orders.
“The bottom line is, is that if somebody is working for ICE, and there is a policy and they don’t follow the policy, there are going to be consequences to it,” Mr. Obama said, adding that those who don’t follow his orders have “got a problem.”
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson last month told reporters that the new guidance was clearer for agents, but still allows them discretion to make final decisions. He said there could still be some “misimpressions” among agents about how to carry out the guidelines, but said they’re working on that.
“We want to look into that, and we’re doing our best to identify any misimpressions that may exist in our immigration enforcement workforce,” he said.
Mr. Isenberg said, from his standpoint, Mr. Marroquin Quintanilla’s case looked like an instance where ICE agents were ignoring the spirit of the president’s new policies.
The surge
The Marroquin family is also emblematic of the latest trend in illegal immigration — the surge of Central Americans attempting to enter the U.S. Illegal immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador in particular have come, blaming violence and economic troubles for pushing them out of their home countries, and saying lax enforcement and relatives who have already established a foothold here in the U.S. enticed them to try their own crossings.
Mr. Marroquin and his common-law wife made the journey a decade ago, soon after their son Alexis was born, and with their daughter, Sylvia, a toddler. They left the two children with a grandmother and uncle, Elvin, and headed north, ending up in Dallas, where they had two other children who are U.S. citizens.
As gang violence increased in El Salvador, it touched the children left behind. Mr. Isenberg said Sylvia’s teacher was shot and killed for not making an extortion payment, and the family began to fear the gangs would pressure Sylvia, who was 13 at the time, to join up. It was too expensive to bring both children.
They paid a smuggler, or “coyote,” somewhere in the neighborhood of $4,000 to smuggle Sylvia north. Somewhere during the three-week journey her coyote separated her and another woman from the rest of the group, and Sylvia was raped.
Finally at the border, she was ferried across the Rio Grande on a makeshift raft and was picked up by the Border Patrol as an unaccompanied minor — one of about 6,000 children from El Salvador in 2013. They were part of the leading edge of the unaccompanied minor surge that exploded onto front pages last year as apprehensions.
Like most of those others, Sylvia was processed into the U.S. and eventually released to her parents, and in the two years since, her case has been closed, and she now has an asylum claim pending. Her father, Mr. Marroquin Quintanilla, is named as a potential beneficiary in that claim.
Conflicting messages
That’s one reason why Mr. Isenberg was stunned to see ICE move ahead with deporting the uncle last month, and now turn to the father.
In an April 28 notice, Simona L. Flores, director of ICE’s Dallas field office, wrote that they were finally going to pursue the 2005 deportation order, and were rejecting his latest appeal to remain here with his family, which was filed in February.
“After a careful review of the application and supporting documentation you submitted, it has been determined that, as a matter of discretion, ICE will not stay the removal in this case,” Ms. Flores wrote.
ICE followed up with a notice saying Mr. Marroquin Quintanilla was banned from re-entering the U.S. for 10 years, and sent an itinerary telling him to be on the flight from Dallas to San Salvador Thursday afternoon.
Mr. Isenberg, in a letter to Ms. Flores this week, pleaded for leniency in Mr. Marroquin Quintanilla’s and other cases that ICIE, Mr. Isenberg’s organization, is handling.
Mr. Isenberg, a real estate investor, funds his operations out of his own pocket — estimating he’s poured more than $500,000 into tough immigrant cases over the last few years.
But he’s also faced criticism for his efforts, including a searing rebuke written by an assistant chief immigration judge, who chastised Mr. Isenberg after he complained about another judge’s treatment of the uncle, Mr. Marroquin Diaz.
Thomas Y.K. Fong, the assistant chief judge in Los Angeles, told Mr. Isenberg he lacks a legal background and isn’t authorized to practice in front of a court, and should be careful about going too far.
“You have not established that you have the legal knowledge of the laws and procedures of the court to competently represent respondents,” Judge Fong wrote, saying he’d listened to the audio of Mr. Marroquin Diaz’s hearing and found Mr. Isenberg “disruptive” in the courtroom.
Mr. Isenberg bristled at the letter, and said he stands by his complaint that the judge ignored Mr. Marroquin Diaz’s valid claims that he would face violence for his political beliefs if sent back home. Mr. Isenberg also said the judge should have given more deference to the immigration officers who conducted the initial screening of Mr. Marroquin Diaz’s asylum claim and found he had a credible fear of returning home.
“It shows just how screwed up the system is,” Mr. Isenberg said. “You’ve got the experts in determining whether or not there is real fear based on the facts and everything else, and then the case gets thrown over to an immigration judge who has to figure out how credible the fear is, and that’s when it becomes ’Alice in Wonderland.’”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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