Kidnapped by 'La Migra.' (U.S. Immigration and Naturalization forced deportations of undocumented children of legally-residing parents)

AuthorJohansen, Bruce E.

When Ambrosio Lopez, seventeen, and Augustin Antunez, fifteen, left home for Omaha's South High School last November 6, neither expected to end the day on an extended field trip engineered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Both teenagers lived with parents who had gained legal residence in the United States under the Federal Government's amnesty program, but their own petitions for residency had been denied. On that November day, agents of La Migra, as the INS is known in the Latino community, showed the principal of South High an arrest warrant and told him to order the two boys into his office.

Lopez was summoned from English class, where he had been practicing vocabulary, and Antunez was taken out of an art class. The agents then arrested both without telling their parents; three days later, they were deported--dumped across the Mexican border at Nogales without food, extra clothes, or money. The INS says it is just doing its job, but Latinos had other words for these deportations--such words as "kidnapping" and "child abuse."

In an editorial in his December issue, Ben Salazar, editor and publisher of the city's Nuestro Mundo, wrote, "Old King Cole, he has no soul." He was referring to Jim Cole, director of the INS regional office in Omaha, which oversees both Nebraska and Iowa. Cole has gained a reputation in the area for his uncompromising enforcement of immigration laws. On one occasion in the 1980s, agents raided Ak-sar-ben, Omaha's horse-racing track, and deported all fourteen of the track's horse groomers to Mexico or Guatemala. About a month before the two Omaha teenagers were seized, several hundred undocumented workers were taken from a meat-packing plant near Grand Island, about 150 miles west of Omaha.

Maria Lopez, a working mother and sole support of three sons, learned that her second oldest was being held for deportation through the community grapevine a day or two after he was arrested at school. Lopez, who was four months behind in her rent, was now faced with a large phone bill and the need to wire money to her son for food and lodging.

"I was told I should hire a lawyer," she says, "but with what money?"

Later, Omaha attorney Joseph Lopez-Wilson took up the cases of both boys in an attempt to reunite them with their families. Representatives of the INS said its bureaucracy would take from six months to a year to do that. In the meantime, Latinos in Omaha organized a letter-writing and media campaign to get...

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