Gael Pullen and her son, Angelo, welcome members of the community recently at McDonald's on Mariposa Road. Little did they know at that point, the new owners of the three Nogales franchises were in for a big surprise when community members stepped up to the bat to help them plan a cross-border fiesta.
By Manuel C. Coppola
"Anyone who takes part will not help but feel blessed and loved."
That's the reaction Gael Pullen anticipates the hordes of volunteers will have after Tuesday's mega cross-border charity event for 4,000 poor and orphaned children.
"Everybody involved in helping make this happen will also be on the receiving end," said Pullen, who along with her husband, Mark, and son, Angelo, took over the three McDonald's franchises in Nogales on Dec. 1.
The Fiesta De Los Santos Reyes "is an opportunity for the community of Ambos Nogales to partner together for a good cause (and demonstrate that) when it comes to children, there are no walls."
The Pullens plan to make this the "signature event" that will have their name on it in partnership with private and public sector and social services agencies.
About 2,000 children from Nogales, Sonora, and 2,000 children from Nogales, Ariz., will be the guests of honor.
The Canchola family, the former owners of the restaurants, annually hosted a Christmas Day celebration for children from Nogales, Sonora, sometimes drawing as many as 1,500 kids.
"We honor the 30-year Christmas day tradition and the legacy of ... Jose Canchola, by using this transition to touch the lives of children and to do it with our signature style: collaboration and partnership with others," Pullen said.
"We feel blessed and tremendously honored to be in a position to serve and to have McDonald's facilitate this amazing event. We lead by example and what better cause can there be than for our children?"
Ronald McDonald will greet children as they assemble at the Plaza De Las Banderas in Nogales, Sonora, and then are transported by bus to the McDonald's on Mariposa Road.
It couldn't happen without cooperation from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection immigration officials and Border Patrol, who restored hopes of making it an international event at the 11th hour.
When the Canchola family announced that their Christmas Day tradition had come to an end, the Pullens thought of hosting a party only for children from the U.S. side of the border.
Following a meet and greet for the community at the Mariposa restaurant, she was approached by Bonnie Arellano of CBP, who encouraged and helped get the ball rolling for the next chapter to what "Tio Canchola" began 30 years ago.
Pullen also credited Mayor Marco Antonio Martinez Dabdoub for helping coordinate the Mexico logistics with the Lion's Club and others.
The children are scheduled to be met by the Nogales Fire Department and receive backpacks filled with school supplies, toys, clothing and a Happy Meal.
Wells Fargo Bank is receiving and distributing donations of beans, rice and tortillas from area bank branches.
The event also will kick off a "literacy partnership" with Barnes & Noble, which Pullen said entails a reading hour in Spanish and English with national and international authors of books for children.
"By having the authors read their books to the children in the three McDonald's restaurants we hope to inspire them to be both readers and writers."
The event starts at 11 a.m. "until the last child is served at about 6 p.m.," she said.
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Posted on Thu, Dec. 27, 2007 By Robert Morris - The Sun News
In an opinion that illegal immigrants have equal rights to workers' compensation payments, the state Supreme Court has ruled that immigration status and federal laws "do not undermine or diminish in any way" labor protections to undocumented workers.
The ruling, released late last week, was in a workers' compensation case called "Curiel v. Environmental Management Services," involving a Mexican citizen who was working in Charleston using fraudulent documents. On a demolition job, an injury to Mario Curiel's right eye caused a detached retina and cost him most of his vision.
His employer, Environmental Management Services, argued that Curiel was not eligible for workers' compensation benefits because federal law prohibits hiring illegal immigrants.
Lower courts had ruled that the state's workers' compensation law explicitly includes illegal immigrants, "whether lawfully or unlawfully employed," a view upheld by the state Supreme Court after an October hearing in a ruling released Dec. 20.
"Disallowing benefits would mean unscrupulous employers could hire undocumented workers without the burden of insuring them, a consequence that would encourage rather than discourage the hiring of illegal workers," wrote Justice James Moore in the unanimous opinion, which also cited a 2002 N.C. case that established the same standard.
Myrtle Beach attorney David Canty, who has represented numerous local illegal workers in their claims, hailed the ruling as a definite standard on the issue. In the past, some employers' lawyers tried to argue Canty's undocumented clients were ineligible for compensation, he said.
Other reasons abound for providing workers' compensation payments to all workers, Canty said. If not, private workers' compensation insurance carriers would profit unfairly by taking employers' premiums for a class of employee ineligible to receive compensation.
Attorney Hubert Wood III of Charleston, who defended Environmental Management Services against Curiel's claim, said that the state workers' compensation law as it is written would have been difficult to overcome.
"That's going to be in the lap of the legislature," Wood said.
Wood's argument contained a more legally persuasive component, he said, based on the legal doctrine that if you hide a pre-existing handicap during hiring, then suffer an injury because of it, your employer is not responsible.
Because Curiel submitted fraudulent documents to gain employment, he was hired under false pretenses, Wood said, so Environmental Management Services should have been allowed to opt out of that contract when his illegal status came to light.
"If the employer is doing everything you're supposed to be doing and is the victim of an individual perpetrating fraud on you, in that situation the employer ought to be able to void the employment contract," Wood said.
The Supreme Court, however, ruled there was no connection between Curiel's fraud and his subsequent injury, so he was entitled to compensation.
Calling the ruling "terrible," Patricia Matthews, Horry County team leader of the Federal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Coalition, said injuries to illegal immigrants should be an additional opportunity to penalize employers who hire them. The workers should still receive the payment, she said, but employers should not be allowed to use private insurance carriers to pay their claims.
"If an illegal alien is hurt at a job, the employer should pay for it out of their own pocket," Matthews said. "I think everyone who hires them is a traitor."
The state General Assembly passed a workers' compensation reform package this year, but it did not address immigration status. Instead, it focused on measures to bring the costs of workers' compensation down.
Some sort of bill has been introduced in the legislature to bar workers' compensation for illegal immigrants nearly every year for at least a decade, Canty estimated, but that effort always dies in committee.
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FRAMINGHAM - A federal lawsuit that targets the Salvation Army for firing two Spanish-speaking workers here who did not learn English has touched off debate in Congress and fueled a tempest in the blogosphere.
But in Framingham, a town of 67,000 that has been transformed by immigration, the response to the controversy has been quieter and more complicated. In recent interviews, neighbors and supporters of the religious organization struggled to reconcile conflicting sympathies: for the immigrants who are widely credited with helping to revitalize the downtown area and for a respected charity that has helped countless local people.
Downtown, where the Salvation Army's yellow-brick headquarters dominates a busy intersection in a neighborhood of immigrant-owned businesses, a few residents defended the organization for requiring employees at its thrift store to speak English. But many criticized the firings, and some said they might reconsider their support for the charity.
"I feel bad, because this is a country that gives opportunity for anybody, and I know this is not the right thing to do," said Edson Marinho, the Brazilian-born owner of a meat market, Casa de Carnes, behind the Salvation Army. He said he learned English while cleaning houses and working in restaurants.
Last week, US Senator Lamar Alexander filed legislation that would protect employers who enforce English-only workplace rules. Made in the midst of an election-year furor over immigration, the Tennessee Republican's proposal was spurred by the discrimination lawsuit against the Framingham thrift store, filed in federal court in Boston in March by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The Salvation Army decided to enforce its language policy in 2004 and had directed all employees to learn basic English, according to the suit. The EEOC complaint on behalf of Dolores Escorbor and Maria del Carmen Perdomo says their firings in December 2005 were unlawful because there was no legitimate business reason for them to be required to speak English on the job.
Joseph Mastone, a car wash owner from Dedham who bought several novels at the thrift store last week, said he admired the charity's good works but was bothered by the strict language policy because his wife, an immigrant from Vietnam, is still learning English 15 years after coming to this country.
"It's nice to ask people to study English, but these people are [working long hours] to make a living," said Mastone, who, like most of those interviewed, learned of the lawsuit from a reporter.
Inside the Framingham store, where sweaters grouped by color hang in blocks of green, yellow, and lavender, workers sorting merchandise behind a thin-walled partition with swinging red doors could be heard speaking a mixture of Spanish and English.
Some customers said they understood the language requirement. Pausing on the store's front steps, Adriana Solorzano said she thought it would be helpful for the store to employ Spanish speakers, given the number of its customers who speak the language. But she also said the policy is not unreasonable.
Solorzano immigrated to the United States from Venezuela five years ago and now works as a Spanish teacher for adults and corporations.
Escorbor, a native of the Dominican Republic, and Perdomo, from El Salvador, began working at the store in 1999 and communicated mostly in Spanish. In 2004, according to the Salvation Army's response to the lawsuit, employees "were told . . . to obtain at least a working knowledge of spoken English," and were given more than a year to demonstrate progress. But the women did not learn English and continued to speak Spanish at work, according to the charity.
The problem with the firings, according to the employment commission's complaint, is that the women worked behind the scenes sorting clothes, and, therefore "learning English . . . was unrelated to the job they had been performing."
The Salvation Army denies that the women worked only as clothes sorters. Charity officials declined to speak to a reporter because the lawsuit is pending, but a statement said: "The Salvation Army continues to believe that there is no legal basis for the complaint filed by the EEOC . . . and we vigorously dispute any suggestion that we have violated the law."
The lawsuit raised the ire of Alexander, who first tried to attach an amendment to a funding bill to block such suits. The measure provoked strong opposition from Hispanic members of Congress, who called it dangerous and discriminatory. Alexander then filed it separately, as the Protecting English in the Workplace Act, which will be referred to a committee for study.
"Our greatest accomplishment as a country has been uniting our magnificent diversity, and one way we have done that is by all speaking a common language, English," Alexander said in a statement.
The dispute captured the attention of conservative bloggers and illegal immigration foes, who have tried to rally support for the legislation. "Tell Congress to rein in this ROGUE agency and PROTECT English as the common, unifying language of our nation!" urged the website for a nonprofit group called ProEnglish that aims to make English the official language of the United States.
David Grinberg, a spokesman for the EEOC, said federal law allows English-only rules when there is a "business reason" for them to exist, such as employees interacting with customers or using dangerous equipment. He said a tiny number of the allegations brought to the agency concern such rules - 125 out of about 75,000 last year - and even fewer result in lawsuits. The commission filed two such suits this year, he said.
"Most employers do the right thing," he said.
Practices that have led to lawsuits have included bans on employees speaking other languages on breaks, on personal phone calls, and on the street outside the workplace, he said.
The lawsuit against the Salvation Army seeks back pay for the two workers and compensation for other losses, including health insurance, and for emotional suffering. Attempts to reach Escorbor and Perdomo were unsuccessful.
Outside the Wal-Mart on Route 9 in Framingham last week, Salvation Army bell-ringer Lillian Bailey said she would support the English-only policy even if she didn't work for the charity.
"This is the United States, and English should be the first language," she said.
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MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico plans to use cards with electronic chips to better track the movements of Central Americans who regularly cross the southern border to work or visit.
Starting in March, the National Immigration Institute will distribute the cards to record the arrival and departure of so-called temporary workers and visitors. They will replace a non-electronic pass formerly given to foriegners who cross into Mexico, which has proven "easily alterable and subject to the discretion of migration agents," the institute said Thursday.
The U.S. government has spent tens of millions of dollars issuing similar visa cards digitally embedded with the holder's photo and fingerprints, but U.S. border inspectors almost never check them, and vehicle lanes are not equipped with the necessary scanners to read them, The Associated Press reported earlier this year.
Mexico detained more than 182,000 undocumented migrants in 2006, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador en route to the United States. But many others cross legally from Guatemala and Belize to work or visit, and the new cards are meant to guarantee their security, the institute said.
Left behind: Amid immigration debate, children often are forgotten
LATAM LETTER Dec-28-2007 By Barbara J. Fraser Catholic News Service
LIMA, Peru (CNS) -- Talking with neighbors in a small town in Ecuador one morning, Susana Nicoladi recalled a friend who immigrated into Spain while her husband stayed home with their children. He had an affair, she said, "and lost the children's respect."
One of her neighbors was raising a rebellious nephew, the son of her sister who was working as a maid in Spain.
Some 3,000 miles away, in Connecticut, an Ecuadorean mother of 10 children reminisced about her family. Her youngest child was only 2 when she left for the United States, where she works as a housekeeper in a motel.
"She is 8 now, and she doesn't know me," the woman said sadly.
Amid the political debate over immigration, the children are forgotten too easily. But they are often the ones most affected as long separations tear families apart.
"We need to pay more attention to the kids who are left behind," said Mary DeLorey, a strategic issues adviser for Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' international relief and development agency.
More and more children in Central America are being raised by people other than their parents, DeLorey told Catholic News Service. Those who are raised by extended families miss direct contact with their parents, she said, while those who are left with neighbors may end up on the street or in gangs.
Meanwhile, skills that were once passed from parents to children are getting lost. In Ecuador, some organizations have begun targeting emigrants' children for technical training, partly to fill gaps in communities that have been left without skilled tradespeople, and partly to help youths learn an income-producing trade.
"It isn't just that emigrants are leaving, but their skills and the skills that they (would have passed) to their children are going with them," DeLorey said.
There was a time when some parents, especially those from countries relatively near the U.S. border, would go home periodically to visit their children. Crackdowns on undocumented immigrants have made that difficult, however, and more parents are sending for their children.
The result is a surge in the number of unaccompanied minors making the dangerous trek from Central or South America with smugglers, risking robbery, accidents and rape. Some run out of money along the way and are forced into prostitution. And, like adults, some simply vanish altogether.
Because the youngsters travel in groups with adults, although those people are unrelated to them, officials often ignore the fact that they are actually unaccompanied minors, DeLorey said.
"It's a way of undermining protections (for children) that are legally binding or at least in principle understood to exist," she said.
Parents sometimes send for very young children, DeLorey said, and "there have been some notorious cases of busloads of children being transported" to the U.S.-Mexican border. Sometimes the family must borrow money to pay the smugglers.
If the child is stopped by immigration officials, "the family incurs a massive debt," and the child feels a double sense of failure -- for not making it across the border and because the family is now worse off economically than it was before, she said.
Some unaccompanied minors are older youths who are running away or seeking employment, but many are young adolescents, around age 13 or 14, DeLorey said. Organizations working with migrants report extremely high rates of sexual violence against girls along migration routes.
Many children traveling alone are detained at the border or along the route. A delegation of U.S. bishops investigating the problems of migrant children in 2006 found that some facilities resembled foster care, while others were more like juvenile detention centers.
Boys who are detained generally are separated from adult men, but girls are often held with women. As a result, DeLorey said, "their special needs are not met" and statistics are unreliable.
If a child is detained in the United States and no relative comes forward, the child usually is deported on a flight home. Those caught before crossing the border, however, are sent home on a bus -- a dangerous journey in reverse. The bus sometimes travels only to the Mexican-Guatemalan border, stranding the children there with no means of returning home, DeLorey said.
In their report on migrant and trafficked children in October 2006, the U.S. bishops wrote, "Regardless of their reasons for migrating, unaccompanied alien children are highly vulnerable and need specialized support and guidance."
Immigration policy must take the needs of unaccompanied migrant children into account, DeLorey said. Better family reunification policies would also help protect children from the high risks of traveling with smugglers.
"Much U.S. migration policy has historically been based on family reunification, and there are massive backlogs," she said. "Mexicans wait eight to 10 years to reunite when they have a legal right to reunite with their immediate family members."
As a result, she said, "Children pass their entire childhood without their parents."
The U.S. bishops and other advocates are pushing for bilateral agreements between countries on how to transport children who are being deported. The Regional Conference on Migration -- which includes 10 countries between Panama and Canada, as well as the Dominican Republic -- has developed a protocol on the return of migrant and trafficked children, "though it is not always implemented well," DeLorey said.
But a comprehensive solution also must address the root problem in the migrants' home countries, where adolescents have few options for education and employment.
"This is a time bomb," DeLorey said. "Individuals are making survival decisions about a chance to have a future, and it is going to be the younger folks who take these risks."
2007 Catholic News Service/USCCB. CNS · 3211 Fourth St NE · Washington DC 20017 · 202.541.3250
Iowa has a fast growing illegal alien population of at least 55,000 persons, and the fiscal burden on Iowans resulting from services provided to that population are similarly growing rapidly. Comparing this number with the federal government estimate of 24,000 illegal immigrants in 2000 suggests that the illegal resident alien population has grown by roughly 31,000 persons — an increase of 130 percent — over the past seven years. A comparison of the entire foreign-born population residing in Iowa in the 2000 Census — including legal and illegal immigrants and some long-term nonimmigrants, such as foreign students — with the estimated size of that foreign-born population in 2006 also shows an increase of about 31,000 people. This suggests that virtually all of the increase in the foreign-born population in Iowa since 2000 has been by illegal residents.
This rapid rise in the illegal alien population in Iowa since 2000 has coincided with the implementation of a program termed the New Iowans Project. The New Iowans centers are still operating in the state.
FAIR estimates that the annual fiscal burden on Iowa taxpayers today from illegal immigration is at least $241 million. That equates to an annual cost of about $172 per native-born headed Iowa household after accounting for taxes collected from illegal workers.
This study takes into account the findings of a report prepared by Iowa’s Legislative Services Agency (LSA) in February 2007 and by the Iowa Policy Project (IPP) in response to the LSA report. Our estimates, based on a different methodology, reveal a greater fiscal burden than reported in either of those studies. Even without accounting for all areas in which costs associated with illegal immigration are being incurred by Iowa taxpayers, the program areas analyzed in this study indicate that the burden is substantial. The nearly one-quarter billion dollar costs incurred by Iowa taxpayers annually result from outlays in the following areas:
Education. Based on an estimate of 8,645 school-age illegal aliens and 12,100 U.S.-born children of illegal aliens in Iowa and estimated per pupil costs of $8,450 per year for public K-12 schooling, Iowans spend about $175.3 million annually on education for the children of illegal immigrants. An additional estimated $13 million is being spent annually on programs for limited English students who are likely children of illegal aliens. More than four percent of the K-12 public school students in Iowa are children of illegal aliens, and this share has been increasing as the illegal resident population increases and the overall public school enrollment has decreased slightly
Health care. State-funded uncompensated medical outlays for health care provided to Iowa’s illegal alien population amount to an estimated $48.3 million a year. This estimate does not include higher medical bills and insurance costs that Iowans who have medical insurance pay to cover the costs of those without insurance.
Incarceration. The uncompensated cost of incarcerating deportable illegal aliens in Iowa’s state and local prisons amounts to nearly $4.9 million a year. This estimate excludes compensation from the federal government, short-term detention costs, related law enforcement and judicial expenditures, as well as the monetary costs of the crimes that led to incarceration.
By MARISA TREVINO Hispanic Link Friday, December 28, 2007
There was nothing extraordinary about the news footage showing a neatly dressed female reporter, umbrella in one hand, microphone in the other, calmly standing between the open car door and the unseen driver behind the wheel in the middle of a sporting goods store parking lot.
In fact, if the sound had been muted, you would have wondered what was so newsworthy about it. There was no mad chase or a microphone thrust in a face or even the subject trying to slam the door shut to get away from the reporter.
The reporter was just doing her job: asking hard questions of a man who, in separate incidents in the span of just three weeks, had killed two people who were burglarizing his machine shop and welding business, which also happened to be his home.
The reason why the reporter was questioning the man now was because he had called her to tell her that he was buying a new gun to replace the one the police took away from him after he killed the second intruder.
Because of that infamous interview, the reporter, a 26-year, award-winning industry veteran, received an indefinite suspension from her station.
What was the big deal?
The big deal was that the man was 70 years old.
The old showbiz adage: Never work with animals and small children evidently extends to senior citizens, too. That's the only rational explanation for the initial torrent of public hostility that rained down on Dallas-based, Fox News affiliate reporter, my friend Rebecca Aguilar.
Dallas viewers, bloggers and media critics swarmed in vilifying Aguilar for the interview when it first aired. They have taken her questions out of context to paint her as a cold-hearted journalist.
They have been especially quick to focus criticism on Aguilar for asking this two-time shooter: "Are you a trigger-happy kind of person? Is that what you wanted to do, shoot to kill?"
They conveniently disregard how she balanced her hard line of questioning by following it with the sympathetic: "So basically you were scared for your life?"
The last thing Aguilar expected after such a routine interview was that her professional career would be at risk
It has been more than two months since Aguilar was suspended from KDFW TV. At first, only Aguilar was disciplined but when red flags were thrown by her supporters as to why she was singled out from a team of superiors who authorized the story for broadcast, other reprimands were dished out -- two weeks later. The managing editor for that segment received a 3-day suspension, while the editor was suspended for two days and the cameraman got a write-up that went into his file. They all went back to work, or never left, except Aguilar.
The question needs to be asked. Why?
Media analysts, fellow industry colleagues and even the online site of the eminent journalism school, the Poynter Institute, have all chimed in with their analyses of Aguilar's interview and their disbelief at her station's extreme disciplinary measure.
All agree that the interview was "very even-handed," and she treated the subject with "respect."
In a Poynter Online interview with Forrest Carr, news director at WFTX-TV in Cape Coral, Fla., and a 2002 Poynter Ethics Fellow, said, "My thoughts are that her conduct toward the shooter was not as her critics described it. Her words were polite. Her demeanor was professional. Her questions, which set off the critics, were for the most part appropriate."
So, why all this continued hostility?
It might have something to do with the fact that the shooter is white.
A quick scan of the latest comments and blog entries show that what started out as the public's knee-**** reaction to a routine story that had a sympathetic perpetrator has evolved into the latest example of a backlash against Hispanics stemming from the emotional immigration debate gripping the country.
Comments such as, "They should check this Mexican reporter's green card. She is most certain an illegal." or "I say send this guy down to our border to help out with national security. Maybe if he was there we wouldn't have to put up with unbelievable people like Rebecca Aguilar," are indicative of what is transpiring in this country and fueling a story that ceased being newsworthy a long time ago.
It's one thing for Aguilar's station to listen and respond to its viewers' wishes, but her continued suspension only endorses a racially charged extremist viewpoint and trivializes the career of an individual who was honored just last year as the National Association of Hispanic Journalists' "Broadcast Journalist of the Year."
At this writing, both sides have hired lawyers.
In the meantime, Aguilar is left to wonder what she did so wrong in this one interview, singled out from the thousands she conducted throughout her career, that has jeopardized her professional future.
It's a thought on the minds of a lot of us.
(Marisa Trevino, of Rowlett, Texas, is a contributing columnist with Hispanic Link News Service. She publishes the site LatinaLista. (www.latinalista.net). Contact her at mtrevino(at)airmail.net.)
Boy's kidnappers promise revenge if family cooperates with authorities, mom says
Wow gotta love those family values . . they just keep doing the jobs Americans won't do
By JAMES PINKERTON Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle
Human traffickers are threatening family members of a Houston boy who was kidnapped in an apparent Christmas Eve dispute over $4,000 owed for smuggling his sister from Mexico, the boy's mother said.
Francisca Torres, 37, said Wednesday she has received three calls at her home from smugglers since her son Luis Antonio Gonza***, 14, was freed by authorities in Austin and returned to Houston late Christmas Day.
''They don't want money. They are telling me to retract my statement, to say it was a mistake, a misunderstanding," Torres said. ''It's a big organization they have, and they could hurt us here and in Mexico."
During the calls, she said the smugglers threatened relatives in Houston and Mexico with harm if they continued to cooperate with authorities.
Torres also said smugglers mentioned the location of her youngest daughter, who is expecting a baby and lives in Mexico.
One of the men who held her son told him they were connected to the feared Zetas, a group of Mexican military defectors who are assassins and enforcers for the Gulf Cartel drug trafficking ring.
''We are afraid — afraid of the smugglers and afraid of the immigration authorities," said Torres, acknowledging they could be deported because they are illegal immigrants.
And at their modest home on Wednesday, the family seemed to be on edge. Every time a car would stop along the street outside, either Luis or his younger brother would peer out from the curtains.
A spokeswoman with Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not comment on the threats or whether the family faces deportation, citing the early stage of a ''fluid" investigation.
''Agents are trying to see which story matches what actually happened," said Nina Pruneda, a spokeswoman with ICE in San Antonio. "We're trying to get down to the nuts and bolts of what happened."
Kidnapping charges Harris County deputies have filed kidnapping charges against Santos Vasquez, 37, who they identified as the suspect who abducted the teenager from a gasoline station at U.S. 290 and Becker on Christmas Eve. Vasquez was transferred from a San Marcos jail to the Harris County Jail on Wednesday.
Sgt. Dennis Field, a homicide detective with the Harris County Sheriff's Office, said it was not clear whether the family will be subject to deportation or allowed to remain in the country as material witnesses.
''We do need them as witnesses in the case against Santos Vasquez," he said.
Clients of human trafficking rings who are held captive to perform work or to repay smuggling fees can apply for special federal T visas for victims of extreme trafficking.
Pruneda said it was too early to comment on a trafficking visa.
''Right now we're happy the family was reunited, and the boy was found to be in good health," Pruneda said. ''With respect to their immigration status, that is yet to be determined."
Field said local officials ''seldom get these cases" because the victims are reluctant to report them because of their immigration status.
However, he said, ''It's not uncommon for (smugglers) to set a price originally, and then they raise the price once they have the person in the country."
Their fee had risen Francisca Torres explained that she, her brother and her son met Vasquez late Monday afternoon at a north Houston gas station as he delivered her 20-year-old daughter and a grandchild. The two had been smuggled across the Rio Grande and brought to Houston over the weekend.
However, Torres said, smugglers informed her their $2,800 fee had risen to $4,000. But Torres said she had only $900. A last-minute loan she arranged to cover the difference fell through.
Torres said Vasquez agreed to accept the titles to a pair of family vehicles until they could get money when banks opened Wednesday. Her daughter and granddaughter left in her brother's car, and she and Luis went with Vasquez, Torres said.
However, Torres said, Vasquez changed his mind and decided not to take them to get the car titles. She asked him to stop at a second gas station to use the bathroom, and when she came out, he had left with her son. The clerk at the gas station phoned authorities, Torres said.
Eighth-grader's ordeal
Austin police, along with Harris County sheriff's deputies and Texas Rangers, freed the 14-year-old at an Austin apartment after detectives contacted Vasquez by cell phone.
''It was 24 hours of being worried, not so much fear, but worry about my family," Luis, an eighth-grader, said about his ordeal.
Four men were taken into custody in or near the southeast Austin apartment, including Jamie Segura Ramos, 42, who fled the apartment as police arrived. Pruneda said Segura, a native of Mexico, has been charged with illegal re-entry after being deported by ICE in May 2006.
The other three men had no knowledge of the kidnapping, officials said. ICE officials have filed immigration charges of illegal entry against those three. The trio was living in the apartment and told Luis that they were being forced to live there while they worked off smuggling fees.
Chris Hawley Republic Mexico City Bureau Dec. 27, 2007 12:00 AM
MEXICO CITY - Biologist Karen Krebbs used to study bats in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on the Arizona-Mexico border. Then, she got tired of dodging drug smugglers all night.
"I use night-vision goggles, and you could see them very clearly" - caravans of men with guns and huge backpacks full of drugs, trudging through the desert, Krebbs said. After her 10th or 11th time hiding in bushes and behind rocks, she abandoned her research.
"I'm just not willing to risk my neck anymore," she said.
Across the southwestern U.S. border and in northern Mexico, scientists such as Krebbs say their work is increasingly threatened by smugglers as tighter border security pushes trafficking into the most remote areas where botanists, zoologists and geologists do their research.
"In the last year, it's gotten much worse," said Jack Childs, who uses infrared cameras to study endangered jaguars in eastern Arizona. He loses one or two of the cameras every month to smugglers.
Scientists, especially those working on the Mexican side of the border, have long shared the wilderness with marijuana growers and immigrants trying to enter the United States illegally. But tension is rising because of crackdowns on smugglers by the Mexican military, increased vigilance in the Caribbean Sea, new border fences, air patrols, a buildup of U.S. Border Patrol agents and a turf war between cartels.
Smugglers are increasingly jealous of their smuggling routes and less tolerant of scientists poking around, researchers say.
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument stopped granting most new research permits in January because of increasing smuggling activity. Scientists must sign a statement acknowledging that the National Park Service cannot guarantee their safety from "potentially dangerous persons entering the park from Mexico."
"It's a kind of arms race, and biologists are stuck in the middle," said Jim Malusa, who specializes in mapping desert vegetation. "There's been a chilling effect on researchers."
Higher stakes Scientists say things have gotten more uncomfortable since 2001, when the United States began fortifying its border after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In 2006, the Border Patrol embarked on a hiring spree, with plans to raise its personnel from 12,000 to 18,000 by the end of 2008.
Smugglers have responded with violence. Assaults on Border Patrol agents are occurring at a record pace, with 250 attacks reported from Oct. 1 to Dec. 16, an increase of 38 percent over 2006.
"It's a war zone out there," said Mickey Reed, a research technician at the University of Arizona's School of Natural Resources.
As crossing the border gets more difficult, the fees that smugglers charge to guide illegal immigrants through the desert has doubled in recent years, to as much as $3,000 per person, migrants say. At the same time, Mexico has been stepping up highway checkpoints and port inspections, forcing drug smugglers into the wilderness and onto remote beaches.
To avoid the checkpoints, Mexican drug cartels are moving their marijuana farms northward, from traditional growing areas in Michoacan, Nayarit and Guerrero states to more remote areas in Sonora and Sinaloa states, according to the U.S. government's 2008 National Drug Threat Assessment.
Marijuana smugglers, whose cargo is smellier and bulkier than cocaine, are increasingly abandoning the urban border ports of Texas and California in favor of the Arizona-Sonora corridor, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says. U.S. authorities seized 616,534 pounds of marijuana in the Tucson Sector alone in 2006, up from 233,807 pounds in 2001.
Smugglers also are increasingly relying on boats moving through the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. Coast Guard said this month. The Coast Guard seized a record 356,000 pounds of cocaine this year, most of it in the Pacific.
Scientists, who once had the ocean and desert all to themselves, say they are increasingly rubbing elbows with bad guys.
"They used to take the easier routes through washes and old river beds, but now, they're moving into the rougher country," said Randy Gimblett, a University of Arizona professor who studies human impacts on ecology. "There's a lot at stake because there's a lot of money tied up in drugs. We're not confronting those folks, but we're seeing more of that activity."
Close calls There are no statistics on attacks or threats against scientists, said Mark Frankel, director of the scientific-freedom program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But among researchers, drug stories abound.
Michael Wilson, a botanist and director of research at the Drylands Institute in Tucson, said he avoids some parts of Mexico's Sonora state since seeing opium poppies, which are not native to Mexico, and mules carrying loads of marijuana down from the mountains. Opium resin is used to make heroin.
Wilson said he has noticed an increase of marijuana cultivation in recent years and more people watching over the fields. Some of his colleagues now carry guns, he said.
"There are a lot of researchers who have ducked out of doing research in Mexico," Wilson said.
David Yetman, a social scientist and host of the PBS series The Desert Speaks, said he had to stand in a marijuana field in eastern Sonora to get pictures during the filming of a 2004 segment on rural liquor-making. He hired off-duty policemen with automatic weapons to protect his film crew during a piece in southern Sonora, an area known for drug trafficking.
Richard Felger, another botanist, said he stays away from remote mountains in Sonora since being robbed and threatened on research trips.
"I got kind of allergic to pistols being held to my forehead," Felger said.
Gimblett, who relies on buried pressure sensors for his research on park users, said smugglers routinely cut his cables. Childs has tried leaving notes and pictures of saints - even Jesús Malverde, the unofficial saint of drug traffickers - to try to persuade smugglers to spare his jaguar cameras, but to no avail. Each camera costs $450.
Holes in research The paranoia among drug smugglers is creating serious gaps in scientific knowledge, researchers complain.
"The most serious problem is when you have to visit a specific place in the countryside, places of geological interest," he said. "(Residents) will say, 'You can go to A, B and C place, but not D.' And it turns out that's the place that interests you most."
Childs says he loses one or two months' worth of pictures every time a jaguar camera is destroyed.
He also is unable to put cameras on the Mexican side of the border because of opposition from property owners who are fearful of, or perhaps cooperating with, the smugglers. That has made it harder to answer a key question: whether endangered jaguars are repopulating the United States or simply wandering over occasionally from Mexico.
Krebbs hasn't been out to study the endangered lesser long-nose bats at Organ Pipe in two years. Dean Hendrickson, an ichthyologist at the University of Texas, says avoiding marijuana and poppy fields has set back his efforts to study mysterious species of Mexican trout in Chihuahua state.
"It's going to be hard to do that without comprehensive sampling, and this sort of stuff definitely puts holes in our sampling," Hendrickson said. "There's no doubt: The drug stuff is definitely affecting research."
Congress' inaction on illegal immigration has led states and even cities to try to take matters into their own hands. But many of these unproductive measures have resulted in a confusing mess for employers, new costs of enforcement for taxpaye
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