One of the few Trump-era denaturalization cases that has received substantial press attention, that of Norma Borgoño, a 64-year-old secretary and grandmother who was naturalized in 2007, is also facing civil counts, with the same lower burden of proof. The case stems from an ICE investigation that is unrelated to Janus. Four years after becoming a citizen, she pleaded guilty to assisting her boss defraud a bank and cooperated in the investigation. In May 2018 she found herself facing denaturalization, following a probe by Homeland Security Investigations. The Office of Immigration Litigation claimed that Borgoño should have alerted U.S.C.I.S. to her role in the ongoing crime when she applied for citizenship — even though it’s plausible she may not have been aware, at that point, that she was participating in a crime.
“At this point you’d be disrupting an American family,” Leon Rodriguez, who served as the head of U.S.C.I.S. during the later part of the Obama administration, told me of cases like Borgoño’s and Dureland’s. “What do we gain as a society from that? Sessions will talk about sound principles of asylum, but, truly, what do we gain from doing this?”
Throughout Odette Dureland’s trial, her lawyer maintained her innocence. But she also argued that even if the jury believed Dureland had applied for asylum under a different name, it shouldn’t matter. Odette had become a citizen through her husband’s application, moving from asylee to green-card holder to citizen based on fully adjudicated claims. If Dureland became a citizen through a process that would be unproblematic were it not for this supposed “Alindor” application, why should that now affect her right to remain in the United States?
The jury was unconvinced. The government had shown evidence that Dureland has relatives named Alindor, and that various details on the Alindor application looked similar to those on the one she later filed. The jury found Dureland guilty of criminal naturalization fraud. “The integrity of our nation’s legal immigration system is paramount,” the acting director of U.S.C.I.S. in Tampa said in a press statement after the conviction. “This conviction sends a clear message that attempting to fraudulently obtain United States citizenship will not be tolerated. Our nation’s citizens deserve nothing less.” The judge sentenced Dureland to five months in prison. The conviction automatically led to Dureland’s losing her citizenship.
After serving her sentence, Immigration and Customs Enforcement moved her to a detention center in August, with plans to deport her. She spent a month there before Gilbert managed to scrape together $10,000 for bond. The couple has hired an immigration attorney, who says he will try to convince an immigration judge that she should be allowed, effectively, to start the immigration process again, to obtain a new green card as the wife of a citizen or the mother of a citizen in the military. But lawyers familiar with denaturalization cases say that because she has been convicted of a crime, it’s unlikely she’ll prevail. Without a judge’s approval, ICE will almost certainly deport her.
In September, I sat with Dureland and her family at their home. A bowl of star fruit, picked from the tree outside, sat on the table. Dureland held her head up with her hands, her elbows resting on the table. Her eyes were heavy. Less than two days before, she was released from federal immigration detention.“I didn’t know if I would come home again,” Dureland told me, standing beside her 15-year-old son, Gethro. She placed her hand on the top of her son’s head, which he rested on her shoulder. She liked to pretend, before she was locked up, that she and her youngest child were the same height, but he had grown in the six months that she was away; there was no more pretending. She laughed. But despite her easygoing demeanor with her son, Dureland was weary from her time in detention, and she told me she needed to nap. When I returned a few hours later, the house was filled with the smell of spices and cooked onions. It had been six months since Dureland had made a meal. “I missed my kitchen,” she said.
She sat back down at the table. “Detention was a scary place,” Dureland told me. “When I got there, everybody was being deported. And I was thinking, I have nobody in Haiti. If I were deported to Haiti, I would be by myself.”
Before she became a citizen, Dureland always knew that if something happened, if she were convicted of some crime, say, she could be deported. She lived a careful life. When she took the oath in 2012, that feeling — that it could be taken away — finally disappeared. “I became an American,” Dureland said. “I am an American.” But even as she said it, she knew it was no longer true.
from Just News Update https://ift.tt/2SkrSPa
0 Comments