Sunday, December 07, 2008
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Saving Fanny

An illegal love story

Yahir Cardona, 28, with a photo of his jailed sweetheart Fanny Suazo, 21.
Stephanie Ramage

“She’s a nanny. Does she really deserve to be in jail for this long?”—Yahir Cardona, Fanny’s American boyfriend

“Some stay for weeks, others are detained for months. If they appeal their deportation in the immigration court, it may be years.”—Barbara Gonzalez, ICE

By Stephanie Ramage

For the past two weeks, I have called the Honduran Consulate at least two dozen times. There was no answering machine or voicemail, only a forlorn ringing and, sometimes, a busy signal. I got an answer once, at exactly 4:27 p.m. on Dec. 1. I was startled by the "Hola?"
 “Is this the Honduran Consulate?” I stammered.

“Yes, but it’s closed,” an accented woman’s voice replied, just before hanging up.

Now, I am watching that very phone ring. The desk where it sits is exactly like the other two desks in the room, their surfaces free of paper or computers or any sign of work. I am alone except for a perfectly coiffed and impeccably made-up female staffer who ignores the phone. Her own cell phone’s hip-hop ringtone rends the air; she answers it in Spanish and chats for a bit. But the ringing office phone is clearly annoying her, so she puts down her cell phone, walks over to the office phone in front of me, takes it off the hook, and then returns to her cell phone conversation.

It occurs to me that one of the people calling the consulate might very well be Fanny Suazo, a 21 year-old Honduran nanny who is imprisoned in Etowah County, Ala. Fanny has lost 20 pounds in less than 30 days behind bars. She is losing her hair. And her family says that she has begun losing her breath as her incarceration has revived her childhood asthma.

Fanny is the reason I am here at the consulate in an office park on Jimmy Carter Boulevard, on a Tuesday afternoon in early December.

I have come to find out why she has not yet been deported, why tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants are incarcerated for weeks, months or even years, at a cost to the taxpayers of $99 per day. I have found an array of laws and exceptions to those laws; a crime-ridden, impoverished Third World country that relies on the United States for foreign aid money as well as for the money its citizens living in the U.S. send home; and, in the middle of it all, people like Fanny and her boyfriend, an American named Yahir Cardona, who has called the consulate nearly a hundred times, getting an answer only once.

When a genial looking man in a Bill Cosby sweater walks into the office, the staffer gets up and puts the phone’s receiver back on its base again. The man introduces himself as the husband of Consul Rosa de Pineda. When I ask him for his name, he says, “I am just lucky to be the consul’s husband, but I can answer your questions. I know, in general, how these things work.”

There is nothing, he says, that the consulate can do to help Hondurans arrested on immigration violations.

“Our only role is to make sure they are well-treated in prison and that they are allowed to make a phone call to their relatives in Honduras,” he says. The consulate also verifies the Honduran citizenship of detainees. “That happens about three days before they are deported. The Department of Homeland Security sends us a list of names—it’s all done automatically through a computer system—and we verify them and send it back so they can be deported.”

Each month, he says, DHS sends the consulate about 100 to 150 names to verify for deportation.

He does not explain how—in view of the staunchly ignored phone—the detainees would be able to get in touch with the consulate.

I ask him why no one answers it.

“We are very busy,” he says, motioning to the 10 people in the waiting room. He says there are only a few people working at the consulate, and that today is an exceptionally slow day. “Usually, there are 50 to 90 people waiting to be seen.”

Most are applying for temporary protective status, or a renewal of it, so that they can remain in the U.S. TPS is granted by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to people for whom returning to their country might be too dangerous. It is usually granted in cases where a country is in armed conflict or is devastated by a national disaster, like when Honduras was hit by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Fanny isn’t eligible for TPS because she never registered for it.

I ask him whether he has seen Fanny’s name on the list of deportees from DHS. He says that he will check. I write my cell phone number on my card and hand it to him, and he writes his cell number in my notebook. When I call it, I get a recording stating that his voicemail is full.

I never hear from him again.

Falling in love in Buckhead

Fanny was stopped for speeding while driving home from her job as a nanny in Cobb County on Nov. 6.  She paid an $800 fine for driving without a license and was held in custody at the Atlanta Detention Center.

On Nov. 8, Fanny called Yahir to tell him that she was being released. He drove to pick her up, but there was no sign of her in the waiting area. He asked for her and was told that she had been returned to custody because she was wanted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“They let me see her for five minutes,” he says. “I told her it was going to be OK, that I would do everything I could to help her.”

On Nov. 12, Fanny was transferred to ICE custody and incarcerated in the Etowah County, Ala. jail.

    Yahir, 28, is also an immigrant. He came to the U.S. 25 years ago with his grandmother as a refugee from Nicaragua's bloody civil war. He grew up in New York and went to school at Georgia State University, earning a degree in political science. But a friend thought he gave remarkably good financial advice and encouraged him to go to work at a bank. So he did. He became an American citizen three years ago. A year later, Fanny’s sister came into the bank and invited him over to her apartment for a get-together in an obvious matchmaking scheme. When he met Fanny, he says, there was no turning back.

He asked her what she would like to do for their first date. She said she wanted to see Buckhead.

“She had heard about it and wanted to know what all the excitement was about, so we went to Buckhead and, to be honest, all we did was drive around,” he says. “She couldn’t believe it, all the buildings, the people, everything. For someone from a Third World country, it’s kind of overwhelming.”

They have been together for two years now.

“I saw her almost every day before she was arrested,” he says. “To go from that to suddenly not having that person, to wake up every day and know she is not here, it’s a very lonely thing.”

Yahir goes to a Kroger on Buford Highway every night to put money on a pre-pay phone card the jail requires the inmates to have in order to make calls. He spends about $220 each week on Fanny’s phone card. She’s wearing it out, he says, because she’s worried that she will be forgotten in prison.

“She knows she broke the law. I know she broke the law, but there are people who have done worse who aren’t in jail as long as she has been,” he says. “She’s a nanny. Does she really deserve to be in jail this long? She just wants to get out of there. She says she just wants to go home to Honduras.”

According to ICE, in 2007 the United States deported more than 30,000 Hondurans. Barbara Gonzalez, spokeswoman for ICE’s Atlanta office, says there is no average length of detention for an undocumented immigrant.

“Some stay for weeks, others are detained for months,” she says. “If they appeal their deportation in the immigration court, it may be years.”

(Excluding a deportation appeal, the law allows detainees to be held for up to six months. So if there were a median length of stay and if the median were, for example, three months, then at $99 per day, Honduran incarcerations alone last year cost American taxpayers almost $270 million. The Bush Administration has requested $53 million in foreign aid for Honduras for fiscal year 2009 according to the Congressional Research Service.

CORRECTION: The print version of this story erroneously listed the cost to tax payers as almost $27 million.)

Fanny, says Gonzalez, has been in ICE custody for less than a month.

“That’s not very long.”

How she got here

Fanny’s sisters, who clean houses for a living, are also illegal. I go to meet them in a rundown apartment complex that crouches next to I-85. The apartment is small, but immaculately clean.

Fanny is the youngest of the three. Her oldest sister, who has asked to be identified only by the initial L., has lived in the U.S. for 10 years. The middle sister, P., came to the U.S. with Fanny in August 2005.

They had heard that they would have to put up assets to secure a legitimate visa to the U.S. (This, says U.S. State Department Spokesman Gordon Duguid, is patently false. There is a fee for a visa, which may vary according to country, but under no circumstances are aspiring immigrants required to put up any kind of collateral. “Human smugglers say this to drum up their illegal business,” he says.)

They had no property to offer. Besides, almost everyone in their family, with the exception of their mother, who is seriously ill with diabetes, had already come to the U.S. illegally. So they took all the money they had saved and scrounged, about $5,000—some of it from relatives already living in the U.S.— and gave it to a smuggler, or coyote, to bring them into the country. At first, P. says, the trip was easy. A van came to their house to pick them up. They travelled through Guatemala and Mexico, picking up people as they went. At the Rio Bravo del Norte, the river that Americans call the Rio Grande, they were told to get out of the van, put on life vests, jump in the river and hold onto a rope to get across. It had rained and the river, P. says, was swollen. She churns the air with her hands and says its current pulled her under.

Once across, the coyotes took them to San Antonio and dumped them outside town. Fanny was arrested almost immediately.

“She was hiding in some bushes,” says ICE’s Gonzalez, who, upon reviewing Fanny’s file, determines that she was given a court date and released on her own recognizance. “She was given an opportunity to contact her consulate and she didn’t do so. She signed a document saying that she understood that she had to go to court and that she knew what the ramifications would be if she did not show up, and she did not show up.”

After getting L. to wire them some money, Fanny and P. fled via Greyhound to Atlanta.

“Fanny was a fugitive,” Gonzalez says. “That is why Fanny is in detention.”

If Fanny had kept her court date and then voluntarily left the U.S., Gonzalez says, she could have come back legally later. Now, however, she won’t be allowed to reenter for perhaps 10 years.

According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services information, there are already more Hondurans in the United States than are legally allowed to immigrate under federal guidelines. Which means anyone who wants to immigrate legally is in for a lengthy wait.

According to the State Department, “crime is endemic in Honduras. … Poverty, gangs, and low apprehension and conviction rates of criminals contribute to a critical crime rate, including horrific acts of mass murder. With a total of 3,855 murders in 2007, and a population of approximately 7.3 million people, Honduras has one of the world’s highest per capita murder rates.” It is also one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere.

Yet that is where Fanny will be when at last her deportation, which Gonzalez says is imminent, is accomplished. And once she is there, Yahir says he will be close behind. He has vacation time in January. He doesn’t know how things will work out, but he knows that he has to be wherever she is. He’s looking toward the long-term.

“We’ll see how it goes,” he says. “A lot of people think I am crazy to be willing to give up my house and my job and everything I have here to go be with someone in a Third World country where I have no idea what will happen, but that’s a risk I’m prepared to take for her.
She’s worth it. I love her.” SP