After 46 days in jail, Fanny Suazo has returned to her family in Honduras. Meanwhile, the Honduran government’s vice minister of foreign relations is looking into reports of incompetence at the Honduran Consulate on Jimmy Carter Boulevard in Norcross.
At about 2 a.m. on Monday, Dec. 22, Fanny was awakened by a guard at the Etowah County (Ala.) Jail and transported to an airport to await a federal flight reserved for immigration violation deportees. She arrived home around midnight.
“She was very happy to be home, to be with her family and to be free again,” says Yahir Cardona, Fanny’s American boyfriend. “She wanted to be with her family for Christmas, and she got that.”
The Sunday Paper published an account of Fanny’s arrest and incarceration in its Dec. 7 edition (“Saving Fanny: An Illegal Love Story”). The 21-year-old was an undocumented immigrant. She was coming home from her job as a nanny in Cobb County on Nov. 6 when she was stopped for speeding. 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 Jail in Alabama.
During her month-and-a-half-long incarceration, she lost almost 20 pounds and her hair began to fall out. Her childhood asthma also returned. The day after The Sunday Paper published this information in its Dec. 7 story, Fanny was given a physical at the jail. ICE says privacy laws prohibit sharing the results of the physical.
Fanny’s boyfriend 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.
They have been together for two years now.
“I saw her almost every day before she was arrested,” Yahir said in early December. “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.”
According to ICE, in 2007 the U.S. 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 cost American taxpayers almost $270 million last year. The Bush administration sent $47 million in foreign aid to Honduras for fiscal year 2007, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Immigration detainees have few options for assistance, but one traditional avenue is to call their country’s consulate. The consulate typically can’t intervene when they have been arrested for immigration violations, but it can advocate for detainees who are not treated decently behind bars, or need medical care or to get in touch with family members. The Sunday Paper called the Honduran Consulate more than two dozen times in a two-week period while working on the first story about Fanny, and got an answer only once—when a staffer picked up the phone to say the consulate was closed, and then hung up.
When The Sunday Paper visited the consulate on Jimmy Carter Boulevard in Norcross, this reporter witnessed the only apparent staffer intentionally ignoring the phone while it rang without ceasing. The staffer went so far as to take the phone off the hook in order to engage in a private cell phone conversation. After publishing an account of this in its Dec. 7 article, SP heard from other Hondurans who are in the United States legally who have suffered through many unanswered phone calls to the consulate as well as lengthy delays in paperwork processes.
As reported in a follow-up story on Dec. 14 (“Saving Fanny Update,” News & Views), Martin Altamirano led a protest against the Honduran consulate in August 2007, after the consulate promised to deliver a passport for his daughter in eight weeks and failed to do so—even though, he says, he paid more for the service than he believes was reasonable.
“Long story short, I waited for eight months and decided to protest,” says Altamirano. “That was when I found out how these functionaries are abusing my people.”
Altamirano told SP, as published in its Dec. 14 story, that he and others planned to demonstrate over their concerns in front of the Honduran Embassy in Washington, D.C.
“I have known people who were having problems with getting documents they needed, and they went to jail because they became undocumented,” Altamirano said in mid-December. “They needed the consulate’s help and the consulate left them alone.”
Less than a week after The Sunday Paper’s Dec. 14 follow-up story was published, Beatriz Valle Marichal, vice minister of foreign relations for the Honduran government, visited Atlanta to look into the performance of the Honduran consulate.
As reported by the Spanish language newspaper Atlanta Latino, Vice Minister Marichal was “investigating inefficiency, extra costs and wait times for documents at the consulate.”
Altamirano found Marichal’s visit reassuring and thanked The Sunday Paper for the role it played: “I told you that your article would help us, and it did.”
SP