Only dangerous criminals are being deported? Sure:
Relatives of 82-year-old Allentown resident Luis Leon are headed to a Guatemalan hospital Saturday in hopes of reuniting with the man they say disappeared without a trace into the American immigration system a month ago — and who, for a time, they thought was dead.
The last time anyone in the family saw Leon was June 20, when he went with his wife to a Philadelphia immigration office to have his lost green card replaced. There, the family says, he was handcuffed by two officers, who led him away without explanation. His wife, who speaks little English, was left behind and kept in the building for 10 hours until she was released to her granddaughter, the family says.
Repeated inquiries to immigration officials, prisons, hospitals and even a morgue yielded no information. Leon’s name was not in ICE’s online database of detainees. Finally, on Friday, a relative from Leon’s native Chile was told he had been taken first to a detention center in Minnesota and then to Guatemala. The hospital, citing privacy rules, would not verify his presence there when contacted by The Morning Call.
[…]
Leon was granted political asylum in 1987 after surviving torture at the hands of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime, according to his granddaughter, Nataly, who asked that her surname not be used because she fears U.S. government retribution against her and her relatives.
In Allentown, he lived a quiet life, raising four children and enjoying retirement after years working at a leather manufacturing plant. It all fell apart, Nataly said, when he lost the wallet holding his green card and made the fateful appointment to replace it at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office on 41st Street in Philadelphia.
The story gets worse. They got a call telling them that he had died, plunging the whole family into grief. But it wasn’t tue.
ICE refuses to answer any questions, of course. Because they don’t have to.
And then there was this, which is probably something that’s happening to other people as well:
The mystery surrounding Leon’s ordeal goes beyond ICE. Just days after his arrest, a woman claiming to be an immigration lawyer placed an unsolicited call to Leon’s wife and said she could help get Leon out on bail, but didn’t say where he was or how she learned about the case. It was this woman who called to tell his wife that Leon was dead. A week after communication from the purported lawyer ceased, the family finally received word that Leon had been in detention in Minnesota and then transferred to a hospital in Guatemala City.
I have no doubt that scam artists are all over the place taking advantage of these immigrant families. And why not? We are living in the age of the con man, led by criminals and liars. It just figures.