Hello, everybody. This is Carlos Batara and I'm broadcasting here from Immigration LIVE.
We have a special guest today. Today, we're going to discuss family separation.
What happens to the children of immigrants who are deported. It's a critical issue.
Last week, I discussed what happens when the family relocates.
This week, we're going to talk about what happens when the family is separated.
Our special guest today - our special guest today is Marguerita Jane Dentino
from Casa Freehold, a non-profit organization in New Jersey.
Maguerita, would you like to say hello to the audience?
Hello everybody and thank you so much, Carlos, for inviting us on the show.
We've been here in Freehold for 14 years when we began a unique struggle, well,
not so unique because it was happening all over the country but
basically it was a time when they wanted to get rid of the day laborers,
get rid of the immigrants here, but still have their labor as
happens often and that was how we came into existence.
How many years ago was that?
Fourteen years ago. We took this down to federal court, and we won.
And generally speaking, how do you raise funds? Is it just donations?
You get government grants? How does your organization sustain itself?
Well, we began in the streets, on the corners where day laborers gather,
and we're still there. But at a certain point, the day laborers
themselves voted to have a place with four walls, an indoor place,
and they voted to give one dollar every time they went to work.
That's about as grassroots as it gets. And that worked for a long time.
But now it's not enough and we do suffer to pay the rent every month
and maintain just certain expenses of phone and computer and those things.
And so, does that come out of like labor union dues?
No, even though our day laborers function in many ways like a labor union, they have their own list.
They make their own rules. Their rule is predominantly respect for one another.
They don't have dues.
We do have a membership, and people pay 35 dollars a year for their membership.
And it's a very participatory organization, so that does help some.
But again, it doesn't carry the expenses that we have now.
So what type of services does your organization provide?
Well, right now our community is afraid.
You know, they are probably living at a higher level of fear
than they have in my whole 14 years of doing this work.
So, we have a big thrust of keeping our community safe, of working on safety plans with our families.
Fourteen years ago, we were primarily men day laborers.
Now, we're men, women, and children which is partly come
because of the militarization of the border that people can't go back and forth like they used to.
Now what part of your percentage of your membership, the people you serve, are immigrants?
What percentage of people we serve? Pretty much 100%.
Okay, so that strikes me as interesting because
then a lot of them probably aren't members of labor unions or are they? Maybe I'm just . . .
No, they're actually with NDLON. We are members of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network.
We are members of the National Domestic Workers Alliance
and NDLON does have an agreement with the AFL-CIO to try to incorporate immigrant workers into the union,
and it's something that we have worked with them on for quite a while.
Its' progress at least in our area has been pretty limited.
And so - you work with families,
so about how many families that you work with would you say are immigrant families
where both mom and dad are immigrants versus immigrant families where one spouse,
either the husband or a wife, is a legal resident or U.S. citizen?
I would say probably at least 90-95 percent of our families have both spouses of immigrants.
We consider the families to be a kind of mixture though because if we take a family as a whole,
a whole extended family, some of them are legal residents, some of them are citizens,
and some of them are citizens of other countries.
Okay. And of the countries you serve, what countries are they from?
Are they from a variety of countries?
We serve all countries. And that was a decision even though out name is Casa Freehold, a Latino name,
the majority of our population we probably have a large degree of Mexican people,
Although in recent years there have been fewer people coming from Mexico
and more coming from Latin American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala,
Honduras, like that, we also have reaching people from European countries,
from Asian countries, from African countries.
We made a decision early on to receive everybody.
You know, I forgot to ask you an important question. Where is Freehold, New Jersey?
That's a good question. We are in Monmouth County in New Jersey.
Not far from the Jersey Shore, about 50 miles south of New York City.
So it you came from New York City on the bus, it would take you about one hour.
Now, that helps me a lot. When you say 50 miles from New York City
I get a little bearing on that.
And that's the big reference point for most of us on the West Coast.
So, before you joined or created – did you join or create Casa Freehold?
I did not create Casa Freehold. No.
I think it basically came out of what was happening in the community.
There was a mayor running unopposed for his 25th year on an anti-immigrant platform
who was going to shut down the ability to look for work, kick people out of their housing.
And so there were two organizations formed. One was Monmouth County Residents For Immigrants' Rights
and the other was The Day Laborers of Freehold.
Then we came together to form Casa Freehold. And so it was a large group of people.
Before that experience, had you worked with immigrants and immigrant families?
No. I would say no. Not in this capacity.
I mean, many years ago when I was in the eighth grade,
and I began working with Cuban people coming to this country because they trained us to teach English.
Okay but you know, I'd like to dive a little into the issue of family separation.
Now, if a large percentage of your families are where there are both immigrants
then that would seem to mean to me that they both can be deported.
Exactly.
Okay, so I would assume that in some cases they both get deported.
But talk to me first about a family where one parent has been deported and another parent has not.
And so the child or children has to live with one parent here. Have you experienced that situation?
We have experienced every variety of situation. We had a family come a few years back from Peru.
And they were very active in Casa Freehold, but they did not disclose to us their situation in immigration.
And in fact, they had come from Utah to here and in the bus station they had been given
an order to maintain contact with ICE.
But they thought somehow if they bought themselves to Freehold,
they would be able to kind of disappear here which is not true.
And so all of them were from Peru, not including the seven-year-old daughter.
So the child went to school, she is very outgoing and friendly.
She had many school friends. Everybody loved the family,
and then one day the father was waiting outside from the corner after work, and ICE came up
They went to the house. They took the mother.
And then I got a call saying the daughter, seven,
was in the school and would be coming home to an empty house.
Was the child thrown into the foster care system?
No, what they did is, you know, the mother desperately called us and she said,
"Please take care of child." And we did.
We got the child for school, and they put an ankle bracelet on the mother
and they let her come back with an order of removal and they put the father in detention
and they quickly deported him.
But they let the mother come back with an ankle bracelet but still with an order of removal.
Is that mother now in the United States with their child still or did she ultimately get removed?
Ultimately, they removed both the mother and the child.
That bracelet experience was a horrible one for the entire family. I think that's important to bring up to.
Well, you know there have been studies that show 5 million children,
there are 5 million children, with at least one parent that is undocumented,
under the age of 18.
And the studies have shown that about 79% of those children,
79% of those at risk children of losing a parent,
are U.S. citizen children and they are under age of 18.
So I did some quick math and basically,
it comes out to the fact that there are about 4 million U.S. citizen children under the age of 18,
living with at least one parent who is undocumented, that are at risk of losing their parent. Now . . .
They live with that every single day,
so not only is it the actual time of deportation,
it is the knowledge that at any moment their parent or parents might be gone.
And I think I have told you previously that we have met with all the guidance counselors
here in our county because they wondered what happened when a student was going along
doing well in school and then one day,
boom, it just fell off the chart and they were doing horribly.
And this is what is happening.
You know, a parent was being deported or was at risk for, you know, imminent deportation.
Does your organization prepare any emergency packets, any guardianship papers,
any prepare in-advance type of information to give the families that are at risk?
This is what we are urgently doing right now.
We've been doing it for a long time but right now, under the Trump administration
we are in a far more emergency situation,
so we do a kind of two-part workshop where we
do a "Know Your Rights" and we do "How To Make A Family Plan."
If I am a parent, which I am, I don't know if I am going be here tomorrow.
Every parent needs to do that to some extent, but this is different in the sense that
we're planning, one, if that parent is gone and, two, how do we reunite that family as quickly as possible.
Because if I have children 2 - 3 years old and I am gone
then I want them to be able to come back with my children as quickly as possible,
so we make that whole plan.
They go home and they make their plan.
They come back for the second part of this workshop and, yes, we have all those papers.
They are specifically approved by the State of New Jersey.
In each state, it's a little bit different, powers of attorney
and their own social services for children and those kinds of things, you know,
so we have it approved here under New Jersey.
So, would you say that the vast majority of children of these families know
ahead of time about their parents' situation?
I think, yes, I think the vast majority of the children know that
their parents do not have papers. And oftentimes,
the children themselves, there may be one of the children who was born out of the country.
There may be other children who were born in this country.
So, the children themselves can be a mix, too.
They are often are and the family themselves, they are aware of that.
How do you think it affects or do you know how it affects the children psychologically?
Does it affect their sense of self-worth?
Does it affect how their peers relate to them?
And I assume, based on what you already said that it affects their school performance.
What about their self-perception and self-worth and those types of issues?
I mean, that affects certainly their self-worth. The other factor which has grown tremendously
in recent days is the factor of bullying that Trump has put forward
such an agenda of hate, you know,
basically giving people permission to hate and children down to very young ages are recipients of this bullying.
We have here three different people who work in behavioural health
and who are bilingual people who worked with down
to very young children who come in very mistreated unfortunately in current days.
So, is there - the schools that the children
you work with, are those schools like mixed schools where a large percentage
are here documented, that they are legal, they are U.S. citizens
and then you have this other component that are undocumented,
that are here without papers and so there is a clash between the children or the social classes
or is that an issue?
I don't think it is an issue within the immigrant families themselves.
I think, you know, as far as having some of the children who were born here
and some of the children who were born out of the country in the immigrant families,
I think they consider themselves all equal.
Of course, in the eyes of the world, the situation is quite different, you know,
because the person with the papers or without papers, you know, their situation is very different.
I know you've been involved with a very intense situation lately
where you have gone to court. Would you like to share that to the audience?
Yes, I will. We are trying, you know, to hold up this picture to the right angle.
This is - Can you see this?
I can see it.
This is a family. A husband by name of Margarito
who is a father of three and a step father of three children.
ICE wanted to quickly deport him, and one of those six children has enormous disabilities.
So his lawyer and his family asked us to bring and support people and I think this is something
that organizations around the country are doing right now. If they see that, you know, that somebody is at risk
of imminent deportation, they accompany them to their check-ins,
they accompany them to them to court to show that there is a huge community behind that person,
and to try to have that have an impact on to court.
And so, because, you know, instead of deporting him,
his case has been accepted to move forward as an asylum case.
And so, when you work with families like that,
are there certain attorneys you assist, are you helping them on a pro per basis, a pro se basis?
Are there paralegals? How do you handle those situations from a legal perspective?
It varies as far as the legal perspective.
In the case of this gentleman, he has a lawyer, a very good lawyer,
and the lawyer and the family asked for our help.
We've had other situations where I had a boy who came up from Guatemala,
and then he was living with his uncle. His uncle threw him out into the street,
and he arrived here the day before his court.
And we accompanied him to the court with no lawyer and so it just depends on the situation.
Do you take an active role personally in those cases?
We do, I mean, of course, we differentiate very strongly that I am not a lawyer and we are not lawyers.
We work with the lawyers, you know.
There is an organization for example – Mujeres
- which works with the women who are victims of domestic violence and who work hand in hand.
We tend to work very closely with our team of lawyers whether it be work accidents
or whether it be families, or whatever it is.
Now, a while back, there was some indication that the Consulate of Mexico was going to be contributing,
I think, 50 thousand dollars to each locality, and do you have any experience with that?
Sadly, we had a kind of traumatic experience because the Consulate of Mexico was h
ere this past Tuesday evening.
The Mexican government put 50 million dollars for the defense and protection of its' people in this country.
So we raised the question about specifics, about what those services would be.
They proceeded to tell us that instead of the mobile consulates which have been here for 14 years
all around the different areas of New Jersey, they would be consolidating their program in one area of Passaic,
which is north of New York City, very inaccessible to people in Central Jersey
and there would be no more Mexican Consulate.
So I guess our response was, well, 50 million dollars, now there is less service instead of more. Why?
And what answer did they give you?
We have not received an answer yet except we
were just told that they would take our responses and review it in New York.
And we are having a state-wide meeting of all the people who are impacted by that
within next few days. So the next time I talk to you, hopefully we will know more.
And so was the anticipation that they would be soliciting grants from non-profit
and community-based organizations or what was the thinking originally when they said
they were going to be helping the localities defend undocumented immigrants?
Well, I mean, I guess our thinking was even though it sounds like a lot of money, 50 million dollars,
we knew that with 25 million Mexican people in this country,
it would come down to, maybe at the outside 1 ½ dollars per person.
So we knew the only way that could be effective would be to form strong teams,
which we were ready to do.
To form strong legal teams, counseling teams, and just work in tandem with them. But instead we feel cut off.
Now, how – we're coming to the limit on the time – how is the funding for your organization right now?
Is it strong? Is it weak?
Has the Trump administration being in charge in creating this fear, has it also affected the amount of
donors and donations and people willing to come forward to support the plight of undocumented immigrants?
I think people are, in one way with the Trump administration,
I think the level of awareness has grown about problems which you
and I know have actually have been around for a long time.
We know that more people than ever were deported under the Obama but we didn't have the volunteers
so I think you know, we do have a lot of people coming forward as volunteers and trying to help us fundraise.
That being said, we still struggle month by month by month to pay our rent and our basic bills.
And anybody would send things to our address which is 6 Morgan Street Freehold, at Casa Freehold.
Okay, so I guess you wouldn't mind if I make a pitch for donations for Casa Freehold.
There is a phone number that I know you can call to talk to Marguerita.
It's (732) 492-1852 and I strongly solicit anybody with a few extra dollars or a few extra hundred dollars
or even a few extra thousand dollars to give off for the good work that they are doing there in New Jersey.
May be miles away from California, but the battles are just as intense.
That I can say for certainly. Now, would you like to add anything to that in terms of the need of donations?
Thank you very much. We just now managed to pay the balance of July rent
and we see August rent looming up ahead.
And you know, it is hard.
We just want to put our energy to fighting for our people,
you know, and it is so hard if we have to put so much energy into saving money
to carry on in very basic ways. I receive no salary, nobody here receives any salary.
That is absolutely amazing! You do this on a volunteer basis. I am - whoaah! - That's amazing!
So, I am not saying that is necessarily a good thing. I'm just saying that is our situation right now.
But so basically we just need to carry our rent and basic expenses to continue to do our work.
You must have a very thin budget.
We do. We do. But to finish the budget, yes.
So, I'm assuming your budget includes that there has got to be some items for lunch
and some you know copy paper and all that. Correct?
Right. Yeah. Obviously, we have a wonderful IT volunteer,
a man who puts in literally hundreds of hours in maintaining
our computer setups just like we're on right now
which is necessary in this day and age and making sure my phone works
which is I have over 3000 contacts on my phone. So it is a hotline for many people.
Well, I want to thank you for coming on the air. And I want to let everyone know that on July 26,
11 o'clock, we are going to do a full broadcast with Casa Freehold and Marguerita.
We are going to discuss the issues that she brought up in more depth.
Obviously, there is a lot more here, and this only touches the surface,
so as I said earlier, Immigration Live is back.
This is the weekly mini version and we are going to be coming back with the full version
and I think that this is definitely a topic we want to explore more with Marguerita.
And with that, Marguerita, I want to say thank you very much.
I really appreciate you being brave to being my first guest under the return of Immigration Live.
And that you are really a brave person. You took the risk that I was going to pull this out, but anyway.
So, thank you, my pleasure.
With that, I want to say thank you.
Are there any parting words or wisdom that you would want to give to immigrant activists
or advocates or immigrants themselves before we close today?
Well, one of the things we discussed now, our country is way too divided in every way, shape, and form.
And our advice to people is every single day,
step outside your normal boundaries, do something, however small,
to extend those boundaries. Whether it is a smile at a stranger, anything, we all have to do that right now.
Or go to your nearest non-profit center and do what Marguerita is doing and donate some time, right?
Exactly. Exactly. I mean all those people that we had at court yesterday,
it was just amazing. Most of them were people who never would have done that before, so I am very proud of them.
Well, you are doing a great job there. I look forward to meeting up with you again in a couple of weeks here,
as we do it on a different platform, a different technology, but still here at Facebook Live.
Everyone will be able to catch it.
So tell your friends that, you know, one, Immigration Live is back and, two, please donate to Casa Freehold. Okay?
And come back and join us in our next broadcast.
Thank you very much, and I'll see you later. Bye. Bye.
Thank you.
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