About Myrna Dick

--click here to read articles about Myrna Dick--

When she was nine years old, Myrna Ochoa-Carrillo (now Myrna Dick) moved with her family to Dallas. This they did illegally. When an amnesty was declared in 1986, some two years later, Myrna’s many siblings seized the opportunity to be-come citizens. For some reason, Myrna, still a pre-teen, did not.

From there, Myrna descended into bureaucratic purgatory. She applied three times for permanent residence, and each time was told her file was still missing but not to worry that everything was in order. In 1998, Myrna went to Mexico to attend her grandmother’s funeral and, according to authorities, falsely claimed U.S. citizenship to get back in—a deportable offense. In the process, she was fingerprinted.

In November 2001, she married Brady Dick, now a voice engineer with Sprint. After her marriage she applied for permanent residency and again provided her fingerprints. It was not until April 2004, when she innocently went in to renew her work permit in Kansas City that immigration officials arrested her and held her for deportation.

As it happens, Myrna Dick had discovered that she was pregnant just days before she was detained. In a weird reversal of fortune, Judge Scott Wright, “a staunch supporter of abortion rights” even by the standards of The Star, declared the unborn Zachary a citizen and blocked his forced exile to Mexico. This move won the Dicks no new friends in the liberal community. Just the thought of the chant—“If you can’t deport, you can’t abort”—had to have been unnerving.

Once Zachary was born, however, Myrna Dick was no longer protected. To the degree that the media have come to her rescue it has been in Jonesian fashion, only slightly tempered: innocent victim versus heartless bureaucrats. “Myrna Dick didn’t look like a criminal Friday morning,” The Star tells us. “She’s a wife, mom, community volunteer and Sunday School teacher.”