Articles About Myrna DickSupreme Court declines to intervene, so a Raymore woman will return to Mexico.
By JAMES HART
“God bless you guys. I’ll see you soon.”
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday refused to block a Raymore woman’s
deportation from the United States to Mexico. U.S. Supreme Court denies stay of deportation for Kansas City-area mother
GARANCE BURKE KANSAS CITY, Mo. - The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a suburban Kansas City mother's request to postpone her deportation order, a penalty she faces because courts found she lied about her citizenship years ago when she crossed the border illegally from Mexico, her lawyers said Friday. Myrna Dick, 32, is married to an American citizen, and her 19-month-old son was born in the Kansas City area. Dick, who speaks fluent English, was raised in Chihuahua, Mexico, but spent the last two decades in the United States. Justice Samuel Alito denied the motion for a stay of deportation Friday evening, immediately following the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal's rejection of the same request, said Dick's attorney, Michael Sharma-Crawford. While the high court is still weighing whether to rehear Dick's case, an eventual ruling in her favor still wouldn't necessarily mean the immigrant mother could return to the U.S., Sharma-Crawford said. "I'm very disillusioned," Dick said in a telephone interview from San Diego, where she is preparing to leave the country Saturday. "I'm not going to give up, but I just hope that people who have heard the tragedy of our lives will keep on struggling so that immigration laws benefit the many, many families who are in a situation like ours." The family's case drew national attention in 2004, when Dick, then three months pregnant, was first ordered to leave the country. False claim to citizenship, the charge she faced, carries a penalty of a permanent ban from the U.S. A federal judge in Missouri made the unusual decision to stave off Dick's deportation because he said her fetus essentially was an American citizen. Earlier this week, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency's case against Dick had not changed and that the government's position was supported by numerous courts. "Our job is to enforce immigration law, and that's what we're doing in this case, and hopefully restoring some integrity to the immigration system," agency spokesman Carl Rusnok said Wednesday. Dick and her husband, a voice engineer for Sprint Inc., believed they would raise Zachary, their toddler, on a cul-de-sac in Raymore, Mo. But Friday, Dick said the family was preparing to drive across the border Saturday to resettle with family friends in Tijuana.
"Congress doesn't care about what kind of future Zachary will have,"
she said. "Immigration reform won't work unless they make laws that
satisfy American families, because not everyone is going to want to
move to Tijuana." The amendment would create a new legal step to require the government to give an additional review to cases involving American children whose parents entered the U.S. without proper documentation. "We are still looking to attach it to the immigration bill whenever that comes up, but it also could take a long time," said Danny Rotert, a spokesman for Cleaver. Even if the measure passed, her lawyers said they did not know whether it would apply to Dick's case. "I just don't have words to describe the feelings," Sharma-Crawford said. "It sucks." COMMENTARY Laws need a touch of compassion
Mike Hendricks Whether it would be wise to station troops on the border, don’t ask me. But President Bush is right to want to “fix the problems caused by illegal immigration and … deliver a system that is secure, orderly and fair.” After all, who isn’t for fairness? Only how about sending some fairness Myrna Dick’s way, too? She’s to be deported next month. And even if Congress goes along with Mr. Bush’s humane plan to stem the tide of undocumented immigration, people like Myrna Dick will continue to contend with an immigration system that is not only unfair but is heartless. If you know Myrna Dick’s story, then you know she didn’t jump a fence in the middle of the night so she could take your job. She was a child when her parents brought her to this country. She grew up in America and went on to marry an American.
She and husband Brady live in all-American Raymore with their
American-born son, 18-month-old Zachary. All it looks at is the law. And the law has zero tolerance for anyone accused of falsely claiming American citizenship at a border checkpoint, as Myrna Dick is alleged to have done in 1998 while returning from a visit to Mexico. While she disputes the allegation, the law isn’t interested. The accusation is reason enough to deport even someone as well-documented as Myrna Dick and then to forbid them to return. Ever. The deportee never gets a chance to challenge the evidence in court. And what of family circumstances, you might ask? “Immigration is sort of cold in these kinds of situations,” says Danny Rotert, an aide to U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. “They’re not required to give a second thought, and they don’t.” In his address to the nation on Monday, the president said that a general amnesty to undocumented immigrants would be unfair to those who follow the rules and wait their turn. Many of us can agree with that. We like what’s fair. Yet, to his credit, Bush also recognizes that “there are differences between an illegal immigrant who crossed the border recently, and someone who has worked here for many years, and has a home, a family, and an otherwise clean record.” He said that “… illegal immigrants who have roots in our country and want to stay should have to pay a meaningful penalty for breaking the law, to pay their taxes, to learn English, and to work in a job for a number of years.”
And that when they meet those requirements, those folks ought to be
able to stay and apply for citizenship. But what’s fair about deporting Myrna Dick when some guy who sneaked in from Mexico a couple of years ago will be allowed to stay? By June 10, she must leave the country she’s lived in for 20 years. And the only legal way back for her would be a law of the type that Cleaver proposes. One that would require family circumstances and a person’s reputation to be taken into account in cases like this one.
Is that too much to ask for in a country that values families as
much as it does fairness? Or would we rather that the law operate like a cold-blooded machine? Court denies review in deportation case
JEFF DOUGLAS ST. LOUIS - A federal appeals court ruled Monday that it will not review the case of an immigrant mother fighting to halt her deportation to Mexico. Myrna Dick's petition was dismissed by Chief Judge James Loken of a three-judge panel with the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. "We are very disappointed," Dick said Monday from her home in the Kansas City suburb of Raymore. "We think it's not fair and now we have less and less options." The U.S. government tried to deport Dick, 31, in 2004 on the grounds that she once lied about her citizenship years earlier while crossing the U.S border. Dick, the wife of an American, was pregnant at the time of the deportation order, and a federal judge in Missouri allowed her to stay because her unborn child was a U.S. citizen who could not be deported. Immigration officials came back with the deportation order after the child was born. In February, the 8th Circuit gave the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement authority to deport her to Mexico, separating her from her now 18-month-old son and the American husband she married in 2002.
Dick's attorney, Rekha Sharma-Crawford, said Monday that she would
appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. No date for her deportation has been set, and Dick was given 90 days last month to appeal. The appeals court returned its decision to dismiss her petition in less than two weeks. Dick said she has to check in with immigration officials, in person, once a month. "I get worried that one day I'll check in and they won't let me go," Dick said. "I hope that they will come up with something."
At the center of the deportation case is a lie authorities say Dick
told border agents in 1998. She was crossing the desert illegally at
the time to attend her grandmother's funeral in her hometown of
Chihuahua, Mexico. Dick and her attorneys deny she ever lied. Immigration officials said her false statements were grounds for deportation. Who will save Zachary Dick ?
By Jack Cashill (www.cashill.com) Life is so much easier for film stars like Tommy Lee Jones than it is for real people like Brady and Myrna Dick of Raymore and their infant son, Zachary. Like so many of his ideological pals, Jones deals with a tough moral issue by preening his way through it. His most recent film, the preposterous Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, gives Jones the soapbox on illegal immigration. Jones not only starred in the film, but he also directed it and co-produced. He has no excuse. In the film, when the amiable Melquiades Estrada shows up at the ranch of Pete Perkins, Jones’ character, Perkins asks—in Spanish of course—what Estrada wants. When Estrada answers that he only wants to be a cowboy, the job is his, no questions asked. Unfortunately, and ironically, this cinematic self-indulgence works against truly heartbreaking, real-life cases like that of the Dicks. Many Kansas City business people are no more discriminating than cowboy Pete. The need for workers who actually work motivates some entrepreneurs. They will tell you that much of America’s homegrown underclass has been corrupted beyond the ability to set an alarm, let alone shingle a roof, and unfortunately, they will be telling you the truth. Less understandable is the motivation of those Chamber types who turn a blind eye to illegal immigration. Their fear is that, if our laws are enforced, Mexico will take its NAFTA trade somewhere else. So we don’t enforce our laws.
By “tweak” Callon means two things. One is that police help insure that contractors pay laborers for contracted work. The second is that the police ignore the fact that half of these workers are here illegally and their work has been contracted in full violation of the law. As Callon boasts, the police have better things to do than enforce immigration law. Among those better things is capturing violent fugitives. In Los Angeles, where police are also banned from checking immigration status, 95% of the city’s 1200 plus outstanding murder warrants are signed out for “undocumented immigrants” as are two-thirds of the 17,000 outstanding felony warrants. And anyone who thinks the problem is limited to California should take a look online at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s Most Wanted list. It will open your eyes. Apparently, all that Tommy Lee Jones salvaged from Texas is his twang. He seems to have shucked his Lone Star values somewhere between Harvard—where he spent four years, rooming with Al Gore no less—and Hollywood. In Three Burials, Jones portrays those who actually enforce the law on a continuum from weasel to Wehrmacht. Nastiest among them is the film’s antagonist, an almost comically abusive border guard named Mike Norton, who looks as Anglo as his name sounds. And lest the point be missed, the first shot we see of this Tim McVeigh look-alike is a tilt down from an American flag. Although Norton coolly abuses everyone in his universe, (including himself, but that’s another story) it is quite by accident that he shoots and kills the angelic Mexican, Estrada. No matter. Cowboy Pete spends the last 2/3 of the movie torturing and humiliating Norton for a higher moral cause that he alone uniquely intuits. Immigration activists in Kansas City see the world much the same way Jones does. As many of them will happily tell you U.S immigration policy violates their exquisite sense of morality. No reform of American law will placate the hard core among them. Myrna and Brady Dick and son Zachary inhabit another world altogether, the world of real laws and real people, a world in which the enforcers are no more evil than your local IRS agent or DMV clerk or mailman, but no more creative either. The law does not allow for creativity. When she was nine years old, Myrna Ochoa-Carrillo 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 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 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.” This much is true. The problem is that The Star has squandered its moral capital celebrating enterprises like the Westside CAN Center that encourage and nurture illegal behavior. In the process, it has alienated many citizens who would naturally be sympathetic to the Dicks. Those citizens meanwhile have grown increasingly frustrated with the indifference of big government, big business and big media to a problem with real grass roots consequences. If they remain silent on the larger issue, it is because they fear the almost inevitable taunts of “anti-immigrant” or even “racist” should they take the wrong tack on the issue. Kris Kobach knows all about this. When the UMKC Law School professor ran for Congress against Dennis Moore in 2004 on the tough side of immigration reform, the Moore camp sent out thousands of mailers to Kansas women showing Kobach’s alleged ties to certain “white supre-macists,” who shared his views. As it happens, the Dicks found their most influential supporter in Kobach. They believe that were it not for his ability to secure a stay, Myrna would have been long since deported. This only seems ironic to those fool enough to have believed Moore. That stay has expired. Myrna could be deported at any moment. The Dicks’ best hope is emergency legislation, and they are pinning their futures on Kansas Senator Sam Brownback. For some time, however, the young staffers that surround all Congress people shielded Brownback from the petitions that the Dicks and others had been sending. They badly misjudged the soul of his constituents. “Who knows,” says Myrna, “maybe God will touch someone’s heart and they will let me stay.” At this stage, it will take something close to divine intervention. Otherwise, young Zachary Dick faces the choice of being either Mexican or motherless. And here is the final irony. In Three Burials, cowboy Melquiades Estrada insists on being buried in his homeland and not “among the #@$%& billboards” of West Texas. And why not? The Mexico we see in the movie is a natural wonderland filled with saintly people. The Texas we see is a hellhole filled with grotesques. The question that Jones fails to answer is why everyone wants to come to the hellhole. If Jones doesn’t know or care, the Dicks do. That’s why they want Zachary to be an American. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
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