New America Media - Collaborative Reporting

THE HOME CARE REVOLUTION: Eldercare at the Crossroads

2013-05-31T07:20:00Z

Photo: Chuck Schockweiler pours a liquid lunch into a feeding tube for his wife, Rosalie. They’ve helped each other survive the debilitating effects of terminal illness. (Herald-Tribune/Elaine Litherland)

Part 1. Read Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

SARASOTA, Fla.— Chuck and Rosalie Schockweiler need no words as they execute a smoothly choreographed routine in their Englewood home.

He rinses her feeding tube and hands it to her; she shakes it dry and attaches it to a port on her abdomen as he dissolves three pills in water. Chuck fetches her liquid lunch as Rosalie places a plastic receptacle in an ingenious homemade stand that Chuck fashioned from PVC pipe and an old battery charger, weighted “with imported stones from the front yard.”

He pours in the solution, and as she feels it flow into her belly, she smiles — the same glorious, sunny smile he first noticed back when they worked at Venice Regional Medical Center, in Venice, Fla. He chases the meds with a can of liquid nutrition Rosalie must have five times daily, filling the tube and responding to her prompt when it’s time for another pour.

Usually, as Rosalie finishes her meal, Chuck gets himself something to eat and they sit together at the dining table. Then they stand, every single time, for a long, satisfying hug.

It’s a process they repeat about every two and a half hours, with two more feeding sessions for medication alone.

Early in the day, it looks easy. But, Chuck admits, evenings are tougher because his energy flags.
The Schockweilers have been married for 14 years. At 66, she has lived for a year and a half with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, an incurable erosion of the central nervous system that’s also known as ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. And at 71, he has endured countless rounds of chemotherapy for liver cancer.

Rosalie took care of Chuck when his chemo side effects were most debilitating. Now, he says, it’s his turn.

“We both have a terminal illness,” he says. “Whoever lives longer, be that as it may. I don’t know; it will work out. We’re just hanging in there.”

The Schockweilers, like many older couples with health challenges, are determined to stay out of a facility and in their own home as long as they can. But what sets them apart from many retired Floridians — aside from their determination to keep laughing, joking and visiting the occasional tiki bar — is the tight network of people willing and able to help.

Rosalie’s good friend comes by often to take over feedings so Chuck can run errands or work on his boat. A neighbor cuts their grass. Daughters, sisters and church members stand by, along with a close-knit community of fishing buddies, retired police officers and firefighters.

This is the traditional American model of home health care, and it is rapidly fading away.

A New Workforce

Americans are living longer, meaning more health support is required for an extended time. But fewer people have access to the loving, full-time live-in care that Rosalie Schockweiler gets from her husband. Baby boomers have higher rates of divorce and childlessness than their parents — raising the prospect that there will be fewer family members to care for them.

Long-term care specialists agree that helping elders with care in their own homes could be more cost-effective than institutionalization — and it is what most older Americans prefer. But no one seems to know how the home care alternative would work on a larger scale.

A home care revolution — with extended stays at facilities, such as hospitals and nursing homes, diminishing — could be daunting, personally and financially, for many working people who struggle to care for aging parents. It would mean an enormous — and enormously bureaucratic — step beyond asking the nice lady down the street to look in on Mom while you’re at work.

Private-duty aides and home care agencies are expanding nationwide to pick up the slack from what has been a loosely organized, almost spontaneous approach to eldercare by family and friends.

Government-funded programs are scrambling to design networks that make use of this workforce, with the goal of paying less than nursing homes or assisted living facilities would charge.

The rise of for-profit health care providers is no accident; 78 million U.S. boomers are poised to become consumers of these services. Already, some 45 percent of Americans over 65 live alone.

Last year the Franchise Business Review named home health care one of the top five most lucrative franchises in the nation, with net profits averaging 12 percent to 15 percent.

The industry is a major source of new jobs, with an estimated 54 percent of the nation’s 4 million direct care workers employed in home and community settings. By 2018, this share is expected to rise to 66 percent.

But the rush to capitalize on this market could offset a crucial element that has made aging at home a less costly option than nursing and assisted living: a force of more than 66 million unpaid caregivers who do their demanding jobs out of love or obligation alone.

In the move to professionalize a largely informal — sometimes desperately improvised — process, eldercare specialists say, some important questions aren’t being raised.

“What do we want to put in place? Do we want high-quality, person-centered care? Do we really want to make a difference to overburdened family caregivers?” asks Dorie Seavey, director of policy research for the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute. “Or do we want women quitting their jobs because we have such a poor infrastructure to support their efforts to help their loved ones?”

Larry Polivka, executive director of the Claude Pepper Center at Florida State University, which studies issues in aging, is skeptical about an emerging effort to enlist health maintenance organizations — as Florida is doing — in the business of elder care without more evidence about what works.

“I’m not saying for-profit HMOs can’t do the job,” Polivka says. “But we need to have in place more comparative models so we can contrast and compare and decide what’s best. Instead we’re just rushing pell-mell in one direction or another, depending on which way the wind blows — ignoring the fact that this is going to be one of the hugest issues over the next three decades.”

But Bruce Chernof, president of the SCAN Foundation — a California-based nonprofit that promotes aging with dignity and independence — believes the home care revolution can result in a better quality of life for the next generation of elders.

“The challenge is to not medicalize the entirety of someone’s life,” he says. “How do we build a new system that interacts with the medical system but allows people to have the functionality that they want, as opposed to being framed as a hospital patient?”

Steep Challenges

The federal government is lined up solidly behind this goal, funding an array of experiments in diverting frail or cognitively impaired elders from traditional end-of-life care at nursing facilities, and trying to make it possible for them to survive with assistance at home.

“All Americans — including people with disabilities and seniors — should be able to live at home with the supports they need, participating in communities that value their contributions — rather than in nursing homes or other institutions,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said last year.

But it is a long way from “should” to “can.” The cobbled-together care plans that families devise to handle a health crisis — subsidized heavily with their own labor — may not translate easily to government-funded systems operated by an array of for-profit service providers.

The challenges are steep:

• Aside from promising pilot projects, few states have shown real progress in setting up viable, large-scale home care networks that offer quality care and realize tangible savings.

• The dollars available for elder care won’t just be stretched thin as the baby boomers age. The total amount of funding available is almost sure to be sliced as the “Greatest Generation” leaves the stage and numerous boomers begin to draw on their entitlements.

• Professionals in the home care field predict that families will continue to bear a larger share of the burden — in dollars where possible and in hands-on availability where needed.

For unpaid caregivers, quitting or scaling back their jobs can seem like an expedient, less costly way of making sure they meet their family obligations. But they should think long and hard before taking such a drastic step, according to research by the MetLife Mature Market Institute.

An institute study of more than 1,000 family caregivers over the age of 50 found that the lifetime effect of lost wages, Social Security benefits and retirement savings comes to more than $300,000 for the average caregiver.

In trying to make sure a parent or spouse is safe and comfortable, says MetLife Institute research director John Migliaccio, it can be easy to make a decision that may prove devastating financially. About 25 percent of all adult children in the United States are responsible for the wellbeing of an older relative, he says, and the cost of their dropping out of the workforce came to $3 trillion in 2008 dollars.

“That’s a significant economic impact that goes unrecorded,” he adds. “Potentially, the costs are much higher.”

Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to the growing medical sophistication of what family caregivers are being asked to do, says Susan Reinhard, vice president for public policy at AARP.

According to the organization’s 2012 report, “Home Alone: Family Caregivers Providing Complex Chronic Care,” these unpaid friends and relatives are doing the work not of personal aides, but of highly trained health care providers.

“More than half of them are giving five or more medications, and more than 25 percent are giving 10 or more injections,” Reinhard says. “About 35 percent of them are doing wound care, sterile dressings, colostomy care. These are things that make nursing students tremble the first time they do it. And here we’re saying, ‘Go home and do this to your mom.’ ”

Priceless Care

It would be hard to calculate the value of care provided in homes like the Schockweilers’.
Rosalie’s voice is nearly gone; she relies on her expressive face, lively hand gestures, pen and paper and an iPad to make her point.

“I believe God put us in each other’s life for a reason. We take care of each other, and our weakness makes us strong,” she writes on lined yellow paper. “We don’t understand how people cannot believe in God. It is amazing how I can help myself, and all the things I still do.”

Rosalie, an ex-New Yorker, and Chuck, a retired police officer from Chicago, plan to carry on, Chuck says, “as long as possible. I tell my buddies, ‘When I go, I want to check out in my La-Z-Boy chair.’ ”
He wants them to strap him in, put the chair on his boat and light it all on fire, “like a Viking,” out in the Gulf of Mexico.

He and Rosalie laugh, clearly more comfortable talking about the hereafter than the here and now.
“Once they tell you you have a terminal illness and you adjust to that, it’s easier to deal,” Chuck says. “You can kind of joke about it.”

Barbara Peters Smith wrote this article for the Sarasota Herald Tribune as a John A. Hartford Foundation Journalist in Aging Fellow, a collaboration of New America Media, MetLife Foundation and the Gerontological Society of America. Copyright © 2013 HeraldTribune.com.

Twin Papers Prove Power of Print for DC-Area South Asians

2013-04-09T07:45:00Z

Photo: Editor Rajan George in the India This Week and Express India office.

Editor’ Note: New America Media is partnering with American University and other journalism schools to present profiles of ethnic media in their regions. The following story profiles India This Week and Express India, bringing news to South Asians in the Washington, D.C. area.

WALDORF, Md.--Rajan George, editor-in-chief of India This Week and Express India, runs a one-person show these days.

“I used to have five people in the office once upon a time,” he said, thinking back over the papers’ 23-year history. Today he alone serves as editor-in-chief, local correspondent, layout staff and business manager. He also operates the printing press, a 100-foot long machine dominating his headquarters in an industrial park in Waldorf, Md., near Washington, D.C.

Two part-timers help out: A freelancer compiles community announcements, and a delivery person distributes the final products to South Asian stores, Hindu temples and gurdwaras (Sikh temples) around the Washington-Baltimore corridor.

Since 1990, India This Week and Express India have weathered the arrival of the Internet and the decline of print newspapers relatively smoothly, but the recent recession hurt business.

Demand for Print Newspapers

Sometimes, the future looks bleak, George said. But he is convinced that reader demand can sustain print newspapers, especially in immigrant communities. He notes that his papers are the D.C. metropolitan area’s only Indian ethnic publications.

The two free, tabloid-size papers primarily cover news from India and other parts of South Asia. In addition, a small percentage of pages are devoted to announcements of local events and news about D.C.-area ethnic celebrations.

George aims at a readership that might be described as “pan-South Asian.” He chooses articles that will interest immigrants from not only India, but also from Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The papers obtain most of their international content from the wire service, Asian News International. George and a couple freelancers generate local coverage.

The two papers function together like a single semi-weekly publication. Express India began coming out every Tuesday in 1990, and India This Week started publication each Friday in 1995.

The two papers share the same masthead, editorial goals and visual appearance, but they do not duplicate content, George stressed. Together the papers have a circulation of 10,000 and reach immigrants in the District of Columbia, the city of Baltimore and a half-dozen counties in Virginia and Maryland. The region is home to the third largest South Asian population in the United States, one that has grown rapidly in the past decade.

George publishes a wider range of news items on South Asia than mainstream media, which focuses its coverage of the region on U.S. interests. He described Indian Americans as “far from home” and in need of news about their country of origin. George noted that not everyone has access to the Internet.

“This is what puts people together,” he said, turning the pages of the latest issue of Express India. “It’s a unifying factor when you have a community event and publicize it through the local ethnic media.”

English – Indians’ Unifying Language

Express India and India This Week are published entirely in English. According to George, “Even though the national language is Hindi, the only thing that unifies the Indian people is English.”

George shakes his head as he recalls that a friend started a D.C.-area paper in Hindi, but it didn’t succeed. Actually, George is from Kerala, and Hindi is not his native language. India has over a dozen languages designated “official” and English has become the lingua franca of educated Indians. English has the added advantage of reaching South Asian immigrants who aren’t from India.

George isn’t sure what the future holds. He no longer gets advertising dollars from large mainstream corporations, such as Verizon or Citibank.

A decade ago, real estate agents and mortgage brokers were his most reliable advertisers, but most of them have gone out of business since the housing market collapsed in 2008. Today, many of the papers’ largest ads are aimed directly at the ethnic audience, such as placements for local concerts of Indian pop idols on tour.

He Won’t Give Up

But George isn’t giving up. He admits that in the past he did not seek out advertisers because they approached him. Now he thinks more carefully about revenue and expenses.

To reduce costs, he recently moved his office from Takoma Park, Md., to a cheaper space adjoining his printing press in Waldorf. He recently acquired new capacity to print in color. George is in the process of developing a website, which will eventually be at www.indiathisweek.us.

George did not start out in journalism. He earned a master’s degree in theology before coming to the U.S. in 1990, and he remains closely involved with a local church he helped to start. Publishing and religion are equal, simultaneous “passions” for him. Perhaps this unusual background helps him maintain the two papers through what he describes as “a tough time.”

“For me it takes one day at a time,” he said, “We are not thriving, but we are sustaining ourselves. If I don’t have advertisers coming in for a certain time, I’ll close up. I won’t run a losing business. But so far,” he added, “I don’t have a losing business.”

Jessamine Price is an American University student. Assistant professor of journalism Angie Chuang assigned Price and other students to profile ethnic media outlets for her Race and Community Reporting class. American University’s School of Communication is the only professional school in Washington, D.C., that brings journalism, film and public relations together, with an international perspective and a focus on new media -- digital, interactive and social media.

The ‘New Normal’ -- Calif. Youth Giving Up the Gun

2013-03-04T09:00:00Z

Ed. Note: In the debate around gun violence, no one group is impacted and implicated more than youth and young adults. Over the past several weeks NAM youth reporters from across the state have been speaking with their peers about how they experience gun violence in their neighborhoods. Those conversations convey clear gender and regional differences in the way young people experience and think about guns, yet point to an emerging consensus that youth want to see their peers give up the gun; that far from making them feel safer, guns are a root cause of the growing climate of fear and insecurity they feel in the classroom and on the streets.

The following video consists of interviews with students at Jordan High School in Long Beach, who were asked to weigh in on the debate over armed security on school campuses. The two accompanying commentaries offer perspectives from two Bay Area young women, on why young men are the most likely to perpetrate and be victims of gun violence. The sidebar is a collection of youth voices from Merced, Calif.

Young Men With Guns Don't Value My Life
Alicia Marie, San Francisco

I wasn't raised around guns, period. My experience with guns is limited to the fact that they took the lives of my favorite entertainers -- first the singer Selena, who I absolutely adored and wanted to be just like when I got older; later on it was my first crush, Tupac Shakur. So the viewpoint I’ve held consistently ever since I was a child is that guns are evil.

When the boys I was with had guns, they would tell me, "Don't worry, I got my backup in case things go bad." My own brother once told me, "415… 4 every 1 of mine, we taking 5 of theirs." That type of talk didn't appeal to me or make me feel safe -- it actually made me feel that the person saying those words was ignorant and didn't value their own life.

In Merced, Gun Culture 'Heavy'

Alyssa, 19: Growing up, I usually had a relative that was on probation or parole living with us, so that allowed law enforcement to search and seize our house without a warrant. Living in a home where house raids were common, my first experiences with guns began at a young age. My two older brothers are also gang affiliated, so having guns in the house or talk of where to get them wasn’t uncommon.

Kalvin, 17: When I was little, the cops shot at my grandma’s house because of my dad and my uncle. It was like a shoot out. Another time, when I was a baby, a rival gang member shot at my house and a bullet [hit my dad] in the eye -- thank God he’s still living! I don’t care how, but we need to stop gun violence.

Austin, 18: I live in a neighborhood that was [recently designated] Section 8. Last year, a student from Merced High School was murdered in my neighborhood in a shooting. Now with dangers like this, it is necessary for people to get protection legally. This is one of the reasons I plan to own a gun legally when I come of age.

Ana, 16: Nowadays, the only guns I’m aware of are my uncle's. He gets them pretty easy. He also takes my 11-year-old cousin to the gun range with him. I don’t think she should be allowed there. Besides all that, I believe that here in Merced guns are heavy with all the gang violence.

Lisa, 16: I constantly hear gunshots and at school classmates brag about them! One day I was lying down at home when all of a sudden I heard what sounded like wooden planks falling onto each other. My mom and I investigated the house for a bit, then we heard sirens outside. Apparently, someone was shooting at a person standing in front of our house and they missed. What if that bullet went through or shot my cat!

So what would make me think they are going to value mine?

Boys carry guns because they feel they cannot defend themselves on their own strength alone. They believe that since "everyone else has them, I need one too." But why even put yourself in a situation of needing to constantly be on the defensive, feeling like at any moment someone might attack you? If that’s the case, you need to watch who you’re associating with.

When I get off of work, which is usually around 11pm at night, I have to walk through the violent streets of the Bayview neighborhood in San Francisco. Every time a car goes by, I’m thinking, “That car could mistake me for someone else and shoot me." By the time I run home it’s midnight, and I'm exhausted from my thoughts. But I don't feel the solution is to go get a gun or be with a boy who has a gun, to get home safe. It’s not that I think girls are incapable of learning how to use guns. I would just hope that we wouldn't want to use them -- guns have a purpose, and the main one is to take lives or hurt someone. I’d rather take my chances at being safe by not carrying a weapon, but knowing that I won’t unnecessarily or accidentally take away somebody else’s precious life.

As young women, we can play a role in getting men in our community to give up their guns. We have a way of talking and reasoning to make a point, and if we were to explain to our brothers, boyfriends, cousins, uncles, and fathers the benefits of giving up their guns, and help them to do it, we could help curb these senseless murders.

And the point we need to make is this: We have to realize that people in our community have grown accustomed to using guns to settle matters. For example, if you have a headache, the first thing you’re going to want to do is take an aspirin -- it just comes natural. Likewise, guns have become the natural way to defend and settle matters in the streets; the understood way of responding to anger. So, we can make these crimes less frequent by giving the community alternative ways to deal with anger. And in doing so, we can make people who carry guns around seem ignorant and old-fashioned. We can make the alternative the new normal.

Young Men Need Guns to Feel Safer, But They're Not
Keyannie Norford, 17, Richmond

Click, clack, boom! There are a lot of things going on in today’s society, where it seems that guns are a necessity for living day to day, especially in the ‘hoods of Richmond, California, where turf wars, robberies -- even a case of mistaken identity -- can bring you face to face with a gun. But do guns really provide safety? As a girl, I can say I do not believe they make women feel safer. I believe guns are accidents waiting to happen, and they pose a threat like no other.

There are not many women I know of, other than those in law enforcement, that are actually trained to use a gun. Women are capable of learning, but it's all about the will of the individual. She has to want to know how to use it. Whether for protection, survival or any other reason, when it comes down to it, it's an individual choice. Women who own a gun may say, “Well, it’s for protection and if a situation erupts where I need protection, then it will be done.”

In the situations that I’ve seen, though, they didn’t actually use it. They just took it out or held it up to scare the other person. I have seen situations in which young women were nervous to handle a gun. They will be sweating; their hands will be trembling, their fingers twitchy.

Now when it comes to men and boys, guns get justified in many ways. Guns play a part in a man’s status, even though they may have never really handled one. Having a gun seems to be the “cool” and “modern” thing, especially here in Richmond. In reality, most males, young and old, possess guns for protection. I do know someone who protected himself and someone else because he carried. Males are fighting each other everyday over turfs, colors and gang signs, which means they have to protect the ones they care about, as well as themselves. It's almost as if carrying a gun has become a necessity in these boy’s eyes -- some type of unrevealed phobia.

For example, if they didn’t carry a gun, then they’d be afraid and paranoid about everything happening around them, thinking, “If today was the day someone decided to come after me, I'd be defenseless, and that could possibly cost me my life.” For young men, having a gun is the only way to protect themselves in this horrid generation, and it adds to their manhood. They simply need guns to stay on their “Boss Status,” for protection or just to prove a point. Living in the communities we're subject to now-a-days, it's survival of the fittest. There's violence everyday and only the protected live, which is sad, but it happens to be young man’s reality.

I do believe that women can try to influence young men to give up guns and with that, possibly save them from a life of uncertainty. But in today’s society it's just not going to work. The rate of violence is too high among men living the “thug-life “ for them to feel safe without their form of protection. But in the end, boys and men have to want to walk away from the violence as much as a young woman wants to play a role in stopping it before it possibly starts -- which goes to the choice of carrying a gun. I'm not sure exactly how we can get to a community with fewer guns, but I feel that as soon as young people and men see and feel that there is no reason to be afraid and carry weapons, then there will be fewer guns because there will be no need.

This story was compiled by reporters from NAM youth media projects, including Richmond Pulse, We'Ced in Merced, and VoiceWaves in Long Beach. Artwork courtesy of The Beat Within.

Don’t Get Carjacked in Maricopa County

2012-10-21T07:15:00Z

This story was updated on Oct. 26, 2012.

Traducción al español

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- The switchblade pressing into her neck took Aurora Tristan by surprise. She jumped out of her ‘98 Honda Civic and ran. The carjackers – two young women who had asked her for a ride outside the grocery store – drove off with her car.

The 45-year-old said she was unaware at the time she dialed 911 from her cell phone that her status as a victim of an armed robbery might qualify her for a U-visa if she cooperated with law enforcement and prosecutors.

“I wanted to help because I felt they need to pay for what they did to me,” said Tristan, who is Mexican. “I don’t hate them or resent them, I just wanted justice.”

Across the country, undocumented crime victims like Tristan work with local law enforcement and prosecutors’ offices. But when it comes to certifying their help in an investigation – something that helps lead to legal status through a U-visa – where the crime occurred is often as critical as the case itself.

In Maricopa County, victims find themselves at the mercy of lingering anti-immigrant sentiment.

Too Afraid to Seek Help

The U-visa was created by Congress in 2000 to help law enforcement with the prosecution of violent crimes committed against undocumented immigrants – especially women – and to encourage these crime victims to come forward without fear of detention or deportation.

But in an atmosphere clouded by the “Show me your papers” provision of Arizona’s 2010 immigration law, SB 1070 -- which went into effect in September -- policies meant to protect are all but ignored.

And with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office (MCAO) – the largest prosecutor’s office in the state – refusing to certify them, immigration lawyers agree law enforcement is now the only avenue left to get a certification to obtain a U-visa.

To get one, crime victims first need a certificate, called an I-918 B form, proving they are indeed victims of a violent crime, and have cooperated or will cooperate with police or prosecutors. The form must be signed by a police officer, a prosecutor or a judge, or victims can’t begin proceedings with Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that ultimately decides if they qualify for the visa.

In Tristan’s case, she helped the Phoenix Police Department identify the carjackers. But she didn’t get a U-visa because neither the department nor the prosecutor’s office agreed to sign the I-918 B form.

Police waited until after the case was closed to deny the request.

“They [said they] did not sign the certification form because ‘the defendants were already sitting in jail,’ explained Randall Rowberry, Tristan’s immigration attorney, who said he had made the initial request before the pair were sentenced.

Rowberry then tried his luck with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. Four months later, he got a rejection letter from the chief of the Special Crimes Bureau with no explanation.

Automatic Rejection

While agencies are allowed some discretion when deciding on U-visa certifications, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, led by Republican Bill Montgomery, has approved only a tiny fraction of cases. For victims like Tristan, who turn to the prosecutors’ office as a last resort, this has proven a major roadblock.

“I don’t want my office to be in a position to help someone gain legal status for the purpose of prosecuting a criminal case,” Montgomery explained in an interview. Since 2009, his agency has received 83 requests, turned down 19, referred seven to other agencies and granted only six. As of the middle of October, they had a backlog of 51 cases, according to MCAO public records.

Among the few cases MCAO did certify was that of a Latina immigrant who was the victim of a high-profile serial rapist known as the “Baseline Killer.” Montgomery explained the decision as being “absolutely necessary to take care of a situation,” but added, “I don’t want immigration attorneys to default to a request for a visa on behalf of someone because they were the victim of a crime.”

In Tristan’s case, her carjackers pleaded guilty after she offered to help prosecutors.

“There was no trial. Why would we need to issue a U-visa (certification)?” said Jerry Cobb, a spokesperson for MCAO. “The only way we become involved is if we need that person to investigate a crime.”

Rowberry dismisses the argument as one sided. “This is not a witness visa; it’s a victim’s visa,” he said.

In fact, the law doesn’t require that the victim take the stand or even that police prosecute the case in order to issue a U-visa certification. It simply states the individual “must have been helpful, is being helpful, or is likely to be helpful in the investigation or prosecution of the crime,” according to USCIS.

Under the law, Montgomery can use discretion when deciding whether to issue a certification, such as when he needs a person to remain in the United States as a witness. But MCAO’s record does raise questions as to whether the law offers too much discretion – even in cases where, by all accounts, applicants meet the qualifications.

“There is a gray area in the law,” said Christina Ortecho, an immigration attorney at Friendly House, a non-profit organization catering to the area’s Hispanic population. “Congress did not detail what [agencies] could or could not consider” when deciding on a request.

Echoes of Arpaio

In his role as prosecutor, Montgomery works closely with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, run by Joe Arpaio, who is known nationally for his harsh crackdown on illegal immigration and sweeping enforcement of Arizona state laws.

But, Montgomery insists, he isn’t influenced by Arpaio’s politics.

“The decisions that I’m making with respect to U-visas, I don’t make those in consultation with the sheriff’s office. That is entirely an independent determination as a prosecutor,” said Montgomery.

He added that he has consciously stayed away from pursuing immigration enforcement as a political issue.

“I don’t want to be in that position, either trying to implement an enforcement policy beyond the scope of my office or operating a [U-Visa] facilitation agency beyond the scope of my office,” he said. Just over a year after he took office, Montgomery made it clear in a 2011 meeting with Latino attorneys that he would not certify U-visas, according to Delia Salvatierra, a local immigration attorney who was at the meeting.

Still, while Montgomery hasn’t taken an anti-immigrant stance publicly like his predecessor, County Attorney Andrew Thomas – now disbarred by the Arizona State Bar for ethics violations – Montgomery has followed quietly in the footsteps of his former boss.

Thomas and Arpaio worked closely on implementing some of the toughest anti-immigrant laws in the country, including a state law sanctioning employers for hiring workers who are living in the country illegally. He also pursued identity theft charges against immigrant workers with forged papers who were arrested in Arpaio’s raids, convictions that could hurt their chances of regularizing their status in the United States.

While Montgomery has distanced himself from both Thomas and Arpaio, his prosecutorial record resembles that of his predecessor. Since 2011, his agency has prosecuted more than 300 cases of employees working with false documents and pursued one civil case against an employer. The numbers roughly track those that Thomas prosecuted from 2008 until the middle of 2010.

Like Thomas, Montgomery has also used a state human smuggling law to prosecute undocumented immigrants with conspiring to enter the country illegally.

Montgomery explains his position as being driven by “complex humanitarian reasons,” saying that prosecuting those who seek the services of a smuggler could act as a deterrent to people who risk their lives trying to cross the border.

But his stance on U-visas leads some to question whether he is in fact pursuing an anti-immigrant agenda.

“He doesn’t care that by taking this hardline stance he is alienating a community from coming forward,” said Salvatierra. She says she has stopped submitting certification requests with MCAO for her clients. Instead she is turning to police departments, which she admits is not ideal given that prosecutors often have more information about a case than police.

A typical U-visa application can take between nine and 12 months to process with USCIS – not including the extra time needed to obtain a certification from law enforcement.

“There should be an alternative. Whether or not you get your visa shouldn’t depend on the location where the crime happened,” said Valerie Hink, an attorney with Southern Arizona Legal Aid and a long time advocate for the U-visa.

Ortecho of Friendly House agrees. “When you feel the system has failed you, you’re less likely to engage in the system in the future,” she said. “You’re victimizing the victim again, because you’re saying this crime is not serious enough.”

U-visa Requests with Police on the Rise

USCIS can only grant 10,000 U-visas per year. Between October 2011 and July 2012, the agency received more than 20,000 requests. By August it had granted about half of those.

And the number of requests is growing.

A review of police departments in Maricopa County shows an increase in applications as well as certifications granted between 2011 and 2012.

One reason for this could be attorneys like Salvatierra, who are now pursuing certification through the police department, knowing the door is closed at the County Attorney’s office.

But Tommy Thompson, a spokesperson for the Phoenix Police Department, said there was some concern the increase has to do with fraud.

Since the beginning of this year the Phoenix Police Department has received 125 requests, compared to only 25 in 2011. Most of these were granted.

Thompson says the current immigration climate is making immigrants even more fearful and willing to try to adjust their immigration status, which could open the door for unscrupulous people to take advantage of the U-visa certification by claiming they were victims of crimes that never happened.

“I’m concerned that perhaps now they think this is an easy route to get a visa to stay here legally,” said Thompson.

But for Tristan, the memory of the carjacking still haunts her. She sold her car because she couldn’t stand the memories it brought back. She now takes the bus once a week to see a psychologist with Catholic Services. She doesn’t like to walk alone.

“If they don’t think what happened to me was horrible, I don’t know what else they want, for me to be wounded, to have died? It wasn’t easy what happened to me,” she said.

This article was made possible by a grant from Atlantic Philanthropies and was produced as part of New America Media’s Women Immigrants Fellowship Program.

For Those in Poverty, City College a ‘Lifeline’

2012-10-19T08:00:00Z

Pictured Above (L to R): Philip Standing Bear, Tony Robles and Ingrid DeLeon

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following profiles were created by reporters at POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE, as part of a series highlighting the importance of CCSF to communities across the city. The series is part of a fellowship organized by New America Media and sponsored by the San Francisco Foundation. POOR Magazine is

A Future for My Daughter
Phillip Standing Bear   

For many years I was under the assumption that college was out of reach for me. Once I got custody of my daughter, though, I had to figure something out.

I can’t provide a good home for Cheyanne on social security alone. But as a single father, figuring out how I could get an education was hard. Many people told me to take online courses … if I had a computer at the time I would’ve. Still, having attention deficit disorder means I have to constantly be reminded about small things, including homework. Online courses wouldn’t have worked. I had to find a way to get into a classroom or lose hope.

That’s when a friend recommended the Family Resource Center (FRC) at City College of San Francisco. FRC allowed a poor single father like me to go to school and receive access to on-site childcare as well as support. When I walked into FRC, I was instantly greeted by a familiar face; Libah Shephard, a fellow reporter with POOR Magazine, who walked me through the system and explained how I could register myself the following semester.

I don’t want Cheyanne to live the life that I did in foster care. That, for a lot of indigenous children in the system, is pure terror. To be taken away from the ones you love because your parents couldn’t pay rent, or couldn’t pay taxes or didn’t have enough food in the house to last a couple of days. Imagine…   

Philip Standing Bear is a reporter at POOR Magazine and a graduate of RYME (Revolutionary Youth Media Education).

The Only Education for Poor Immigrants
Ingrid DeLeon

My name is Ingrid. I am a mother of four children, and a student at City College of San Francisco. I recently found out [the school] may close their doors. I do not like that idea. This school benefits everyone. If we as immigrants can learn English, we will be able to better understand one another and have more access to employment.

This school is very important for poor immigrant women workers like myself. I am not only able to learn English, but am able to improve my dress-making skills so I can eventually start my own small business. Many of us poor immigrants did not have the time or money for an education in our country of origin. Please do not close these doors, I beg you as a woman who wants to forward her life and knows many who benefit from this school.

Ingrid Deleon is a reporter with Voces de in/migrants en resistencia at Prensa POBRE/POOR Magazine.

Creating Community
V. Park Castro

Those who know me describe me as bookish or nerdy. “Tienes que pensar,” my mom would say. “You have to think.” It was her way of recognizing that her children needed to think critically and develop intellect.

My mother raised me as a single parent. She left her homeland of El Salvador during the civil war there, ending her hope of going to college, and migrated to the United States, where she began from scratch. To learn English she attended City College of San Francisco’s Mission Campus, where she also enrolled in courses on Early Childhood Education. She did this while still providing housing, food, love and a stable home for my sister and I.

Education was at the heart of our dinner table, and City College of San Francisco was home base. It created community for my family, as it has for many others. I still walk the halls there with a sense of belonging to a community-based academic institution.

I’ve been attending CCSF since I was in high school, taking advantage of the courses that are available for public school students. When San Francisco State University became too expensive, I move back to City College to complete my general studies. Affordability has always been an issue for me, because living in poverty has always been a reality for me. CCSF is the only educational setting that I can afford. It is also the place where people who are struggling, people like my mother, are given the agency to educate themselves and achieve greatness.

Vinia Park Castro is a contributor to POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE.

Thank You for Being There
Tony Robles  

Back in 1982 I was getting out of high school and wondering what direction I was going to take out there in what the adults around me referred to as the “real world.” I was living at home and I could tell that my father wouldn’t put up with too much lollygagging in the name of post-graduation relaxation.

I was a fairly decent communicator so I had this idea that I’d like to teach people to read and write, that I could perhaps be a volunteer in such a program. My father recoiled at the word volunteer and quickly volunteered a vigorous, heartfelt and well-intentioned kick in my ass. I forgot about volunteering and found myself back to square one.

Then I recalled a guy who came to career day at my high school. He worked as a radio DJ. He paced in front of the class walking with a bowlegged hobble that made him appear as if he’d ridden a horse cross country minus the saddle. He spoke with an affected southern drawl. He was a Filipino guy but it all made sense when we found out that he worked for a country station. He told us that he started off as the station janitor, working his way up into the coveted announcer position.

I’d left home and moved in with my grandma. She told me about City College. She supported my desire to try broadcasting and encouraged me to enroll. I learned that City College had a broadcasting department with a radio station. I visited the station, looking through the glass at the announcer spinning records. I was intimidated by all the electronic equipment, the blinking lights, tape machines, etc. I finally got into the radio station but not before taking classes in mass communication, broadcast writing and basic audio production. These classes have proved invaluable as I entered a career in media.  

I became a radio DJ, a television production assistant, a radio account executive and a copywriter. The skills I obtained at City College allowed me to work professionally in media without spending thousands of dollars at a broadcasting school. I now share those same skills with writers and journalists from poor communities and communities of color — the same communities I sprouted from, in a city whose college gave me the opportunity to partake in higher education. Thank you City College for being there.

Tony Robles, of African-Filipino descent, is co-editor of POOR Magazine and a board member with Manilatown Heritage Foundation.

Haiti’s Homeless Fight Back

2012-10-18T09:15:00Z

Photo courtesy of PRI's The World

When the earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010, many in the impoverished country lost what little they had.

Nearly three years later, about 400,000 remain homeless. Many are still living in tent camps. And they’re at risk of eviction.

But these days, there’s some push-back.

On a recent Sunday morning outside of Port-au-Prince, impeccably dressed men, women and children file into the huge Grace Church. But across the lawn, a corrugated metal fence hides a different scene — several hundred tents and makeshift shelters.

This is Grace Village camp. No one here attends the church next door.

They’re angry about the horrible conditions here. They’re especially angry at the landlord, the church pastor, who’s been trying to get them off his property.

A church representative says they’re just evicting trouble-makers and trying to help those with some means to relocate.

But many camp residents say the pastor and his associates are using sinister tactics.

Frantsy Alexandre emerges from a tent with a large manila envelope. He pulls out an x-ray of his torso and a signed letter on medical stationery.

He says, “The camp manager was going to destroy my neighbor’s tent, so I said, ‘You can’t do that’ and blocked his way… He came back with a security guard and beat me with a baton. I went to the police but they ignored me.”

So Alexandre went to the courthouse, where they told him to document his injuries.

“I talked to an evicted camp resident who’s been fighting this kind of abuse,” he says, “and he said we need to report what happens to the attorney.”

The attorney is Patrice Florvilus. After the earthquake, he formed an organization that represents residents of tent camps who’ve been threatened with eviction.

“Our strategy is to stop evictions by making landlords follow the law,” Florvilus says, “which can mean a lengthy legal process. And that’s what the landlord wants to avoid.”

This doesn’t always work, but a legal defeat can sometimes turn into a de facto victory. In one case, the mayor of Delmas ordered families off government land. A court upheld the eviction order. But then the mayor backed off – locals say because of organized opposition.

But there are also a lot of failures.

Jackson Doliscar is a community organizer who says getting people to believe in the power of grassroots activism has been a major challenge. In 1990, when Jean-Bertrand Aristide made his successful bid for president, he encouraged Haitians to organize for change. But the hoped-for improvements didn’t materialize. Doliscar thinks that people in Haiti today are desperate enough to try again.

“When things are more difficult for people,” he says, “like they’re having problems with the landlord, they say, ‘If I don’t join the organization today, I’ll be thrown out.’ So they join the organization.”

After the earthquake, Doliscar’s grassroots group joined forces with 25 others to form a housing rights coalition. One of their projects is a slum called Jalousie. It’s in a precarious spot on a hillside overlooking the city. This summer the government ordered residents to evacuate.

Government officials deny they ever planned to force Jalousie residents from their homes. They have been encouraging hundreds to leave, in exchange for money to relocate. But many fear being homeless again after spending more than a year living in the streets after the earthquake.

Marie Michel Moise lived in a tent in a city park with her young children for more than two years. She says she finally got funds to move into a tin shack in Jalousie, the only neighborhood she could afford. When I ask her where she would live if she had the choice, she laughs at the idea. “If you don’t work in this country,” she says, “you don’t have a choice.”

And yet Moise says she believes people can make a difference by taking to the streets and pressuring the government. I ask if she’s afraid she’ll be forced to leave, and she shakes her head. “No,” she says. “We had a demonstration, and they said they wouldn’t destroy our homes.”

But things aren’t quite that easy. Even some supporters of Haiti’s housing rights movement say popular protests are no silver bullet.

Alexis Erkert works with Other Worlds, an organization of women that supports grassroots groups around the globe. She says Haitian authorities often dismiss the activists.

“Last time they did have a sit-in, they managed to get a meeting with [a Ministry of Social Affairs staff member],” she says, “but then they asked for an email address or phone number for follow-up, and they were just laughed at and kicked out.”

I ask if she thinks the movement can succeed. “Not without the international solidarity piece,” she says.

In other words, If Haitian officials won’t listen to Port-au-Prince’s poorest, they might pay attention to their overseas allies, at least those in donor countries.

Reported by PRI’s The World, a co-production of WGBH/Boston, Public Radio International, and the BBC World Service. Support for The World’s Immigrant Lives project comes from the Rita Allen Foundation.

KTSF-26 Producer: Chinese-American Voters in SF Want More Representation

2012-09-29T09:15:00Z

Editor’s Note: In the first in a weekly series of interviews with ethnic media journalists on the 2012 elections, Kwokshu Leung, executive producer of Pan-Asian TV network KTSF-Channel 26, describes some of the issues of concern to Asian Americans, who now make up the largest ethnic group in San Francisco. This series is part of a collaboration by New America Media and 91.7 FM KALW Public Radio. Every Tuesday until Election Day, KALW’s news program Crosscurrents via this NAM segment, will be speaking with ethnic media reporters on the stakes for their communities in the 2012 elections. Leung was interviewed Sept. 25 by Crosscurrents co-host Hana Baba.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Chinese-American voters in San Francisco have been galvanized by unprecedented Asian-American representation in the city – with a Chinese-American mayor and four Asian-American supervisors. But Kwokshu Leung, executive producer at Pan-Asian TV network KTSF-Channel 26, believes many Chinese voters are looking beyond just "face" representation and want to make sure they are genuine leaders as well.

Leung also explains the dilemma for Chinese-American voters over San Francisco's Prop A, which would levy a parcel tax on the city's residents to fund San Francisco City College.

“Some groups are coming out trying to say to the Chinese community, ‘Hey, support this. This is important. You have to pass this,’ he says. “But at the same time, you are a voter. But at the same time, you may be a homeowner. So people are concerned about, ‘Okay, why am I paying $79 for the next eight years to help this organization, which right now is at the brink of insolvency?’ There's a conflict there.”

Click to LISTEN to this interview.

This new NAM-KALW weekly segment collaboration is hosted by Hana Baba and co-produced by NAM News Anchor Odette Keeley. Editorial supervisors are KALW News Director Holly Kernan and NAM Executive Editor Sandy Close. The segment's engineer is KALW's Seth Samuel.

The Other Death Sentence: Aging and Dying in America’s Prisons

2012-09-26T07:25:00Z

Photo: The image above is part of a photo essay by documentary photographer Tim Gruber taken at the Kentucky State Reformatory and published by Mother Jones along with a longer version of the following article. Copyright Tim Gruber

SHIRLEY. Mass.--William “Lefty” Gilday was 82 and suffering from dementia and Parkinson's when officials at Massachusetts' Shirley Prison placed him in an isolation cell -- a "medical bubble" -- for throwing an empty milk carton at a guard. He spent the last months of his life alone, separated by a window from medical staff, who placed manila folders across the glass so they didn’t have to look at him—and also blocking his view.

As we get older, it is easy enough to imagine old age as a prison -- the body imprisoned by illness and loneliness. But in recent months, I have been corresponding with older men in Massachusetts state prisons who are in for life -- or in this case, death.

I am 75, so we share a camaraderie of sorts as we compare notes on our aches and pains and our medication regimens. They know I understand what it's like to be growing old and facing illness and death. But they also know I have no idea what it's like to endure life behind bars, to face the difficult end of life with no chance of ever again breathing the free air.

The men in prison want to tell me, and they want the outside world to know what their lives are like. They know full well the retribution that would likely follow for speaking with the press, but not one of my correspondents asked for anonymity.

Daily Indignities and Isolation

What is clear from my correspondence is that days are filled with indignities, such as trying to heave an aging body into the top bunk, fighting off younger troublemakers, struggling to move fast enough to get a food tray filled or get a book at the library when you can barely walk.

Mass. Ignores Signs of Times

About one in five Massachusetts inmates (19 percent) is 50-plus, more than the national average of one in six (16 percent), according to “At America’s Expense: The Mass Incarceration of the Elderly,” released in June by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Nationally, says the ACLU report, inmates 50 or older cost --$68,270 to house and maintain—double the average for all prisoners of $34,135. That’s far lower than the Massachusetts overall per-prisoner cost of $45,502.19 in 2011, according to the state’s Department of Corrections (DOC).

For those at the end of life, Massachusetts prisons have no hospice programs to manage the care of terminally ill prisoners. In January, the state released its “Massachusetts Corrections Master Plan,” which projects the long-term development of three new facilities to deal with medical problems.

Despite housing 2,212 older prisoners, the Massachusetts DOC said it does not “have a position on compassionate, geriatric or any other type of release. That's up to the Legislature.”

In recent years, according to a 2010 report from the Vera Institute for Justice, by 2009 at least 15 states and the District of Columbia had programs allowing some form of “geriatric release,” especially for imprisoned elders with terminal or serious illnesses or disabilities.

The Vera report notes, though, that jurisdictions rarely use these provisions because of political considerations, public opinion, narrow eligibility criteria, procedures discouraging inmates from applying for release, and complicated and lengthy referral and review processes.

Massachusetts has no type of medical, or geriatric release program.

--James Ridgeway

Most of all, there is isolation. Prisons discourage inmates from forging friendships, and prison officials are suspicious of anything that smacks of organizing. So they switch inmates back and forth between prisons and deny them the right to communicate with anyone else who is incarcerated.

Yet the group of lifers I've corresponded with have tried to make something of their lives, serving as jailhouse lawyers, organizing against abusive conditions, helping other inmates survive.

Sometimes these pursuits get them in trouble, but their prison records are free of any violent offenses. Even if technically eligible for parole, as a few of them are, most have been convicted of crimes that were both horrific and high-profile, ensuring that they will never get out.

Joe Labriola, 66, is a former Marine war hero who served two tours in Vietnam, receiving a Purple Heart and Bronze Star with V for valor. After returning home, Joe was convicted of killing a drug dealer, who was an FBI informant. He got life without parole. So far he has served 38 years, 18 of them in solitary confinement.

Agent Orange exposure left Joe struggling to breathe. He can't walk more than 10 steps without help from an oxygen tank. He's in a wheelchair most of the time and lives in a ward called Assisted Daily Living, which he describes as a clutch of hospital beds in a corridor.

"The only assistance we get,” he tells me, “is what other prisoners assigned to clean the floor and bathrooms render us when we ask."

From his window, Joe has a view of the prison hospital. "I see men coming up for medication and insulin at least three to four times per day. They come in chairs, geriatric walkers, and all have medications. In one week we had three deaths."

Seniors in the outside world complain about health care. But the inpatient facilities at the prison’s hospital consist of a series of five small wards with five beds in each. Men in various stages of bad health or terminal illness lie in bed all day with nothing to do but watch soap operas and the rare housefly that meanders in.

"What they need is mental, spiritual and human stimulation in the form of one-on-one care provided by trained prisoners," Joe writes. "There are many men willing to volunteer their time and energy to make this a reality."

“We Loved the Old Man”

Joe Labriola's "best pal" was Lefty Gilday. A minor league ballplayer turned ’60s revolutionary, a convicted cop killer, and target of one of the most famous manhunts in Massachusetts history, Lefty had been in and out of prison several times on robbery offenses when he fell in with a group of young Brandeis students, who thought they could spur on a black revolution by stealing guns and money.

When the Boston police answered an alarm during a bank robbery with guns drawn, Patrolman Walter Schroeder was shot dead. Lefty maintained it was a ricochet of a warning shot, but he was tried and convicted of first-degree murder.

Initially sentenced to death, Lefty became a lifer when the U.S. Supreme Court briefly banned capital punishment in 1972. The students got sentences of no more than seven years.

In prison, Lefty became renowned as a jailhouse lawyer, putting together cases for other inmates. He settled disputes and became something of an elder statesman. "We loved the old man," Joe wrote.

When dementia set in, Lefty was already suffering from advanced Parkinson's disease and a host of other ailments. Inmates at Shirley Prison formed an ad hoc hospice team in their crowded ward. They brought special food from the prison commissary, heated it in an ancient microwave, and fed it to their dying friend. They helped him to the toilet and cleaned him up.

Joe tried to see that Lefty got a little sunshine every day, wheeling his chair out into the yard and sitting with his arm around Lefty to keep him from falling out.

After Lefty was placed in the medical bubble, his friends were denied contact with him. When Joe snuck in one day he found unopened food containers stacked up. Lefty said he couldn't open the tabs to get at the food. The stench of piss and feces was overpowering.

In September 2011, Lefty Gilday died in a Boston hospital. His friends sought permission to conduct a service in the prison chapel. Their request was denied. A chaplain helped put together a service in a classroom, which culminated in some 80 men sailing paper planes into the air in a symbolic representation to Lefty's spirit.

Younger Prisoners Not Told of Dementia

Other inmates with dementia are not as fortunate in their cellmates. John Feroli, in for murder, wrote to me about several lifers at Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgwater, Mass. They are housed in double cells with much younger prisoners who are never told about the old timers' ailments.

In one case the guy with dementia believed his cellmate was stealing his clothes and started a fight. His cellmate broke his jaw. Another thought his cellmate was pissing in his socks, so he smashed his cellmate's guitar and hit him over the head with it. He got knocked out in return.

John also wrote about another guy in his 70s, who was in solitary confinement because he failed to stand for the afternoon count. "He was on the third floor of the housing unit, he was partially paralyzed from a stroke and the batteries in his hearing aid were dead and he never heard the announcement for 'Count time.'"

At 73, Frank Soffen, convicted of armed robbery and second-degree murder, has spent more than half his life in prison. He has suffered four heart attacks, has kidney and liver disease, and can move about only in a wheel chair.

Because of his failing health and a record that includes once rescuing a guard threatened by other prisoners, Frank has been identified as a candidate for release on medical and compassionate grounds. He has a supportive family and a place to live with his son.

The Massachusetts Board of Parole voted to deny his release in 2006, and again this past January. He will not be eligible for review for another five years. Today, he is warehoused in a medical observation bubble at Norfolk State Prison, bed-ridden, unable to wash himself, clad in adult diapers, and unable to hold a pen.

In May, I went to visit Gordon Haas at Norfolk, some 70 miles south of Boston. Haas has been in prison since his 1975 conviction for murdering his wife and children. That conviction was overturned and a retrial ended in a hung jury. He was reconvicted in a third trial in 1982.

Since he has been behind bars, Haas has earned a master's degree from Boston University. Now at age 68, he is active in the prison’s lifers' group, which he now leads, and is pushing compassionate care legislation in the state legislature. Haas has been urging the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to adopt a hospice program for the last 15 years.

"Our contention is that since lifers will probably be in need of such care we [prisoners] are a resource for others now," he tells me. "But the DOC does not sanction prisoners helping other prisoners. There is one outlet and that is prisoners can volunteer to take those who can go outside for programs and fresh air, even those in wheelchairs. That is good, but that is all there is."

James Ridgeway wrote a longer version of this article for Mother Jones in cooperation with New America Media through a MetLife Foundation Journalists in Aging Fellowship, a collaboration of NAM and the Gerontological Society of America. He and Jean Casella recently received a 2012 Soros Justice Media Fellowship for their website “Solitary Watch,” [http://solitarywatch.com/], which tracks the “use of solitary confinement and other forms of torture in U.S. prisons.”

Immigrant Mothers--Living With a Heart Divided

2012-09-22T08:15:00Z

Traducción al español

As national media debate whether women can “have it all” – a successful career and a family – one group of women has chosen to provide for their families at all costs, even if it means leaving their kids behind.

They are the undocumented immigrants who work as nannies in the United States and who, in exchange for work, have paid a high emotional cost: living apart from their own children.

Many working mothers may be familiar with feelings of guilt. But little is known about the drama faced by undocumented nannies in this country -- mothers who love and care for other people’s children, while their own children are only able to reach them by phone because they are living back in their home country.

This is the story of three immigrant mothers: A Mexican woman who promised her kids she would come home soon but, because she hasn’t been able to, lives tormented by her broken promise. A Salvadoran woman who strives to give her kids material things because she can’t be there with them, instilling in them values and praising their accomplishments. And an Argentine woman who, after 14 years of separation, reunited with her children.

“My tiredness has been for nothing”

Gloria García, 43, likes to imagine a different reality. In the little time she has to herself, the undocumented immigrant wonders how her life would have been different if she had never left the town where she lived with her children.

In 2002, she migrated to the United States, fleeing a life of poverty and an abusive husband – and leaving her three kids, 11-year-old Edgar, 6-year-old Montserrat, and 4-year-old Jimena, in the care of their grandparents in the Mexican state of Michoacán.

“I came here because I didn’t have enough to feed my kids. I had nowhere to live because I was making so little money,” said García.

For this Mexican mother, saying goodbye to her children was one of the hardest moments of her life. She couldn’t find the right words to give her kids a sense of security in the face of an uncertain future. So she promised them that the separation would only be temporary. But 10 years have passed since then and García hasn’t been able to return to her country to see how her children’s faces have changed.

García is one of the 4.1 million undocumented immigrant women who are living in the United States, according to the study by Pew Hispanic Center, A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States.

She lives in Richmond, in the East Bay, and works as a nanny in San Francisco, where she makes $400 a week. It isn’t enough to meet all her needs; she sends $800 a month to her kids back home, and the rest of her salary goes to rent, food and transportation. Her workday lasts nearly 11 hours due to the tedious three-hour roundtrip commute she makes by bus.

“My tiredness has been for nothing,” says García with a hint of frustration. “I work as much as I can. When they call me I go, and I come back at night without eating dinner, without drinking water, or resting, after caring for kids and cleaning for seven hours in the hot sun without any food,” says the immigrant.

But her physical exhaustion is nothing compared to her emotional pain. The mother regrets moving away from her children; her absence has left scars that are harder to erase than hunger. “My son suffered because I could never go to his school; he told me his friends had their moms [there] and he didn’t,” García says.

One day she was on her way to work when she heard her phone ring. It was Edgar, her oldest son, lashing out at her in anger. “I’ll never forgive you,” he told her. “You said you were only going for a few years but you haven’t come back.”

García repeats her son’s words that continue to haunt her. “In those days I felt like I was dead, disoriented, frustrated and thinking, ‘I’m not worth anything.’”

In desperation, she started taking sleeping pills she got from other women. When she couldn’t get them anymore, she started looking for another kind of help. She eventually found help at Mujeres Unidas y Activas, a non-profit organization that provides counseling for women about labor rights and offers a meeting group for immigrant women to talk about their lives.

“There’s a lot of depression among domestic workers. A lot of them live with anxiety, fear and a permanent feeling of guilt. It’s common for them to get sick to the stomach. And all of that happens because of the very vulnerable condition they’re living in,” said Juanita Flores, program director of Mujeres Unidas.

García has found relief in prayer, she says, because she has faith that one day she will find a way to return to Mexico to see her children.

Nannies form a sector of workers that has been largely excluded from workers’ rights laws. A 2007 study entitled Behind Closed Doors, conducted by Mujeres Unidas among 240 household workers, found that 94 percent of workers interviewed were Latina, and the majority, 72 percent, were immigrants who sent money back to their families in their home countries. Twenty percent said they had experienced physical and verbal abuse and 9 percent said they had experienced sexual harassment.

Although the study did not ask respondents for their immigration status, many domestic workers are undocumented immigrants. Many of them don’t speak much English, don’t have a driver’s license, aren’t familiar with the culture and live in fear of being arrested and deported -- conditions, which according to experts, put them at greater risk for mental illness.

“Living in a different culture creates extra strain on immigrants, as they have to learn a new language and new customs. For patients living on the edge of independent functioning, it can be too much, resulting in depression, anxiety, or psychosis,” said Dr. Russell Lim, professor at the University of California at Davis and a specialist in transcultural psychiatry.

According to the California Domestic Workers Coalition, there are more than 200,000 domestic workers and nannies who lack the basic labor rights of all workers. But that could soon change if a California bill that already passed both houses of Congress is signed by Gov. Jerry Brown.

The bill, AB-889, will ensure that domestic workers have basic rights such as time for meals, overtime pay and uninterrupted sleep for those who live in the same house as their employers.

“If they deported me, they’d be doing me a favor”

Emma Delgado, 37, is happy to have a job that allows her to provide for her children and even give them some luxuries like 15th birthday parties for her two teenaged daughters living in El Salvador.

“Thank God both of my daughters celebrated their Quinceañeras and my Vanesa, when she called me to thank me, even cried with excitement,” said Delgado.

But the price she had to pay to be able to give her daughter a Quinceañera party was that she could not be there to see it.

“I just watched a video and I felt a lump in my throat and cried. It’s not easy to be separated from your children, but you have to make that decision to be able to pay for their education,” she said.

In 2003, Delgado crossed the border illegally and came to San Francisco to join her husband, who was unemployed. In Costa del Sol, her hometown in El Salvador, she had been a housewife. She raised chickens and relied on the money her husband sent her. But when her husband lost his job and the remittances stopped coming, she came to the rescue of her family’s finances.

She said her children were very young when she left. Fernando was 10 years old, Vanesa 8 and Chaterine 7. “I feel worse when I see the videos of my daughter as a maid of honor, a student council candidate or a cheerleader at school. When I see that, I think of everything I’ve lost,” says Delgado.

Delgado works in childcare and as a housekeeper. She makes an average of $15 an hour and sends her kids $600 each month. She is a member of Mujeres Unidas y Activas and in her spare time she volunteers for the organization, handing out flyers on workers’ rights to other women. One day she was asked to go to New York as part of her activism and the undocumented immigrant made the trip, defying immigration authorities.

“If they deported me, they’d really be doing me a favor because then I’d just have to go!” she laughs.

Dr. William Vega, an expert in Latino mental health at the University of Southern California, says that historically immigrants have been able to adapt and thrive despite their difficult living conditions.

But he says conditions for undocumented immigrants have gotten worse because they can no longer visit their families in their home countries. The same law that made it harder to cross the border illegally into the United States also made it impossible for undocumented immigrants in the United States to visit their families back home. “They are being denied the joy of seeing family and that is not a full life,” said Vega.

He said that keeping families together long-distance is a challenge because they are many miles and many years apart. “It doesn’t matter how much money they send their kids. In the end, it’s going to be really hard to make the connection because people keep changing,” Vega said.

“It’s like starting over”

Fernanda Areal, 51, returned to her native Argentina after living apart from her kids for 14 years. During that time, her three kids were raised by their grandmother.

The Argentine teacher, who gave up her professional career to work as a nanny in San Diego and Los Angeles, spoke by telephone about her recent reunion with her three kids.

What did she gain and what did she lose?

“It was worth it because now my kids are grown up, they are young people who already have their independent lives and they are very grateful. But we lost our way of physically expressing ourselves: My kids don't come give me kisses and hugs and sometimes that’s really needed,” says Areal.

In 1998 she quit her job as an elementary school teacher in Buenos Aires because her salary of $450 a month wasn’t enough to support her kids, 15-year-old Agustín, 13-year-old Fernando and 12-year-old Guillermo.

That year she flew with a tourist visa from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles, where she started working in childcare and cleaning public restrooms.

In 2005, she was hired by a family in Chula Vista, in San Diego County, to take care of their 40-day-old baby and his 4-year-old and 6-year-old siblings. For four years she did all kinds of work for them: she took care of the kids, cooked, cleaned, helped them with their homework and fulfilled their emotional needs. “It felt good knowing I was giving other children the care and love that I couldn’t give my own kids,” she says.

Her boss was a prominent Latina businesswoman who spent a lot of time away from home and Areal’s workdays stretched beyond eight hours. Despite this, her boss’s brothers started bringing their kids over for the nanny to take care of, without paying her extra for the job. Areal quit and found a new job as a nanny.

While she lived in San Diego, Areal talked to her kids in Argentina on the phone every day. But now that they are together, she has time to bond with them.

“Recently I was talking with my son and he said, ‘What good is a pair of Nikes if I could never tell you about the first time I kissed a girl?” said Areal.

After evaluating the pros and cons of her decision to emigrate, Areal said she is convinced that parents should be with their kids.

So was it a bad decision to move to the United States?

“Today I realize that if I had to do it out of necessity I would do it all over again, but if I could have seen, like in a movie, all the things I would have lost, honestly I wouldn’t do it,” Areal concluded.

This article was made possible by a grant from Atlantic Philanthropies and was produced as part of New America Media’s Women Immigrants Fellowship Program.

It appeared in Enlace and online at vidalatinasd.com.

Lack of Paid Sick Days for Immigrant Caregivers Risky for U.S. Economy

2012-09-05T16:00:00Z

SAN CARLOS, Calif. – Considering that Paula Osorio has multiple jobs and no paid sick days, the nosebleed could not have come at a worse time: right before her shift caring for an elderly woman in a private home.

In a nursing home or hospital, she would be able to lean on other caregivers. But the patient in her care, 91-year-old Elda Frank, has just her – Osorio, an immigrant from El Salvador.

Thankfully the two women, who have spent a lot of time together for five years, share a deep bond. Osorio cooks Frank’s favorite meals, bathes her and reminds her to take her medicine. Sometimes Osorio even visits Frank on her evenings off because she knows Frank is alone and needs help.

It is this tight-knit relationship that made her feel comfortable to call Frank’s son to suggest that Osorio’s partner, Roberto, go in her place. She then took the day off to go to the doctor.

“I think it’s fine because Roberto is very nice to my mom, too,” said Frank’s son Bruce, a 57-year-old computer engineer and father of three in Foster City. “I told Paula ‘to take the time that you need’, that if she can’t make it, I can find someone or go myself. ”

Osorio has two jobs: she works in Frank’s home during the week and cleans other houses on the weekends. In neither of these jobs is she able to earn paid sick days. When she is sick, she has to choose between going to work ill – and potentially putting the people she works with at risk -- or taking the time off to go to the doctor and lose a much-needed paycheck.

In 145 countries, businesses provide workers with paid sick days. But the United States isn’t one of them. Nearly 40 percent of U.S. workers lack access to paid leave to care for themselves or a sick family member.

A Shortage of Caregivers, Many Have No Paid Sick Days

America is suffering from a shortage of caregivers. And of the existing caregivers, many have no basic worker protections like paid sick days.

About one in every eight Americans is 65 or older, a rate that is expected to almost double by 2030 as baby boomers and Generation Xers age, according to the U.S. Administration on Aging. The number of adults requiring care is expected to balloon from 13 million in 2000 to 27 million in 2050, according to Caring Across Generations, a growing national movement anchored by the Domestic Workers Alliance and Jobs With Justice that has a coalition of over 200 organizations. (Disclosure: MomsRising, my employer, is a partner organization of Caring Across Generations.)

Already, many families are scrambling behind closed doors to care or find care for their loved ones while balancing jobs, other dependents – such as children in the home – and other responsibilities. As for the caregivers themselves, they are almost always an afterthought. No one considers what happens to them or their children when they become sick.

A whopping 62 percent of personal care and service workers lack a single paid sick day, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Besides the emotional and physical costs to caregivers’ families, the lack of a national paid sick days policy has been costly to all U.S. workers and the economy.

Federal legislation called the Healthy Families Act would require employers with 15 or more employees to earn up to seven paid sick days a year. If passed, the Healthy Families Act would expand access to paid sick days to 90 percent of private sector workers. But the bill has stalled in Congress.

Only one state (Connecticut) and a handful of cities (San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.) guarantee paid sick days to workers. These state and local laws allow workers to accrue paid sick time, typically an hour for every 30 hours worked. A study of the paid sick days law in San Francisco found that after the enactment of the legislation the city had a healthier workforce and actually experienced job growth compared to surrounding areas -- including San Mateo County where Osorio works -- that don’t have a similar law in place.

These findings contradict that of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business interests that claimed employees would “abuse the system.” Employees ended up using less than half of the days they had accrued, according to the report.

Yet, these same business interests continue to fight paid sick days laws both on the national and local levels. Their effects have been felt in every U.S. household requiring a caregiver.

“I knew a caregiver who needed a hysterectomy,” said Myrla Baldonado, a Filipina caregiver in the Chicago area. “She had to find and pay someone else out of her own pocket so that she could still have a job when she got out of the hospital….This situation of paying somebody to fill in especially when somebody is sick happens all the time. Caregivers keep it a secret that they are going for medical consultations or procedures that might make it appear that they have a serious illness which might cause them to lose their jobs.”

After much soul-searching, Baldonado recently cut back on caregiving to focus on advocating on behalf of caregivers. She is now on staff at the Latino Union of Chicago, although she still fills in for caregiving friends who need time off.

Baldonado said that caregivers are not only vulnerable to exploitive labor conditions but also illnesses in nursing homes and private homes that have sick residents. Due to the physical demands of the job – lifting an elderly person in and out of the bathtub, bed or wheelchair – these workers are also prone to injury.

Every year, employees who come to work sick – many because they lack paid sick days – cost the United States $160 billion. Low-income workers who don’t want to miss a day of pay are very likely to go to work sick, get injured or infect their co-workers and those in their care, which in turn affects other families, too. This is especially true during flu season.

Three years ago, the H1N1 flu pandemic swept through the nation, claiming at least 11,000 lives. What is especially astonishing is that according to research by the University of Pittsburgh, 5 million cases of the flu could have been prevented that year if the United States had simply had a paid sick days policy.

Who Is Caring for Mom?

Osorio is a spry 66-year-old woman, who, even though she is smaller than Frank, has no problem helping her out of bed or off the couch, or bathing her. No matter how unpleasant the task at hand is, Osorio is forever winking, smiling and joking with Frank. “What party are you going to this Sunday?” asked Osorio, who very well knew that Frank had her 91st birthday party coming up.

Osorio was born and raised in the small town of San Ildefonso in San Vicente, El Salvador, a region known for its breathtaking views of the volcanic peaks of Chichontepec. It is also an area of extreme poverty, dotted by multigenerational families living in shacks, barefoot and undernourished children playing with equally skinny and undernourished dogs, and it is not uncommon for poor single mothers to seek work in the country’s capitol San Salvador or the United States.

Osorio herself was raised by a beloved grandmother named Maria. Osorio said she spent her childhood days alongside her abuelita Maria, washing clothes in a river, making their own tortillas and soaps and sleeping outside in a hammock as her abuelita, a midwife, delivered babies.

“She was my mother and father,” Osorio said of her grandmother. “Even after her death, I still feel her in my heart.”

Maria Osorio delivered all four of her granddaughter’s babies and helped raise them until she died before the start of the country’s civil war in 1980. Between 1980 and 1992, the country was entrenched in a bloody civil war that claimed 100,000 lives in a country of six million. During this time, Osorio made tortillas to sell and provide for her four children. She was constantly worried that her daughters would be kidnapped by guerrilla soldiers.

Osorio recalled running home with an armload of wet laundry every time the guerrillas approached the river. Her daughters hid under their beds whenever unknown men came to their home. At times, guerrillas would ask that Osorio feed them. She refused. “I wouldn’t give them anything because I had to pay to make the tortillas!” she said.

It may sound like a gutsy move, but Osorio was very afraid, especially for her oldest daughter, Blanca, who she sent to live with other family members in San Vicente. Blanca would eventually make her way to the United States and send for her mother in 1992. To be with her daughter in California, Osorio would leave behind her three other children, including her youngest, a 12-year-old son named Rene.

“It’s hard,” Osorio said of having to leave behind her children. “I got here and I cried.”

An Opportunity for Immigrant Caregivers, American Families and Economy

“Paula has been a blessing,” Frank’s son, Bruce, said. “She has done so much for my mom. She will come over to see my mom at night out of her own free will. It is amazing what she does. We can’t ask for a better person for my mom.”

Prior to Osorio’s arrival, Frank said his mother went through at least two caregivers provided by the county. In between caregivers, it fell on him to care for his mother, who suffers from dementia, near blindness due to macular degeneration, a heart condition and limited mobility.

The thought of Osorio ever becoming ill troubles him deeply.

“Of course, we always worry,” he said. “If she doesn’t come in, who’s going to take care of my mom? In my mom’s case, she has me. But there are people who don’t have anybody.”

For Jodeen Olguin-Tayler, field director for Caring Across Generations, the aging of the baby boomers presents an opportunity to help both families and caregivers as well as strengthen the U.S. economy.

“Home care workers are sometimes the only support and care that elderly and people with disabilities can rely on to allow them to live at home with dignity and respect,” Olguin-Tayler said. “Ensuring that home care workers have dignified working conditions, including paid sick days, will create stability in the home care industry, and formalize the industry so that it can grow to meet the needs of our country and create the jobs our economy needs to get back on track.”

The U.S. taxpayer is already feeling the pinch of not putting in place basic worker protections like paid sick days. Research shows that paid sick days would decrease the number of stomach flu cases in nursing homes. In California, for example, between 30 and 45 fewer nursing homes would have norovirus outbreaks each year under a paid sick day policy – and these are the homes that are forthcoming about such outbreaks. In Denver, Colorado, which failed to pass a paid sick days policy earlier this year, there were 526 cases of norovirus stomach flu infections in nursing homes in 18 months. Five of these cases led to hospitalizations.

Considering that many of these seniors are covered by public insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid, the taxpayer should feel leery.

Paid Sick Days Makes a Difference in the Lives of Caregivers

When Osorio first arrived in California in 1992, she cared for two girls in Hayward. The girls’ mother was a nurse who not only paid Osorio when she was sick, but also took her to her clinic for treatment.

“They treated me so well,” Osorio said of the family. “We still keep in touch.”

Eventually, the girls would grow up and it was time for Osorio to find another job. For 10 years, she worked at an industrial Laundromat where she had full benefits, including health insurance. It came in handy. During that time, she contracted uterine cancer and had to miss six months of work for a hysterectomy and 28 treatment sessions.

“I have never dyed my hair,” Osorio said with a grin, as she parted the roots of her dark curly hair to prove it. “Even when I was treated for cancer, I didn’t lose my hair or go gray.”

Osorio credits her faith, relationship with Roberto and love of work that have kept her young during the most arduous moments of her life. Roberto has helped her over the years, whether emotionally or financially. Work has allowed her to sustain herself and send money to her children and grandchildren in El Salvador.

Recently, in Frank’s one-bedroom apartment in San Carlos, Osorio revealed a photo of the plaid-skirted and olive-skinned 11-year-old girl that keeps her going: Rene’s daughter -- her granddaughter -- Nicole.

Thanks in part to cash remittances from her grandmother, Nicole is attending a private school in San Salvador and not only learning how to read and write in Spanish – but in English, too. “Nicole tells me, ‘I am going to make something of myself,’” Osorio says assuredly.

With that, Osorio flashes her signature smile, tends to Frank and says a little prayer that she won’t get sick. “If something happens to me, who will take care of her?” she wonders aloud.

To learn more and take action on federal legislation for paid sick days, click here. To ensure that domestic workers, including immigrant caregivers, receive basic job protections, learn more about the Caring Across Generations campaign.

This story was made possible by a grant from Atlantic Philanthropies, and was produced as part of New America Media’s Women Immigrants Fellowship Program.

Years Later, Human Trafficking Survivors at Risk of Re-Exploitation

2012-08-30T16:30:00Z

Traducción al español

Pictured above: Lili Samad, a survivor of international labor trafficking, holds her three-year-old daughter. Photo by Jason Winshell / SF Public Press

When Lili Samad came to the Bay Area to work as a nanny for an Egyptian government official, she thought it was an ideal job. Instead, she said, she was forced to work long hours doing domestic chores and forbidden from contacting her family in Indonesia.

“First when I arrived there, they treated me like a prisoner,” Samad said.

After almost 3 1/2 years, for which she was paid just $1,000, she sought help from a neighbor she had met a few times. She said the neighbor concealed her in the back of a car and took her to a police station.

But after she escaped, Samad faced a whole new set of challenges: finding housing and a stable job to pay for it. Samad stayed with the neighbor for a few months before moving to the Asian Women’s Shelter, a San Francisco nonprofit that provides temporary housing for women who have suffered violence. There, case managers connected her to community rehabilitation services for victims. Still, the road to recovery was rocky. Over the course of six years, she lived in four temporary apartments before settling down in subsidized housing.

People trafficked into the country receive temporary government and nonprofit social service benefits after rescue or flight from captivity: shelter, health care, counseling, employment and legal help. But once these benefits term out, counter-trafficking specialists worry that victims, who generally have little work experience and weak social and family networks, could fall back into labor conditions as exploitative as the ones they fled.

As a victim of international labor trafficking, Samad received government help to stay in the U.S. But she is among hundreds of trafficking survivors each year who end up, months after getting help trying to build a new life, living in marginal housing and working in low-wage jobs.

Samad, who works part-time as a waitress at an elder care facility with her husband and lives in a low-income public housing unit in the Bay Area, said their combined income is only sufficient to pay for basic needs.

“We cannot spend on other things, so only food and rent,” she said.

From fiscal year 2002 through May of this year, the U.S. government issued 3,042 visas for trafficking victims, called T-1 Nonimmigrant Status visas, data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services show. These provide temporary protection and a chance to apply for permanent residency for those trafficked from foreign nations.

Experts say it is difficult to identify and quantify the number of victims in this country or those who are re-exploited. Not all victims of sex or labor trafficking seek help from government agencies or community groups. And international trafficking incidents in the U.S. are diverse. They can involve the exploitation of farm laborers by contracting companies, the abuse of domestic workers by foreign diplomats and the coercion of people into prostitution by pimps.

Traffickers — anyone who brings people to the U.S. through force, fraud or coercion — often hide victims in their homes, brothels, boats or other clandestine locations.

Risk of re-exploitation

A recent in-depth academic study by researchers at the University of Texas, Austin and North Carolina A & T State University, looked at women in Texas who had been trafficked from other countries. It showed that victims need targeted, long-lasting and culturally sensitive services to help them rebuild their lives.

Almost all of the women interviewed for the study now work in restaurants, hotels and other service jobs. This presents a challenge for their rehabilitation, said Noël Busch-Armendariz, director of the Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault at the School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin, and one of the authors of the report, published in the Journal of Applied Research on Children.

One of the long-term needs of trafficking survivors is acquiring new life and professional skills, so they can move toward jobs that give them more security and income, Busch-Armendariz said.

“If we don’t give survivors and their children ways to fully integrate, ways to be self-sufficient, they could continue to be targeted as somebody who could be exploited,” she said.

A 38-year-old single mother from the Philippines, who requested that her name not be used, said she came to the U.S. to work as a housekeeper for an ambassador from Africa more than three years ago. But as soon as she arrived in New Jersey, her employer seized her passport and work contract.

“The first thing that made me scared is they said their house is alarmed — if I open the door, the alarm will go off, and the police will arrive and take me away,” she said in her native Tagalog through an interpreter.

The woman said her employer paid her $1,000 per month for working 17-hour days, threw a fork at her in a fit of anger and made her scrub the kitchen when she was ill. “I was so scared,” she said. “I was always nervous. I was feeling sick.”

With the help of the ambassador’s driver, she contacted the Damayan Migrant Workers Association, a nonprofit group in New York City, which helped rescue her.

She said finding work has been difficult, and potential employers fear her trafficking background. She now works as a part-time nanny, but the pay is not sufficient to support herself.

“In truth, it’s short,” she said. “Not enough. My part-time work is just enough for the housing. There’s no health insurance.”

Community groups say survivors run the risk of re-exploitation if they work in sectors that are not properly regulated.

“This is especially true in the domestic worker industry, but any kind of informal sector where people are kind of more hidden from sight,” said Cindy Liou, staff attorney and coordinator of the Human Trafficking Project at Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that provides legal services for victims.

“It’s not uncommon that some of our clients sometimes come back to us with wage-and-hour questions, and we refer them out to the Employment Law Center and other places usually so they know their rights,” Liou said.

The benefits clock

County, state and federal governments offer a variety of temporary benefits to help smooth the way to rehabilitation for victims of international human trafficking.

Victims granted a T visa or continued presence status — a short-term immigration status from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — receive certification from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to access public benefits at the same level as refugees.

Benefits typically last eight months, and include cash assistance, health care, food stamps, job training, English courses, transportation passes and other services.

Some states, such as California and New York, have approved short-term benefits to assist trafficking survivors in the process of qualifying for federal benefits.

The maximum benefit for single adult T visa clients in San Francisco is $422 per month, which includes a county supplement of $105, said Josef Bruckback, eligibility manager of the state’s welfare program CalWorks at the Human Services Agency in San Francisco. Clients with children receive benefits through CalWorks and are eligible for services for up to 48 months.

“The overarching problem is that once they time out of those benefits, they’re really left on their own,” said Denise Brennan, associate professor and chair of the department of anthropology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “It’s a very short time frame. It’s not likely that they have built a social network that could fill in where the government support leaves off.”

Survivors generally find work in the same labor sector they worked in when they were trafficked, Brennan said, and it’s usually low-wage work, limiting their economic mobility.

“What I think is really quite concerning is that over time, some of the first T visa recipients who now have green cards are just treading water,” she said. “Just in the past six months, I’ve heard about some folks who have lost their jobs.”

Some rescued trafficking victims struggle to pay rent. “I’ve found that there are formerly trafficked people who sometimes stay in romantic relationships even after they’ve fallen out of love, because they just can’t really afford to move out on their own,” Brennan said.

Hurdles in finding housing

Trafficking survivors often have difficulty finding an economical place to live in the long term. Some migrate from shelters to transitional housing until they can secure an affordable room or apartment. Others find temporary accommodations by working as live-in nannies.

A 64-year-old woman, who requested that her name not be used because she feared her former captor, said she came to California from Peru, because her brother-in-law offered her work as a nanny to take care of his granddaughter. But he made her cook, wash, clean, garden and do other domestic work for about 14 hours a day, and restricted her from getting in touch with her family, she said.

“He invited me to come over here with the promise of work, and that he would support me in everything, but it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t true,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter.

After he released her from his house more than a year later, she found work as a nanny for a family in the Bay Area, who provided a space for her to stay in their home. She said she has lived in low-income housing apartments and has worked low-wage jobs at stores and cafes in the region since then.

She now earns $11 an hour working at a chain supermarket and lives in a subsidized apartment with her son.

Community organizations that provide shelter and rehabilitation services for international trafficking victims say finding both short-term and long-term affordable housing is difficult, and without proper housing, they could be at risk for re-victimization.

At the Asian Women’s Shelter in San Francisco, case managers start looking for housing once the victim has stabilized and recovered from the trauma, said Hediana Utarti, the group’s community projects coordinator. For trafficking survivors in the process of applying for a T visa, they look for housing that meshes with the government benefits.

“It’s very, very tight, but we would look for a place where maybe they can share with other people,” Utarti said. “Usually we are able to find something like a live-in situation, like help with the elderly.”

Those situations often work as barter: trafficking survivors provide support for elderly people who give accommodations in return. Survivors sometimes find these work opportunities on their own through friends.

While most of the time this type of arrangement works, employers have been known to abuse the trafficking survivors by making them do more work than they signed up for, or not giving any breaks during their shifts, Utarti said.

When this type of re-exploitation occurs, case managers advise the trafficking victims to talk about the situation with their employers. “If need be, then we’ll do intervention,” she said.

In San Francisco, case managers also work with the city to identify space in single-room occupancy hotels, and if the clients have children, they look for housing in transitional facilities, such as the Compass Clara House, Raphael House and Hamilton Family Center.

Clients can stay for up to three months, but the Asian Women’s Shelter provides extensions for clients unable to find housing, to ensure that they do not find themselves on the streets.

“If they end up in a homeless shelter, then they’re going to go back to the whole cycle again — re-abuse,” Utarti said. “And we don’t want to do that.”

This story was made possible by a grant from Atlantic Philanthropies and was produced as part of New America Media’s Women Immigrants Fellowship Program.

Fixin’ up Hoopa: A Community’s Struggle with Addiction--Part II

2012-06-14T10:10:00Z

Editor’s Note: Part I of this two-part series, along with the accompanying documentary short film, “Addiction and Renewal in the Hoopa Valley,” can be viewed here.

HOOPA, Calif. -- Jane judged drug addicts harshly, until she became one in her late 20s. Suffering from depression and mourning a lifestyle she worked hard to maintain for her family, she began smoking meth. Three years into her addiction, she continues on a cycle of cleaning up and relapsing. She’s not sure what it takes to quit for good, but she knows she has to want sobriety more than anything else, more than the drug itself.

“There are good people who use drugs and there are bad people who use drugs,” she said. “Just like there are good people who don’t use drugs and bad people who don’t use drugs.”

Like so many living on the Hoopa Valley reservation in Humboldt County, Jane is a good person. She grew up with the love of both parents. But, her childhood was far from easy. She waited in cars outside of bars and spent months at a time living with other family members while her parents entertained various addictions. Nonetheless she was raised to be a strong, productive member of the community. Even the strong succumb to meth.

Hoopa Tribal Police Chief, Bob Kane, sees it nearly every day. “How do you describe something that takes a sane person and turns them half insane?” he said.

The Hoopa Valley Tribe considers alcohol and controlled substances the most significant safety issue facing the community. They fear the greatest impact will be on the next generation—Hoopa’s at-risk youth.

The Tribe’s court estimates that alcohol or substance abuse is a factor in approximately 65 to 70 percent of eviction cases heard by the court, and 75 to 80 percent of child custody and divorce cases. In 2010 the court reported that alcohol or substance abuse was a significant factor in 80 percent of the child abuse and neglect cases heard on the reservation.

Crisis Driven System

Not only does the community struggle with addiction, the people struggle to come together to address the problem. Last year the Tribe applied for a grant through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) that would help bring together their various organizations for a collective response to the problem. They didn’t get the grant and funding continues to be an issue when providing substance abuse services to those in need.

“The Tribe’s approach has been focused on providing assistance to the already addicted person,” the Tribal Court wrote in a Community and Justice Profile. “This approach has been utilized out of necessity: the limited staff resources have been used to try and put out the biggest fires in hopes of stabilizing individuals, their families and the community. It’s a crisis driven system.”

The Tribe’s system consists of a court, a juvenile probation program, a police department, an Indian Health Service clinic and a human services and mental health department. Human Services is where most people seeking help turn. Some say the department does not meet their needs, others say the opposite.

Tonya Bussell-Linderman works at Human Services as a substance abuse counselor. She also works under an alcohol and substance abuse prevention program that began in 2010. She said most of the people seeking services through Human Services are court ordered or on probation. The Department facilitates intensive outpatient groups four days a week for two hours each day.

“It’s intensive,” she said. “A lot of education and a lot of working on one’s self goes on there.”

It is estimated that Human Services serves about 550 people per year, many of whom access help for substance abuse related problems. Although most arrive because of a court order, there are a few, like Jane, who walk in the door asking for help, either in a moment of desperation or planned self-intervention. Regardless, Bussell-Linderman said intake assessments are not done unless the individual in need has at least 24 hours clean and sober. Achieving 24 hours clean can be a real challenge for most suffering from an addiction.

Assessments are done as a way to identify the types of services a person may need. Assessments can also be used as a mechanism to track data about the problem in the Hoopa community. Because there are no inpatient treatment options in the local area, many referrals are made to the Friendship House in San Francisco and the Jordan Recovery Center in Crescent City.

All of Hoopa’s agencies working in the field agree there is a lack of support services and outpatient programs for those returning from treatment.

“Our community needs more aftercare,” Bussell-Linderman said. “If we had places for people to go, sober living and clean and sober housing to support them, I think we would be more successful. They need to have a place that’s safe.”

Jane’s first trip to Human Services was an act of desperation. “Everything was falling apart. I was falling apart. I didn’t know what else to do or where else to go,” she said. Little did she know it would still be a while before she would be fully ready to walk the path to recovery.

She went with the intention of getting a quick ticket to rehab. Instead of immediate admission, the team at Human Services explained the steps she needed to take before checking into a program. Some treatment programs require as many as 30-days clean and sober to weed out those who are not serious about their recovery. Beds are hard to come by at any treatment facility. If a bed opens it’s usually filled within 24 hours.

Jane began to attend an intensive outpatient group at Human Services. Although Human Services calls it an intensive outpatient group, Jane feels it’s nothing more than a support group for people in recovery. Nonetheless, the staff at Human Services saw she was committed to recovery and began to take steps to help get into a treatment program. Within a month, a bed opened at a popular Native American treatment facility. Jane stayed a little over three weeks there before repacking her bags and heading home. She stayed clean for a year-and-a-half, and hasn’t quit working toward recovery on her own.

A Higher Power

“Recovery is about finding your higher power and maintaining that relationship,” said Jane. “Once you’ve found your higher power; with faith and belief you can do anything.”

Eva Smith, a medical doctor at the Tribe’s Indian Health Service center, believes there is no recovery without spiritual recovery. She was also Jane’s medical doctor.

“When people go away to treatment, they’re beginning to get in touch with some of the hurts and pain they have,” she said. “For a lot there’s a light switch that seems to go off about connecting to spirituality.”

The Sweat Hogs – a group of men in recovery from the Hoopa Valley -- are finding that spiritual connection via a sweat lodge ceremony borrowed from the Great Plains tribes. The group comes together at least once a week to pray while drenching themselves in their own sweat. It’s a clean and sober sweat that serves individual spiritual needs while providing a network of support for participants, some young and some old.

Others on the reservation have found recovery in denominational churches, specifically the Shaker church—a unique blend of Christian denominations and Native American overtones.

Melodie George-Moore, a high school teacher and Hoopa ceremonial leader, also believes spirituality can be an important component to recovery. She explained that Hoopa ceremonies have long incorporated aspects of family medicine. “We have our traditions and old ways of healing,” she said. “And we do have our stories.”

George-Moore used an analogy to describe the impact substance abuse is having on the Hoopa community. “Drugs are attacking our family bonds. Think of a spider web and a central figure at the center of that web, and then the rays of the web coming from the center representing the various familial relationships,” she said. “Drugs come in and attack those family bonds—the rays of your web. The web is still there, but pieces are torn and that places pressure on the intact pieces of the web to do more.”

“We all have this latent ability to build webs—to rebuild these relationships. It takes one person to activate another person,” she said. “The threads of the web are still there if people want to pick them back up.”

The Grass Roots

In 2010 a group of community members got together to try to help repair a community thread on the web. They named their organization the Klamath-Trinity Anti-Drug Coalition (KTAC). Initially meetings overflowed with anywhere between 40 to 50 participants. Some were frustrated with burglaries, others with law enforcement, more were frustrated with the lack of prevention activities available to deter youth from falling into the drug trap.

The group meets monthly and meetings have now dwindled to about five dedicated participants. Quarterly meetings are held every three months where local agencies are invited to give updates on law enforcement activities. KTAC is now working to organize a symposium for local schools and agencies to come together on prevention efforts.

As the community grows more and more frustrated with the problem, a cure can seem further out of reach. But people like Dr. Smith believe there is hope for the future. She has faith in the strength of Hoopa people.

“There is a growing sense of intolerance that it’s not going to be OK anymore,” she said.

For Jane, recovery is slow. She’s struggling to get back into the community in a way people respect.

“This community is so small and so impacted by drugs,” she said. “Staying clean is almost impossible. It’s in your face. It’s in your family. It’s in your family and your friends. It’s everywhere and the community is one big judge. People begin to treat you differently and it’s difficult to establish yourself again.”

Jacob Simas of New America Media contributed to this report.

This series of articles was produced as a project for the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, a program of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Read Part I here, along with the accompanying documentary short film, “Addiction and Renewal in the Hoopa Valley.”

Prominent Scientist Loses Berkeley Homes After Prolonged Battle With City

2012-05-02T10:20:00Z

BERKELEY, Calif. – An eminent Bangladeshi American scientist, who helms a nonprofit organization attempting to mitigate the effects of arsenic in Bangladesh’s wells, lost a 12-year battle April 30 with the city of Berkeley to retain ownership of his homes.

Property owned by Rash B. Ghosh – founder of the International Institute of Bengal Basin (IIBB) – was sold in Alameda County Superior Court to developer Robert Richerson, who is associated with the Berkeley-based real estate company, Korman and Ng.

The parcel – two houses on one lot at the corner of Dwight and McGee that Ghosh bought in 1992 – sold for $265,000, far below the market rate of comparable properties in the area priced from $465,000 to $685,000.

Declared a “Public Nuisance” in 2001

Citing numerous code violations, Berkeley housing officials declared the structures a “public nuisance” in 2001 and then seized the parcel in 2009, evicting Ghosh and his tenants. Ghosh was homeless for some months, living on friends’ sofas until he was able to purchase his current home, which also faces imminent seizure by the city.

Ghosh believes he has been unfairly treated by the city of Berkeley in his prolonged battle to keep his homes. “I’ve been defrauded all the way,” he asserted, noting that he paid $160,000 in 2011 to a court-ordered receiver to bring the structures in compliance with the city’s housing codes.

“They made me do all the groundwork; I’ve had to sell so much property in Bangladesh to do that, and still I have lost my lifetime investment,” he said, accusing Berkeley housing officials of selectively enforcing code violations against him.

“This house is stronger than any property in the vicinity,” Ghosh stated, alleging that he spent over half a million dollars to repair and maintain the property in the 20 years he has owned it.

The structure on Dwight Way also served as office space for the IIBB and housed a small multi-denominational temple. IIBB has been relocated to Ghosh’s new home.

Ghosh continued to pay his $5,000 monthly mortgage on the contested property, even after he was evicted. He also continued to pay his property taxes.

Peter Smith, co-founder of the lSan Francisco-based law firm Dhillon and Smith, which specializes in real-estate, explained that people remain the owners of their property – even those in receivership – until a sale goes through. Therefore, Ghosh had to pay his mortgage and property taxes until this week’s sale to avoid foreclosure. The city was also allowed to bill him for repairs until the sale occurred, Smith said.

Nobel Laureate’s Plea Rebuffed

Ghosh's attorney, Michael Sims, filed an 11th-hour application for a stay in the sale of the property, and noted that his client was attempting to comply with the city’s requirements for repairing the structures.

But Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch approved the sale to Richerson, noting that Ghosh has had 12 years to make the required repairs.

“He has done absolutely nothing,” Roesch asserted, as he denied Ghosh’s application for a stay on the sale.

At the hearing, the judge also cut short a declaration from Nobel Laureate Charles Townes, who has supported Ghosh in his struggles against the city. The judge stated that Townes -- age 97 and an inventor of the laser -- was “singularly uninformed” about the case.

Ghosh is widely respected for having accomplished much of the early work on canopy chemistry – the role of trees in offsetting carbon released into the atmosphere, which contributes to global warming. His doctoral dissertation at the University of Salford in Manchester on the pollution of Liverpool’s Mersey River is also well regarded.

In his declaration, Townes, who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize for physics, wrote, “I have known Dr. Ghosh for many years and I am thoroughly impressed by his selfless dedication to the remediation of ground and surface waters throughout the world. He is a man of the greatest integrity who has dedicated his life to his cause.”

Townes alleged in his letter that the city of Berkeley was selling the property at “a sixth of its value, with little public notice, to a zoning board member, which may be a conflict of interest.”

No known staff member of the Korman and Ng real estate company sits on Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB). However, Miriam Ng, co-founder of the firm, was appointed to Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) in April 2011 by city councilmember David Moore. ZAB and the LPC have frequently collaborated on land-use determination issues in Berkeley.

Richerson subsequently closed escrow and took ownership of the Ghosh properties, but he refused to comment on the sale for publication. Berkeley Deputy City Attorney Laura McKinney also would not comment on Roersch’s ruling.

Ghosh said he now plans to appeal.

“Unattached Stairs and Bootlegged Work”

Superior Court receiver Ben McGrew, who was paid $160,000 by Ghosh for repair work, said in an interview, “This is one of the worst properties I’ve ever dealt with. The property inside is in deplorable condition, with unattached stairs and a lot of bootlegged work.”

McGrew went on, “There were very serious structural deficiencies, including electrical wiring issues, which had not been addressed by Ghosh.” He added that Richerson would have to spend at least $250,000 to get the parcel to the point where it would meet city requirements.

City housing officials also wanted Ghosh to tear down an additional storey he had added to the Dwight Way structure without proper permits.

Reporters examined the exterior of the property on April 25, and found it to be in appalling condition. Although the house facing McGee Street bore external signs of recent renovation, including new electrical wiring, the structure abutting Dwight Way had many rusting appliances housed in its weed-choked backyard, which also stored rotting floorboards and other detritus. Gang graffiti adorned its façade.

But Ghosh’s contractor, Nick Saadi, contended it would have been easy enough to fix all the issues the city had with the properties, which he believed were largely cosmetic.

“It is very unfortunate that he is losing his buildings. Here is a man who is 68 years old, who has done some very important work in his life. We must help him,” said Saadi. He continued that he has worked on homes in much worse shape where the owner has been allowed to retain his property.

The Berkeley City Council will hold a hearing June 8 to determine whether Ghosh should get back the $160,000 he paid to McGrew for repairs.

Photo: By Sunita Sohrabji, India-West

This article was a collaborative project by Sunita Sohrabji, a staff reporter at India West, and Viji Sundaram, an editor at New America Media.

Human Trafficking a Growing Global Scourge

2012-02-24T09:00:00Z

On the 900-mile trek of mostly desert that stretches between Eritrea and Egypt, hunting for humans has become routine.

Eritrean refugees who have fled their homeland fall prey to Bedouin or Egyptian traffickers. The refugees are held for ransom. Those with relatives abroad who can pay for their release might survive. Those who do not are often killed. The United Nations confirms that some are harvested for their organs — their livers and kidneys sold on the black market — while others, the young and able, are sold off. One survivor told the U.N., “People catch us, sell us like goats.”

Slavery is alive and well in the 21st century. There are more people enslaved today than at any other time in history. The U.S. State Department says that estimates of those enslaved through human trafficking ranges from 4 million to 27 million.

Human trafficking is the fastest-growing criminal business in the world, according to the State Department. It ranks only second to drug trafficking in profitability, bringing in an estimated $32 billion annually. The majority of those trafficked are young adults between ages 18 and 24 — but children also make up a large part of it. Almost all have experienced either sexual exploitation or violence, often both, during their time being enslaved.

But the statistics can be disputed. The United Nations notes that “the lack of accurate statistics is due only in part to the hidden nature of the crime, and that the lack of systematic reporting is the real problem.” In other words, the number of those trafficked worldwide might be far greater than what is estimated.

What we do know is that traffickers practice the trade with relative impunity. In 2006 there were 5,808 trafficking prosecutions and 3,160 convictions worldwide, which would mean that one person is convicted for every 800 people trafficked.

Though most of those trafficked are exploited for their labor or are thrown into sexual servitude, the area that’s particularly grotesque is the organ trade. One human rights lawyer who did not want to give his name said cases involving the removal of human organs for transplantation are more miserable than those involving genocide.

“At one end someone is killed for their organs, which in some perhaps overly theoretical way is worse than murder,” he said. “In the latter, the victim’s death is at least a motive — the murderer seeks to kill a human being. In the former, the victim is merely a box containing an object, and the murder is merely the process of throwing out the box and wrapping.”

The international commodification of humans is becoming the new norm of our age. In Bangkok, Thailand, a “baby factory” was discovered last year in which more than a dozen Vietnamese women were impregnated (some were raped), and their babies were sold for adoption. Whether or not the babies — unregistered, non-existent in the eyes of the law — were truly adopted, raised to be slaves or farmed out for body parts is not known.

What is certain is that Vietnam, like many other impoverished countries with a growing population of young people, has become a major supply country, where vulnerable young women and girls are in high demand on the international market. In certain bars in Ho Chi Minh City, rural girls are routinely trucked in to parade at auction blocks. The girls are often naked except for a tag with a number on it, and in the audience are foreigners — South Koreans, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese are the main consumers — who call them down for inspection. They leave together under the pretense of marriage after the paperwork is done, but many end up in brothels or sweatshops instead.

Diep Vuong, executive director of Pacific Links Foundation, an organization that works to combat human trafficking by providing education to the poor in Vietnam, is pessimistic. Overpopulated and dwindling in resources, Vietnam is full of young, uneducated people.

“The only resource we have left in abundance are the humans themselves,” she noted wryly. “We’re moving toward the Jonathan Swift version of reality.”

While children of the poor are not being eaten as Swift sarcastically suggested, they are being abducted and enslaved. They work in the fields as slave laborers as in the Ivory Coast’s cocoa plantation where half a million children work and provide 40 percent of the world’s chocolate — something most of them have never tasted. Or they are abducted at ages as young as 5 in Uganda and forced to become soldiers. Or they work in the carpet and brick factories of South Asia, many shackled and branded by their masters. Those too weak to work are killed off and thrown into rivers.

Closer to home, border drug cartels have incorporated the lucrative human trade into their business, and in some parts of Mexico they have the tacit support of the local authorities. Mass graves were discovered last year full of migrants’ corpses. Their crime: They weren’t worth much alive.

The forces of globalization have only intensified the trade in humans. After the Cold War ended, borders became more porous. New forms of information technology have helped integrate the world market. Increasing economic disparity and demand for cheap labor have spurred unprecedented mass human migration. The poor and desperate fall prey to the lure of a better life.

Nongovernmental organization workers who battle trafficking often describe victims as being “tricked.”

In March 2004, eBay shut down sales when it discovered that three young Vietnamese women were being auctioned off, with a starting bid of $5,400. Their photos were displayed. The “items” were from Vietnam and would be “shipped to Taiwan only.”

“I was browsing on the Internet and this guy kept trying to chat with me,” one Vietnamese teenager rescued from a brothel in Phnom Penh recounted. “There’s a coffee shop in Cambodia. He said I could make money over there.”

They crossed the border from Vietnam to Cambodia, and she soon became enslaved. She was saved in a police raid, just as the traffickers were planning to move her again. The madam “was waiting for more girls to show up to ship us to Malaysia,” she said. Her fake passport had already been made.

The trafficking network is sophisticated and well organized, and if the lure of money and a better life elsewhere becomes the entrapment of the poor and vulnerable, the abundance of cheap labor coupled with an atmosphere of impunity becomes the seduction for others to become traffickers.

“A slave purchased for $10,000 could end up making her owner $160,000 in profits before she dies or runs away,” Siddharth Kara noted in a talk on sex trafficking at the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University. In fact, a child in Vietnam can be bought for as little as $400.

Slavery is not going away because the agony of human enslavement remains largely invisible in the public discourse. It is just as shocking that Eritrean refugees are hunted nightly by traffickers as it is that their story remains hidden in darkness.

NAM editor Andrew Lam is author of "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres," and "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora." His next book, "Birds of Paradise," is due out in 2013.

U.S. Visas Aid Trafficking Victims, At Their Peril

2012-02-22T09:00:00Z

Zoraida Peña Canal, left, was trafficked from Peru to be a domestic servant in Walnut Creek. Lawyer Avantika Rao guided her through the complex T visa program. Peña Canal prevailed, without law enforcement certification of her case. Photo courtesy of Avantika Rao.

A special visa created 12 years ago to save thousands of victims of human trafficking and curb international human trafficking has been vastly underutilized.

Attorneys for rescued victims seeking residency protection say law enforcement agencies are often unwilling or slow to “certify” victims’ claims of having been brought to the U.S. to work by force, fraud or coercion.

Legal experts and social service providers in high-trafficking regions, including the San Francisco Bay Area, suggest that victims are placed in a dangerous dilemma: Promising to cooperate with an investigation could possibly help their visa cases, but it could also expose them and their families back home to retaliation.

One result is that victims only apply for a fraction of the visas available each year. Last year the government received one-fifth of its quota, and of the applications received nearly 23 percent were rejected.

Lawyers and service providers for trafficking victims said the lack of assistance from law enforcement slowed or derailed what they called deserving applications. In one case, a domestic servant who worked 16-hour days for no pay for years earned a T visa with the help of a crusading lawyer despite the lack of certification by federal law enforcement officials.

Created by the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, the T-1 Nonimmigrant Status visa provides trafficking victims from foreign countries temporary legal status, with an opportunity to apply for permanent residency and access to federal benefits if they cooperate with law enforcement in the investigations of their traffickers. Minors and those unable to participate in investigations because of physical or psychological trauma are excused, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that adjudicates the visa applications.

Data supplied by the agency reveals that only a few hundred T visas have been issued each year since the program began, despite a yearly quota of 5,000 available. According to the agency, in the last fiscal year 557 T visa applications were approved and 223 were rejected.

The original federal trafficking law, authored by Rep. Christopher Smith, R-New Jersey, has been reauthorized three times, and revisions have included lowering the visa qualification standards and increasing services available to trafficking victims.

Scholars specializing in international human trafficking laws say the program is flawed because the help it offers victims is hinged on their willingness to assist in the investigations.

“It would be much better to have a system where your protections were not dependent on you giving evidence against the person who trafficked you, which is the case for children,” said Jacqueline Bhabha, director of research at Harvard University’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights.

Helping Law Enforcement

The T visa application encourages applicants to submit “primary evidence” of their cooperation, which consists of a law enforcement certification that they have agreed to support investigations of their traffickers.

Attorneys and social service providers who work with T visa applicants say obtaining the certification is often an impediment in the application process.

Zoraida Peña Canal was trafficked from Peru to be a domestic servant in Contra Costa County five years ago. Sacramento attorney Avantika Rao helped her obtain a T visa, even though she said she was unable to get certification from law enforcement.

Peña Canal entered the U.S. in July 2006 to live with and work for a Walnut Creek family. She was put to work from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. each day for no pay caring for two children and doing chores, though her employer assured her that she would be paid.

Rao said Peña Canal escaped with the help of three neighbors. She learned about Peña Canal’s case when she was working at La Raza Centro Legal, a San Francisco-based organization that provides legal services to immigrants and low-income people.

Rao said in an email that law enforcement denied the certification though her client was doing everything possible to cooperate in the investigation.

“Ms. Peña Canal and I met with law enforcement agents and the U.S. Attorney’s Office on at least a dozen occasions during which Ms. Peña Canal provided physical evidence as well as testimony with regards to the crime,” Rao said.

After a series of requests to the U.S. Attorney’s Office to supply the certification, she was notified in September 2008 that the office would not provide the document.

“I was absolutely devastated by their decision, especially because they implied that they did not trust my client and did not view her case as important,” Rao said.

She submitted the T visa application anyway, without the certification. The lack of certification, she said, places “a much higher burden on the victim’s advocate to insert more details and documents in the T visa application, all of which are potentially discoverable by counsel for the trafficker in a legal proceeding.”

Despite these hurdles, Peña Canal’s T visa application was approved in January 2009.

Peña Canal relocated to San Francisco, where she now can be legally employed. She works as a janitor at a San Francisco company, cares for seniors in their homes and cleans houses on a referral basis.

Fear of Retaliation

Government agencies denying certification for T visa applicants is a common theme. Hilary Chester, associate director of anti-trafficking services at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, said law enforcement officials stalled on signing the certification for a client who was trafficked from El Salvador.

“I think what still bothers me personally is this notion that so much weight is given to the law enforcement piece, and that there is this requirement that a person be willing to cooperate in the prosecution,” Chester said. “I think it’s slippery.”

Her client did receive a T visa — more than two years later.

Legal service providers said that in addition to the hassle of getting law enforcement’s blessing, trafficked individuals also fear that applying for the visa may subject their families back home to threats.

“I think the biggest concerns are not so much fear in reporting the trafficking or talking to law enforcement about what’s happened, but it is very scary to be in a situation where they may potentially have to confront their traffickers in court — and the fears of retaliation for family back home,” said Lynette Parker, clinical supervising attorney for the immigration program of the Katharine and George Alexander Community Law Center, based at Santa Clara University.

“One of the biggest challenges for us is to identify NGOs on the ground in the home countries that can help give information and provide safety to the families,” she said, adding that many non-governmental organizations provide services to victims in coordination with U.S. groups.

Some clients are also apprehensive about going through with the investigations because of the stigma they and their families might face in their communities if U.S. investigators start asking questions abroad, as the FBI does occasionally.

Hediana Utarti, community projects coordinator at the Asian Women’s Shelter in San Francisco, said she had a case in which a family brought a young woman to the U.S. from Asia by promising her work as a cook and offering to send her to school. She said the woman did cook, but was also forced to participate in sex parties in the family’s home.

Utarti said that when the trafficking survivor applied for a T visa, law enforcement officials interviewed her, and they contacted her client’s siblings in her home country for the investigation.

“So it’s very scary for that person to have that situation where there are a lot of people talking about you,” Utarti said.

Steven Merrill, a supervisory special agent at the FBI’s San Francisco office, said agents sometimes travel to home countries of trafficked victims, but it is rare.

He said the hardest part for investigators in trafficking cases is that in many cases victims are unwilling to share their stories of victimization.

“There’s a variety of reasons why that may be, but that will always remain a difficulty from the FBI and any other law enforcement’s perspective in accomplishing our mission to put human traffickers — to convict them in court,” Merrill said.

Success Stories

In cases in which the T visa program works, it offers trafficking victims freedom to emerge from oppressive situations and live and work in the country.

A 63-year-old Bay Area woman who was trafficked from Peru to the U.S. by her brother-in-law said she was paid $80 every 15 days for working at his house in Los Angeles.

The woman, who requested anonymity for fear that her trafficker might track her down, said in an interview that she worked about 14 hours a day, seven days a week. She said he forbade her from contacting her family in Lima, Peru.

“They didn’t want me to answer the phone, they didn’t want me to call my children on the phone,” she said. “I would never receive a letter from my kids. Nothing. They didn’t want me to go to church either. I am Catholic, so I wanted to go every Sunday, but they didn’t want me to go to the street, leave the garden. They didn’t want me to go out at all.”

After fleeing the situation, she was helped by the attorneys at Santa Clara University to obtain a T visa, and she is now free to live and work in the U.S.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has sought to raise public awareness of the T visa program. Sharon Rummery, the agency’s spokeswoman in San Francisco, said her office has provided training nationwide to law enforcement, community-based organizations and the media, to explain the T visa and similar programs.

“We very much want people to know that the T is available, people to understand what it means to be trafficked,” she said. “Some people may not even know that they’ve been trafficked.”

Overcoming Isolation

Some human trafficking experts said that building a life in the U.S. after receiving a T visa is challenging for survivors because they feel isolated, and have trouble finding long-term housing and accessing victim services.

Denise Brennan, an associate professor and chair of the anthropology department at Georgetown University, said that in contrast to trafficking survivors, political and economic refugees tend to settle in communities where others from their communities are located.

“Generally speaking, refugees, they are not moving to a community completely alone,” Brennan said. “Formerly trafficked persons generally are resettled alone in communities that are not made up of formerly trafficked persons. In fact, no one would know that they were trafficked unless they told them.”

Some Bay Area advocates for trafficking survivors said that finding long-term housing after escaping is also problematic.

Mollie Ring, chief of programs at Standing Against Global Exploitation, a nonprofit group that provides services to trafficking victims, said it is tough for her clients to find affordable housing in San Francisco after they leave short-term, transitional housing.

Victims, she said, face a dilemma: “A client sometimes leaves the Bay Area in order to find a reasonable quality of life. But that means that they are disconnected from services. So it’s some of the Catch-22 there.”

Monica Jensen contributed additional reporting for this article.