Saturday, March 31, 2012
WEEK SIX BLOG ENTRY:
If you don't mind talking about it, when did your family arrive in the United States? On my mother’s side, they arrived in the 1600s from England. On my father’s side, they arrived from Germany in the 1880s. How does where you come from dictate who you are?
WEEK SIX READING
SOURCE: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-deportation-story,0,6963488.htmlstory
Could he be a good American?
Guatemalan man with a U.S. family is threatened with deportation.
Richard Fausset
June 4, 2011
Reporting from Chapel Hill, N.C. — On a bright Saturday morning, Emily Nelson Guzman packed a beet-red Prius for the journey that would take her once more to Lumpkin, Ga., with its forlorn town square and sleepy barbecue joint and the nation's largest immigration detention center.
Her husband was there, locked away. Nineteen months earlier, federal agents had arrested him in his yard.
She loaded into the Prius a bag holding the old tight jeans she could finally squeeze into again, the ones she would model so he could see, through the visitation window, how much weight she had lost.
She loaded in another bag, full of action figures -- the Shazams and Spider-men and Power Rangers her little boy pretended to be when he fantasized about setting his father free.
THE NEW LATINO SOUTH
The Latino population in the South has grown dramatically over the last decade. This is one in a series of occasional stories chronicling the lives of Latinos in a changing region.
Pedro Guzman's bag, a small Old Navy backpack, had already been packed and stowed away in a locker at Stewart Detention Center. It was the only luggage he would be allowed to take to his native Guatemala if a federal immigration judge, in a hearing two days hence, rejected the argument that Pedro had transformed from gang member to good American, a family man who had earned the right to live in the United States.
At the hearing, Emily would have a chance to vouch for his character. So would her mother. So would Pedro himself.
Emily's mother, Pamela Alberda, brought out a bag of turkey sandwiches from her boyfriend's house. The boyfriend improvised something on the piano. The music spilled out into the driveway, urgent and sad, like the day itself.
“I really, truly do not know what will happen,” Emily had written on her blog. “He will be freed or sent to a country he does not know.”
She is a family therapist, 34, white and Midwest-born, with a voice as plain as milk. A dozen years ago, she fell in love -- and discovered that the object of her affection had been smuggled across the border by his mother when he was 8 years old.
She also discovered that his immigration issue would not be solved by marrying a U.S. citizen.
A wife's devotion
When Emily met Pedro, he was a sweet kid at a bus stop, a 19-year-old high school dropout on his way to one of his two restaurant jobs, a lost soul who escaped the street life of San Luis Obispo and had gone to Minneapolis hoping for a fresh start.
He had covered up his watch on that first meeting, giving himself an excuse to ask the time. She answered in a confident Spanish perfected during a study-abroad year in Mazatlan.
Soon there was passion and friendship, and trust. He told her about his old life: He had run with a gang, but it was minor-league hooliganism, he assured her. It was San Luis Obispo, after all, not Los Angeles.
There was a small wedding, despite her parents' initial reservations, and a move to North Carolina. In between came Logan, now 4 years old, with his big brown eyes and head of loose black ringlets and little fists that pounded his mother when his father's absence drove him to fits.
Emily knew that most women in her position didn't have the means or the connections to publicize their cases.
But she had her blog, “Bring Pedro Home.” He had been the subject of a postcard campaign and an online petition drive. They had retained an Atlanta lawyer who arrived at hearings in a big silver BMW.
And she had formed alliances with the South's small core of pro-immigrant activists, the Mennonites and liberation theology types with their earnest bumper stickers and their belief -- inspiring to some, naive to others -- in a justice that transcends borders.
The drive from North Carolina would take her through a changing South, where pro-Dixie bumper stickers vie for attention with the billboards for restaurants named El Molcajete, and roadside signs like the one in Columbus, Ga., asking, Necesita un Trabajo? Need a Job?
Lumpkin's Stewart Detention Center is itself a sign of the region's transformation, with 1,400 detainees, most of them culled from Georgia and the Carolinas, a rotating cast of Juans and Miguels and Manuelitos. Somebody's father, somebody's son. The ones who were angels and the ones who should probably be kicked out. The ones who fell somewhere in between.
Activists have targeted the privately run detention center and had held up Pedro, 31, as an example of the kind of good person being ground down by a misguided immigration policy. Emily told them about the injustice of his case -- about the judge who declined to grant Pedro legal residency, or even bond, citing two marijuana arrests from when he was a teen.
And yet, despite her allies and advantages, Emily had never felt more pessimistic about Pedro's case as they rolled out of Chapel Hill. She knew there was a kink in his story of redemption.
Unfortunate events
The day before they left North Carolina, Emily took Logan to his therapy session. She and a social worker watched him play Candyland, and invent the rules as he saw fit. This was something he could control, unlike the situation with Pedro.
In a previous session, he reconstructed the night in September 2009 when immigration officers came to his house. A crowned prince action figure, hidden inside a dollhouse, served as his father.
They had come on a Friday at 4 a.m. and banged on the door, but Pedro did not come out. They returned Monday morning. The boy watched as Pedro, surprised, made a brief and hopeless attempt at flight. He watched as his father was handcuffed and loaded into a black SUV.
Pedro had been legal once, with an annually renewed work visa. But when he reapplied by mail in 2008, he was sent back a letter of rejection.
His elderly mother, for reasons not fully clear, had recently been denied legal residency. And because she had filed a 1988 asylum application listing Pedro as a dependent, his fate was tied to hers.
His mother left the United States for good, and the government sent a letter ordering Pedro to court. He says he never received it. The government then ordered him deported.
Being the spouse of a U.S. citizen didn't help much. Emily could petition for him to become a legal resident, but in that scenario, an attorney told her, Pedro would have to leave the country before being accepted for reentry. He would also have to obtain a special waiver because of his arrest record. She was advised that his chances would be slim.
Instead, Pedro took hope in a Clinton-era immigration law that extended legal resident status to some immigrants from a handful of troubled countries. To prevail, he needed to show that his deportation would create an “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” for him and his family. He also needed to demonstrate good moral character.
In December 2009, the immigration judge cited the pot convictions, both misdemeanor possession cases, in ruling that Pedro's character was suspect. Since then, one case has been vacated and the family's attorney, H. Glenn Fogle Jr., has successfully appealed the immigration judge's ruling, winning Pedro another chance.
But two days before the road trip to Lumpkin, Fogle had sent Emily a worried email. He had been taking a closer look at Pedro's papers. What was this about a hit-and-run from 2008?
The hit-and-run. Her heart sank. She thought it was a non-issue, something that wouldn't appear on Pedro's record. It wasn't something she tended to bring up when she told his story to her activist allies.
Emily told her lawyer that the incident wasn't as bad as it sounded. But she knew that “hit-and-run” could sound bad to a judge.
According to the Justice Department, roughly 75% of the people who appeared before an immigration judge in the last fiscal year were ordered removed. Before the email from her lawyer, Emily had put Pedro's chances at 50-50. Now, she had to admit to herself, it seemed more like 10-90.
And yet the trip to Lumpkin was still on. If nothing else, she and Logan needed one last visit before Pedro was put on a plane for Guatemala City, alone, with his one allotted bag.
After therapy, Emily and Logan returned to their little wreck of a rental home in Durham. Pedro had been the cook, the housekeeper, the fix-it man. Now vegetation clogged the gutters. The mailbox was bent sideways and full of carpenter bees. The doorknobs had broken on the bedroom and bathroom doors. Not knowing how to fix them, Emily removed the knobs, leaving holes with naked bolts.
She met her mother and mother's boyfriend, Milo Fryling, 49, at a Thai place for dinner. Pamela, 54, is a preschool teacher and puppeteer who wears “Life is Good” T-shirts. But she had taken a dimmer view of a system that refused to free the father of her grandson.
In November, she was arrested for criminal trespass during a pro-immigrant rally at the detention center.
“I woke up this morning,” she said to her daughter, “and thought, 'There's going to be no justice.'”
The Carolinas passed in a blur of rest stops and billboards. Then it was into Georgia, where, a day before, Gov. Nathan Deal had signed an Arizona-style bill to crack down on illegal immigration.
They arrived in Lumpkin long after dark and spent the night at El Refugio, a modest rental house activists offer as a “refuge” for families visiting the detention center. With its bunk beds, frayed paperbacks and National Geographic maps of Latin America, it had the feel of a backpacker's hostel. Lumpkin has no hotels.
The next morning, they were among the first visitors at the detention center, a white, blocky complex ringed by fencing and concertina wire. More visitors would come soon, mothers and brothers and aunts and sisters, dressed smartly, as if for a casual church service, all murmuring in Spanish.
Pedro emerged from a door, on the other side of the visiting room's glass partition. His big dark eyes matched his son's.
The boy beamed. With feet planted on a table, he slammed the top of his head against the glass. His father did the same. They smiled, and then slammed again, in unison, like bucks in the woods, the vibrations the next best thing to a touch.
Emily stood and pirouetted in her tight jeans. Pedro grinned and bowed at the waist for comic effect. The boy commandeered the phone. Emily let him spend most of the hour talking about things important to a boy.
Pamela spoke to her son-in-law briefly. We love you, she said.
Pedro told her he figured his chances were slim. Pamela did not correct him.
“We're just trying to be realistic,” she said.
The boy and Pedro played hide-and-seek until the guard announced that time was up.
“Hide under the table,” Emily told Pedro in Spanish. He ducked.
Logan pretended to wonder where he was.
They returned to El Refugio and rested. At one point, Milo wandered Lumpkin looking for a piano. In an unlocked church, he found a Steinway, and banged out pieces from a Methodist hymnal.
In the morning, Pamela read Milo a letter she had written to God:
“I know that we are not perfect and that Pedro has made mistakes in his life. But the price he has paid has been greater than he deserves. In a world where people fight and argue and are often filled with hate and fear, this small family are loving and faithful.”
The hearing was in a tiny detention center courtroom, its wooden pews scratched with “Jorge,” “Cancun XIII,” “Zacatecas,” “LA.”
Pedro, dressed in blue prison garb, took the stand. There were three small tattooed dots on his left hand, above the thumb. Mi. Vida. Loca. My crazy life -- reminders of his life in the streets.
Pedro told Immigration Judge Dan Trimble that he couldn't remember when he left Guatemala. He had no friends or family there.
He described his work history: restaurant upon restaurant, group home worker, truck driver, and, after his work permit was denied, stay-at-home dad -- “the best job I ever had in my life.”
There was the question of the pot busts -- teenage indiscretions, he said, that he deeply regretted.
Soon after his move to Minnesota in 1999, there was a misdemeanor charge of theft. “I don't remember doing it,” he said.
There was another arrest for destroying property around the same time. Pedro said it was a big misunderstanding, that he was only going to retrieve his own stuff from a drunk roommate.
He described how he met Emily, and how she had taught him to be a better man. He spoke of his bond with his son. Deportation, Pedro said, would mean “taking my soul away, everything I worked for, everything I made.”
He explained the hit-and-run from 2008. It was nighttime on a North Carolina country road. He felt a thump on his FedEx truck, and thought it was a deer. He stopped, looked around, called out. Nothing. He returned in his truck, and a second time, with Emily.
A police officer met them at the scene and said Pedro had hit a man. It was a cyclist, a physician training for a triathlon. The man had cuts and bruises, and what his lawyer, Edward J. Falcone, would later describe as a “fairly significant” head injury. (Falcone says the cyclist has ongoing neck and shoulder pain.)
Pedro was booked at the station. He later pleaded guilty to failing to stop after an accident with an injury. It went on his record as a misdemeanor.
Pamela testified next, describing how Pedro had been caring for her elderly and ailing mother.
Then it was Emily's turn. She deposited the boy on Pamela's lap and took the stand. Logan's eyes were blank and glassy, like a doll's.
Her voice was small. And soon it cracked.
Emily said she and Pedro had changed each other for the better. She said he was a compassionate man and a better father than anyone she knew.
The boy was suffering, Emily said. He was in therapy. He didn't understand why this was happening.
She told the judge she had battled depression, attempting suicide at 16.
She said she no longer needed antidepressants after she met the sweet Guatemalan boy at the bus stop. Now she could feel the black dog nipping again.
I need Pedro, she told the judge. Logan needs him.
Aminda Katz, the Department of Homeland Security's attorney, laid out the case against Pedro Perez Guzman dispassionately.
There was arrest after arrest after arrest. There was a $915 fine, apparently for a probation violation. There was a matter of tax filings. He had started working in the late 1990s when he dropped out of school to help his mother. But the IRS had filings only back to 2002.
This, she argued, was not good moral character.
As for an “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship,” she said their ordeal would not be any worse than it was for many of the other families who have a loved one deported.
The judge took a break, and the family waited, pleased to at least have it over. Pedro was separated from them now only by the court's low bar.
The judge returned. He told them he had considered both sides carefully.
The family suffered, he said, while Pedro was detained. It would only get worse if he were sent to Guatemala.
Pedro, he said, “appears to have been rehabilitated.” He would grant relief.
There was a collective shriek of joy.
Moments later, the judge asked the federal attorney if she cared to reserve the right to appeal. Yes, she said.
“No!” Pamela shouted.
“What happened?” the boy asked.
The government would decide whether to keep fighting to have Pedro deported.
The next morning, Emily and the family were driving the Prius back to North Carolina. The attorney was drafting a motion to free Pedro on bond. Then Emily's cellphone rang. She yelled at Milo to turn the car around.
The government had decided not to appeal.
Back in Lumpkin, a Volkswagen Passat, driven by a Mennonite pastor, roared into the dirt driveway of El Refugio. Its bumper sticker read “GOD BLESS THE WHOLE WORLD NO EXCEPTIONS.”
Pedro emerged from the car in jeans and a polo shirt.
The Prius skidded up in a cloud of dust. Emily and Logan dashed toward him. Then Pamela and Milo.
Crying was the only sound. They rolled in the grass. They formed a circle, fell to their knees and prayed.
The boy told them to stop crying. He had things to tell his father. About the concrete chair he found behind the house that looks like a throne. About the big deep hole over by the storage shed. About how Pamela and Milo were getting married, and about how he heard that cicadas can sting you.
Eventually, it was time to go home. Pedro grabbed the backpack he would have taken with him to Guatemala.
It was stuffed. With letters from Emily, and pictures of his American family.
Could he be a good American?
Guatemalan man with a U.S. family is threatened with deportation.
Richard Fausset
June 4, 2011
Reporting from Chapel Hill, N.C. — On a bright Saturday morning, Emily Nelson Guzman packed a beet-red Prius for the journey that would take her once more to Lumpkin, Ga., with its forlorn town square and sleepy barbecue joint and the nation's largest immigration detention center.
Her husband was there, locked away. Nineteen months earlier, federal agents had arrested him in his yard.
She loaded into the Prius a bag holding the old tight jeans she could finally squeeze into again, the ones she would model so he could see, through the visitation window, how much weight she had lost.
She loaded in another bag, full of action figures -- the Shazams and Spider-men and Power Rangers her little boy pretended to be when he fantasized about setting his father free.
THE NEW LATINO SOUTH
The Latino population in the South has grown dramatically over the last decade. This is one in a series of occasional stories chronicling the lives of Latinos in a changing region.
Pedro Guzman's bag, a small Old Navy backpack, had already been packed and stowed away in a locker at Stewart Detention Center. It was the only luggage he would be allowed to take to his native Guatemala if a federal immigration judge, in a hearing two days hence, rejected the argument that Pedro had transformed from gang member to good American, a family man who had earned the right to live in the United States.
At the hearing, Emily would have a chance to vouch for his character. So would her mother. So would Pedro himself.
Emily's mother, Pamela Alberda, brought out a bag of turkey sandwiches from her boyfriend's house. The boyfriend improvised something on the piano. The music spilled out into the driveway, urgent and sad, like the day itself.
“I really, truly do not know what will happen,” Emily had written on her blog. “He will be freed or sent to a country he does not know.”
She is a family therapist, 34, white and Midwest-born, with a voice as plain as milk. A dozen years ago, she fell in love -- and discovered that the object of her affection had been smuggled across the border by his mother when he was 8 years old.
She also discovered that his immigration issue would not be solved by marrying a U.S. citizen.
A wife's devotion
When Emily met Pedro, he was a sweet kid at a bus stop, a 19-year-old high school dropout on his way to one of his two restaurant jobs, a lost soul who escaped the street life of San Luis Obispo and had gone to Minneapolis hoping for a fresh start.
He had covered up his watch on that first meeting, giving himself an excuse to ask the time. She answered in a confident Spanish perfected during a study-abroad year in Mazatlan.
Soon there was passion and friendship, and trust. He told her about his old life: He had run with a gang, but it was minor-league hooliganism, he assured her. It was San Luis Obispo, after all, not Los Angeles.
There was a small wedding, despite her parents' initial reservations, and a move to North Carolina. In between came Logan, now 4 years old, with his big brown eyes and head of loose black ringlets and little fists that pounded his mother when his father's absence drove him to fits.
Emily knew that most women in her position didn't have the means or the connections to publicize their cases.
But she had her blog, “Bring Pedro Home.” He had been the subject of a postcard campaign and an online petition drive. They had retained an Atlanta lawyer who arrived at hearings in a big silver BMW.
And she had formed alliances with the South's small core of pro-immigrant activists, the Mennonites and liberation theology types with their earnest bumper stickers and their belief -- inspiring to some, naive to others -- in a justice that transcends borders.
The drive from North Carolina would take her through a changing South, where pro-Dixie bumper stickers vie for attention with the billboards for restaurants named El Molcajete, and roadside signs like the one in Columbus, Ga., asking, Necesita un Trabajo? Need a Job?
Lumpkin's Stewart Detention Center is itself a sign of the region's transformation, with 1,400 detainees, most of them culled from Georgia and the Carolinas, a rotating cast of Juans and Miguels and Manuelitos. Somebody's father, somebody's son. The ones who were angels and the ones who should probably be kicked out. The ones who fell somewhere in between.
Activists have targeted the privately run detention center and had held up Pedro, 31, as an example of the kind of good person being ground down by a misguided immigration policy. Emily told them about the injustice of his case -- about the judge who declined to grant Pedro legal residency, or even bond, citing two marijuana arrests from when he was a teen.
And yet, despite her allies and advantages, Emily had never felt more pessimistic about Pedro's case as they rolled out of Chapel Hill. She knew there was a kink in his story of redemption.
Unfortunate events
The day before they left North Carolina, Emily took Logan to his therapy session. She and a social worker watched him play Candyland, and invent the rules as he saw fit. This was something he could control, unlike the situation with Pedro.
In a previous session, he reconstructed the night in September 2009 when immigration officers came to his house. A crowned prince action figure, hidden inside a dollhouse, served as his father.
They had come on a Friday at 4 a.m. and banged on the door, but Pedro did not come out. They returned Monday morning. The boy watched as Pedro, surprised, made a brief and hopeless attempt at flight. He watched as his father was handcuffed and loaded into a black SUV.
Pedro had been legal once, with an annually renewed work visa. But when he reapplied by mail in 2008, he was sent back a letter of rejection.
His elderly mother, for reasons not fully clear, had recently been denied legal residency. And because she had filed a 1988 asylum application listing Pedro as a dependent, his fate was tied to hers.
His mother left the United States for good, and the government sent a letter ordering Pedro to court. He says he never received it. The government then ordered him deported.
Being the spouse of a U.S. citizen didn't help much. Emily could petition for him to become a legal resident, but in that scenario, an attorney told her, Pedro would have to leave the country before being accepted for reentry. He would also have to obtain a special waiver because of his arrest record. She was advised that his chances would be slim.
Instead, Pedro took hope in a Clinton-era immigration law that extended legal resident status to some immigrants from a handful of troubled countries. To prevail, he needed to show that his deportation would create an “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” for him and his family. He also needed to demonstrate good moral character.
In December 2009, the immigration judge cited the pot convictions, both misdemeanor possession cases, in ruling that Pedro's character was suspect. Since then, one case has been vacated and the family's attorney, H. Glenn Fogle Jr., has successfully appealed the immigration judge's ruling, winning Pedro another chance.
But two days before the road trip to Lumpkin, Fogle had sent Emily a worried email. He had been taking a closer look at Pedro's papers. What was this about a hit-and-run from 2008?
The hit-and-run. Her heart sank. She thought it was a non-issue, something that wouldn't appear on Pedro's record. It wasn't something she tended to bring up when she told his story to her activist allies.
Emily told her lawyer that the incident wasn't as bad as it sounded. But she knew that “hit-and-run” could sound bad to a judge.
According to the Justice Department, roughly 75% of the people who appeared before an immigration judge in the last fiscal year were ordered removed. Before the email from her lawyer, Emily had put Pedro's chances at 50-50. Now, she had to admit to herself, it seemed more like 10-90.
And yet the trip to Lumpkin was still on. If nothing else, she and Logan needed one last visit before Pedro was put on a plane for Guatemala City, alone, with his one allotted bag.
After therapy, Emily and Logan returned to their little wreck of a rental home in Durham. Pedro had been the cook, the housekeeper, the fix-it man. Now vegetation clogged the gutters. The mailbox was bent sideways and full of carpenter bees. The doorknobs had broken on the bedroom and bathroom doors. Not knowing how to fix them, Emily removed the knobs, leaving holes with naked bolts.
She met her mother and mother's boyfriend, Milo Fryling, 49, at a Thai place for dinner. Pamela, 54, is a preschool teacher and puppeteer who wears “Life is Good” T-shirts. But she had taken a dimmer view of a system that refused to free the father of her grandson.
In November, she was arrested for criminal trespass during a pro-immigrant rally at the detention center.
“I woke up this morning,” she said to her daughter, “and thought, 'There's going to be no justice.'”
The Carolinas passed in a blur of rest stops and billboards. Then it was into Georgia, where, a day before, Gov. Nathan Deal had signed an Arizona-style bill to crack down on illegal immigration.
They arrived in Lumpkin long after dark and spent the night at El Refugio, a modest rental house activists offer as a “refuge” for families visiting the detention center. With its bunk beds, frayed paperbacks and National Geographic maps of Latin America, it had the feel of a backpacker's hostel. Lumpkin has no hotels.
The next morning, they were among the first visitors at the detention center, a white, blocky complex ringed by fencing and concertina wire. More visitors would come soon, mothers and brothers and aunts and sisters, dressed smartly, as if for a casual church service, all murmuring in Spanish.
Pedro emerged from a door, on the other side of the visiting room's glass partition. His big dark eyes matched his son's.
The boy beamed. With feet planted on a table, he slammed the top of his head against the glass. His father did the same. They smiled, and then slammed again, in unison, like bucks in the woods, the vibrations the next best thing to a touch.
Emily stood and pirouetted in her tight jeans. Pedro grinned and bowed at the waist for comic effect. The boy commandeered the phone. Emily let him spend most of the hour talking about things important to a boy.
Pamela spoke to her son-in-law briefly. We love you, she said.
Pedro told her he figured his chances were slim. Pamela did not correct him.
“We're just trying to be realistic,” she said.
The boy and Pedro played hide-and-seek until the guard announced that time was up.
“Hide under the table,” Emily told Pedro in Spanish. He ducked.
Logan pretended to wonder where he was.
They returned to El Refugio and rested. At one point, Milo wandered Lumpkin looking for a piano. In an unlocked church, he found a Steinway, and banged out pieces from a Methodist hymnal.
In the morning, Pamela read Milo a letter she had written to God:
“I know that we are not perfect and that Pedro has made mistakes in his life. But the price he has paid has been greater than he deserves. In a world where people fight and argue and are often filled with hate and fear, this small family are loving and faithful.”
The hearing was in a tiny detention center courtroom, its wooden pews scratched with “Jorge,” “Cancun XIII,” “Zacatecas,” “LA.”
Pedro, dressed in blue prison garb, took the stand. There were three small tattooed dots on his left hand, above the thumb. Mi. Vida. Loca. My crazy life -- reminders of his life in the streets.
Pedro told Immigration Judge Dan Trimble that he couldn't remember when he left Guatemala. He had no friends or family there.
He described his work history: restaurant upon restaurant, group home worker, truck driver, and, after his work permit was denied, stay-at-home dad -- “the best job I ever had in my life.”
There was the question of the pot busts -- teenage indiscretions, he said, that he deeply regretted.
Soon after his move to Minnesota in 1999, there was a misdemeanor charge of theft. “I don't remember doing it,” he said.
There was another arrest for destroying property around the same time. Pedro said it was a big misunderstanding, that he was only going to retrieve his own stuff from a drunk roommate.
He described how he met Emily, and how she had taught him to be a better man. He spoke of his bond with his son. Deportation, Pedro said, would mean “taking my soul away, everything I worked for, everything I made.”
He explained the hit-and-run from 2008. It was nighttime on a North Carolina country road. He felt a thump on his FedEx truck, and thought it was a deer. He stopped, looked around, called out. Nothing. He returned in his truck, and a second time, with Emily.
A police officer met them at the scene and said Pedro had hit a man. It was a cyclist, a physician training for a triathlon. The man had cuts and bruises, and what his lawyer, Edward J. Falcone, would later describe as a “fairly significant” head injury. (Falcone says the cyclist has ongoing neck and shoulder pain.)
Pedro was booked at the station. He later pleaded guilty to failing to stop after an accident with an injury. It went on his record as a misdemeanor.
Pamela testified next, describing how Pedro had been caring for her elderly and ailing mother.
Then it was Emily's turn. She deposited the boy on Pamela's lap and took the stand. Logan's eyes were blank and glassy, like a doll's.
Her voice was small. And soon it cracked.
Emily said she and Pedro had changed each other for the better. She said he was a compassionate man and a better father than anyone she knew.
The boy was suffering, Emily said. He was in therapy. He didn't understand why this was happening.
She told the judge she had battled depression, attempting suicide at 16.
She said she no longer needed antidepressants after she met the sweet Guatemalan boy at the bus stop. Now she could feel the black dog nipping again.
I need Pedro, she told the judge. Logan needs him.
Aminda Katz, the Department of Homeland Security's attorney, laid out the case against Pedro Perez Guzman dispassionately.
There was arrest after arrest after arrest. There was a $915 fine, apparently for a probation violation. There was a matter of tax filings. He had started working in the late 1990s when he dropped out of school to help his mother. But the IRS had filings only back to 2002.
This, she argued, was not good moral character.
As for an “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship,” she said their ordeal would not be any worse than it was for many of the other families who have a loved one deported.
The judge took a break, and the family waited, pleased to at least have it over. Pedro was separated from them now only by the court's low bar.
The judge returned. He told them he had considered both sides carefully.
The family suffered, he said, while Pedro was detained. It would only get worse if he were sent to Guatemala.
Pedro, he said, “appears to have been rehabilitated.” He would grant relief.
There was a collective shriek of joy.
Moments later, the judge asked the federal attorney if she cared to reserve the right to appeal. Yes, she said.
“No!” Pamela shouted.
“What happened?” the boy asked.
The government would decide whether to keep fighting to have Pedro deported.
The next morning, Emily and the family were driving the Prius back to North Carolina. The attorney was drafting a motion to free Pedro on bond. Then Emily's cellphone rang. She yelled at Milo to turn the car around.
The government had decided not to appeal.
Back in Lumpkin, a Volkswagen Passat, driven by a Mennonite pastor, roared into the dirt driveway of El Refugio. Its bumper sticker read “GOD BLESS THE WHOLE WORLD NO EXCEPTIONS.”
Pedro emerged from the car in jeans and a polo shirt.
The Prius skidded up in a cloud of dust. Emily and Logan dashed toward him. Then Pamela and Milo.
Crying was the only sound. They rolled in the grass. They formed a circle, fell to their knees and prayed.
The boy told them to stop crying. He had things to tell his father. About the concrete chair he found behind the house that looks like a throne. About the big deep hole over by the storage shed. About how Pamela and Milo were getting married, and about how he heard that cicadas can sting you.
Eventually, it was time to go home. Pedro grabbed the backpack he would have taken with him to Guatemala.
It was stuffed. With letters from Emily, and pictures of his American family.
WEEK SIX WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ:
What questions do you have for the author? The questions might be about content or form or anything that comes to mind. After we amass a few, I’ll send the author the link and maybe he can respond.
In addition, what other thoughts did you have as you read this piece?
In addition, what other thoughts did you have as you read this piece?
WEEK SEVEN BLOG ENTRY
WEEK SEVEN READING
7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Be Proactive, Personal Vision
Habit 1:
Proactivity means that, as human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.
There are three central values in life: the experiential (that which happens to us), the creative (that which we bring into existence), and the attitudinal (our response to difficult circumstances). What matters most is how we respond to what we experience in life.
Proactivity is grounded in facing reality but also understanding we have the power to choose a positive response to our circumstances.
We need to understand how we focus our time and energy to be effective. The things we are concerned about could be described as our "Circle of Concern". There are things we can really do something about, that can be described as our "Circle of Influence". When we focus our time and energy in our Circle of Concern, but outside our Circle of Influence, we are not being effective. However, we find that being proactive helps us expand our Circle of Influence. (Work on things you can do something about.)
Reactive people focus their efforts on the Circle of Concern, over things they can't control. Their negative energy causes their Circle of Influence to shrink.
Sometimes we make choices with negative consequences, called mistakes. We can't recall or undo past mistakes. The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it. Success is the far side of failure.
At the heart of our Circle of Influence is our ability to make and keep commitments and promises. Our integrity in keeping commitments and the ability to make commitments are the clearest manifestations of proactivity.
Begin With The End In Mind, Personal Leadership
Habit 2:
There are three major aspects of our personal and business management. First is leadership what do I/we want to accomplish? Second is management how can I best accomplish it? Third is productivity doing it. According to Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, "Management is doing things right; Leadership is doing the right things."
A starting point in beginning with the end in mind is to develop a personal mission statement, philosophy or credo. It will help you focus on what you want to be (character),
do (contributions and achievements) and on the values and principles upon which your being and doing are based. The personal mission statement gives us a changeless core from which we can deal with external change.
The principles we base our lives on should be deep, fundamental truths, classic truths, or generic common denominators. They will become tightly interwoven themes running with exactness, consistency, beauty and strength through the fabric of our lives.
In developing your personal mission statement, you can use your creative ability to imagine life milestones such as birthdays, anniversaries, retirement and funerals. What accomplishments would you like to celebrate? Visualize them in rich detail.
Put First Things First Principles of Personal Management
Habit 3:
“Habit 1 I am the Programmer. Habit 2 Write the Program. Habit 3 Execute the
Program.”
Habit 3 is Personal Management, the exercise of independent will to create a life congruent with your values, goals and mission.
Time management is an essential skill for personal management. The essence of time management is to organize and execute around priorities. Methods of time management have developed in these stages: 1) notes and checklists recognizing multiple demands on our time; 2) calendars and appointment books scheduling events and activities; 3) prioritizing, clarifying values integrating our daily planning with goal setting (The downside of this approach is increasing efficiency can reduce the spontaneity and relationships of life.); 4) managing ourselves rather than managing time focusing in preserving and enhancing relationships and accomplishing results, thus maintaining the P/PC balance (production versus building production capacity).
A matrix can be made of the characteristics of activities, classifying them as urgent or not urgent, important or not important.
Quadrant I activities are urgent and important called problems or crises. Focusing on
Quadrant I results in it getting bigger and bigger until it dominates you.
Quadrant III activities are urgent and not important, and often misclassified as Quadrant
I.
Quadrant IV is the escape Quadrant activities that are not urgent and not important. Effective people stay out of Quadrants III and IV because they aren't important. They
shrink Quadrant I down to size by spending more time in Quadrant II.
Quadrant II activities are important, but not urgent. Working on this Quadrant is the heart of personal time management. These are PC activities.
Quadrant II activities are high impact activities that when done regularly would make a tremendous difference in your life. (Including implementing the Seven Habits.)
Initially, the time for Quadrant II activities must come from Quadrants III and IV. Quadrant I can't be ignored, but should eventually shrink with attention to Quadrant II.
1) Prioritize
2) Organize Around Priorities
3) Discipline yourself
A critical skill for personal management is delegation. Effectively delegating to others is perhaps the single most powerful highleverage activity there is. Delegation enables you to devote your energies to highlevel activities in addition to enabling personal growth for individuals and organizations.
There are two types of delegation: Gofer Delegation and Supervision of Efforts
(Stewardship).
Using Gofer Delegation requires dictating not only what to do, but how to do it. The supervisor then must function as a "boss," micromanaging the progress of the "subordinate."
More effective managers use Stewardship Delegation, which focuses on results instead of methods. People are able to choose the method to achieve the results. It takes more time up front, but has greater benefits. Stewardship Delegation requires a clear, upfront mutual understanding of and commitment to expectations in five areas:
1. Desired Results Have the person see it, describe it, make a quality statement of what the results will look like and by when they will be accomplished.
2. Guidelines Identify the parameters within which the individual should operate, and what potential "failure paths" might be. Keep the responsibility for results
with the person delegated to.
3. Resources Identify the resources available to accomplish the required results.
4. Accountability Set standards of performance to be used in evaluating the results and specific times when reporting and evaluation will take place.
5. Consequences Specify what will happen as a result of the evaluation, including psychic or financial rewards and penalties.
Immature people can handle fewer results and need more guidelines and more accountability interviews. Mature people can handle more challenging desired results with fewer guidelines and accountability interviews.
"Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and he will become as he can and should be."
The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or do, but who we are.
In order to receive the benefits of interdependence, we need to create and care for the relationships that are the source of the benefits.
The Emotional Bank Account describes how trust is built on a relationship. Positive behaviors are deposits building a reserve. Negative behaviors are withdrawals. A high reserve balance results in higher tolerance for our mistakes and more open communication.
There are six major deposits we can make to the emotional bank account:
1. Understanding the individual. An individual's values determine what actions will result in a deposit or a withdrawal for that individual. To build a relationship, you must learn what is important to the other person and make it as important to you as the other person is to you. Understand others deeply as individuals and then treat them in terms of that understanding.
2. Attend to the little things, which are the big things in relationships.
3. Keep commitments. Breaking a promise is a major withdrawal.
4. Clarify expectations. The cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in
ambiguous, conflicting expectations around roles and goals. Making an investment of time and effort up front saves time, effort and a major withdrawal later.
5. Show personal integrity. A lack of integrity can undermine almost any effort to
create a high trust reserve. Honesty requires conforming our words to reality. Integrity requires conforming reality to our words, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations. The key to the many is the one, especially the one that tests the patience and good humor of the many. How you treat the one reveals how you regard the many, because everyone is ultimately a one.
6. Apologize sincerely when you make a withdrawal. Sincere apologies are deposits,
but repeated apologies are interpreted as insincere, resulting in withdrawals.
Think WinWin
Habit 4:
Win/Win is one of six total philosophies of human interaction.
1. Win/Win People can seek mutual benefit in all human interactions. Principle
based behavior.
2. Win/Lose The competitive paradigm: if I win, you lose. The leadership style is authoritarian. In relationships, if both people aren't winning, both are losing.
3. Lose/Win The "Doormat" paradigm. The individual seeks strength from popularity based on acceptance. The leadership style is permissiveness.
4. Lose/Lose When people become obsessed with making the other person lose, even at their own expense.
5. Win Focusing solely on getting what one wants, regardless of the needs of others.
6. Win/Win or No Deal If we can't find a mutually beneficial solution, we agree to disagree agreeably no deal. This approach is most realistic at the beginning of a
business relationship or enterprise. In a continuing relationship, it's no longer an option.
When relationships are paramount, Win/Win is the only viable alternative. In a competitive situation where building a relationship isn't important, Win/Lose may be appropriate. There are five dimensions of the Win/Win model: Character, Relationships, Agreements, Supportive Systems and Processes.
1. Character is the foundation of Win/Win. There must be integrity in order to establish trust in the relationship and to define a win in terms of personal values.
2. Relationships are the focus on Win/Win. Whatever the orientation of the person you are dealing with (Win/Lose, etc.), the relationship is the key to turning the
situation around.
3. Performance agreements give definition and direction to Win/Win. They shift the
paradigm of production from vertical (Superior Subordinate) to horizontal (Partnership/Team). The agreement should include elements to create a standard by which people can measure their own success.
• Defined results (not methods) what is to be done and when.
• Guidelines the parameters within which the results should be accomplished
• Resources human, financial, technical or organizational support available to accomplish the results.
• Accountability the standards of performance and time(s) of evaluation.
• Consequences what will happen as a result of the evaluation.
4. The Reward System is a key element in the Win/Win model. Talking Win/Win
but rewarding Win/Lose results in negating the Win/Win paradigm. If the outstanding performance of a few is rewarded, the other team members will be losers. Instead, develop individual achievable goals and team objectives to be rewarded.
Competition has its place against market competitors, last year's performance, or another location or individual where cooperation and interdependence aren't required, but cooperation in the workplace is as important to free enterprise as competition in the marketplace. The spirit of Win/Win cannot survive in an environment of competition or contests. All of the company's systems should be based on the principle of Win/Win. The
Compensation system of the managers should be based on the productivity and development of their people. The Win/Win process has four steps.
1. See the problem from the other point of view, in terms of the needs and concerns of the other party.
2. Identify the key issues and concerns (not positions) involved.
3. Determine what results would make a fully acceptable solution.
4. Identify new options to achieve those results.
Seek First to Understand Then to be Understood
Habit 5:
We often prescribe before making a proper diagnosis when communicating. We should first take the time to deeply understand the problems presented to us.
Skills of empathic listening must be built on a character that inspires openness and trust and high emotional bank accounts.
When another person is speaking, we usually "listen" at one of four levels: ignoring, pretending, selective listening, or attentive listening. We should be using the fifth, highest form of listening empathic listening.
Empathic listening is listening with intent to understand the other person's frame of reference and feelings. You must listen with your ears, your eyes and your heart.
An effective salesperson seeks to understand the needs, concerns and situation of the customer. An amateur sells products, the professional sells solutions.
Empathic listening takes time, but not as much time as backing up and correcting misunderstandings, including living with problems and the results of not giving the people you care about psychological air.
Habit 5 is powerful because it focuses on your circle of influence. It's an inside out approach. You are focusing on building your understanding. You become influenceable, which is the key to influencing others. As you appreciate people more, they will appreciate you more.
Principles of Creative Cooperation
Habit 6:
Synergy means the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
The essence of synergy is to value differences to respect them, to build on strengths, and to compensate for weaknesses. Synergistic communication is opening your mind and heart to new possibilities. It may seem like you are casting aside "beginning with the end in mind," but you are actually fulfilling it by clarifying your goals and discovering better ones.
By taking the time to really build a team, creating a high emotional bank account, the group can become very closely knit. The respect among members can become so high that if there is a disagreement, there can be a genuine effort to understand.
High trust leads to high cooperation and communication. The progression of communication is defensive (win or lose/win), to respectful (compromise), to synergistic (win/win).
By synergistically creating a mission statement, it becomes engraved in the hearts and minds of the participants. The problem is that highly dependent people are trying to succeed in an interdependent reality. They may talk win/win technique, but they want to manipulate others. These insecure people need to mold others to their way of thinking.
The person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize his own
perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings.
Principles of Balanced SelfRenewal
Habit 7:
Habit 7 is taking the time to sharpen the saw. You must work proactively (Quadrant II) to renew the four dimensions of your nature physical, spiritual, mental and social/economic.
The physical dimension involves caring for your physical body eating the right foods, getting enough rest and relaxation, and exercising on a regular basis.
The spiritual dimension is your center, your commitment to your value system. It draws upon the sources that inspire and uplift you and tie you to timeless truths of humanity.
It's important keep your mind sharp by reading, writing, organizing and planning. Read broadly and expose yourself to great minds.
Our emotional life is primarily developed out of and manifested in our relationships with others. Renewing our social/emotional dimension requires focus and exercise in our interaction with others.
Selfrenewal must include balanced renewal in all four dimensionsphysical, spiritual, mental and social/emotional. Neglecting any one area negatively impacts the rest.
The 7 Habits...and what they'll do to help your group (Summary)
• Be Proactive Fosters courage to take risks and accept new challenges to achieve goals
• Begin with the End in Mind Brings projects to completion and unites teams and organizations under a shared vision, mission, and purpose
• Put First Things First Promotes getting the most important things done first and encourages direct effectiveness
• Think WinWin Encourages conflict resolution and helps individuals seek mutual benefit, increasing group momentum
• Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood Helps people understand problems, resulting in targeted solutions; and promotes better communications, leading to successful problemsolving
• Synergize Ensures greater "buyin" from team members and leverages the diversity of individuals to increase levels of success
• Sharpen the Saw Promotes continuous improvements and safeguards against
"burnout" and subsequent nonproductivity
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