Posted on 08/15/2006 4:33:36 AM PDT by Osage Orange
Tue August 15, 2006
'Trying to do it right’ results in deportation
By Judy Gibbs Robinson
The Oklahoman
The grass is mowed but not edged around the yellow frame house in southwest Oklahoma City where Gladis Rios is raising three young daughters single-handedly.
Rios does the yard work, keeps the house spic-and-span and works two jobs to pay the bills since her husband, Sergio, was deported in October 2004.
She also sends $100 or so a month to Mexico because in the small town in Guadalajara state where Sergio lives, work is intermittent and pays only $40 a week. “I’m the only support for my kids and my husband,” Rios said.
It was not the life Rios planned when she married a man who was in the United States illegally. Shortly after saying their vows, the couple went to an immigration lawyer for help changing Sergio’s status to legal, since he had married a U.S. citizen.
“We were young. We were trying to do it right,” she recalls.
But the lawyer was not encouraging: Because Sergio had once been deported, their marriage was not enough to win him a green card. Re-entry after deportation is a felony, and those who do it are barred from coming back for 10 years.
A friend recommended they get a second opinion from Isabel Pairazaman, a notary public who runs a business called “Hispanic Help Line” helping fill out immigration applications.
“She told my husband she had, like, 14 years’ experience. We thought she was pretty good at it,” Rios said. Pairazaman contradicted the lawyer’s opinion about the previous deportation, assuring them they could get a waiver, Rios said. They believed her. “We thought she was a lawyer,” Rios said.
During the next four years, the couple paid Pairazaman at least $3,500 while waiting for Sergio’s case to work through the system, Rios said. “We keep filling all the applications, and she just keep asking for more and more money,” Rios said. In the end, the immigration lawyer was right. Sergio’s application called him to the attention of immigration officials, who summoned him to an interview in October 2004. The couple thought it was part of the process for getting a green card, but when Sergio was called into an interview room, he was taken into custody for expedited deportation.
Since then, the family is together only when Rios saves enough money for trips to Mexico. On one such trip, she conceived their youngest daughter.
Rios is convinced her husband is gone only because they followed Pairazaman’s advice. In May, the couple filed a lawsuit against Pairazaman, accusing her of breach of contract, fraud and negligence. Another couple in similar circumstances filed a second lawsuit. Pairazaman’s lawyer, Michael Rubenstein, said his client denies all the accusations.
“From what we’ve been able to gather, these people were in the country illegally and were subject to being deported before they ever met Ms. Pairazaman,” Rubenstein said. All she can do now is wait and pray, Rios said. “I figured out if I want to keep hating somebody, I won’t be happy the rest of my life. So I just forgive her and pray someday God will bring my husband back,” she said.
So after The System broke up your family, you went ahead and had another kid?
The headline is so deceptive--this isn't about the evils of The System but about a bad lawyer at a "Hispanic Help Line"--a more accurate headline would be "Hispanic Help Line Doesn't". But that would have a negative connotation about something other than the US in general, so can't have that...
They sought help, but got deported
By Judy Gibbs Robinson
The Oklahoman
An Oklahoma City woman who earns her living helping people file immigration applications is accused of causing them to be deported instead.
'Trying to do it right’ results in deportation
Two couples who filed lawsuits against Isabel Pairazaman are just the tip of the iceberg, one Oklahoma City immigration lawyer says.
“I cannot count the number of people I have seen and continue to see whose lives were ruined by Ms. Pairazaman,” Robert Brown wrote in a July 27 letter to the editor of Hola Oklahoma magazine. “I believe she has been directly responsible for the deportation of more aliens than any three official immigration officers,” he wrote.
The Pairazaman case highlights the vulnerability of illegal immigrants to those who would defraud them, and it points out holes in Oklahoma law that limit what prosecutors can do to stop the abuse, lawyers say.
“These people are in dire need of assistance. They’re grasping at straws. They’re very vulnerable,” said Dan Murdoch, general counsel for the Oklahoma Bar Association, which recently appointed a committee to investigate the unauthorized practice of law in Oklahoma.
They sought a ‘green card’
The lawsuits, filed in May in Oklahoma County District Court, claim Pairazaman took money to file applications for immigration benefits to which her clients were not entitled. In both cases, the benefit sought was a so-called “green card,” the document that identifies someone as a legal permanent resident.
Instead of granting Sergio Rios and Salvador De Loera permission to stay in the United States, immigration officials deported them to Mexico when they showed up for scheduled in- terviews on their applications, according to the lawsuits.
“My husband got called inside. From that time, I never see him again” in the United States, said Gladis Rios, a U.S. citizen. She works two jobs to support their three daughters, ages 6, 3 and 7 months.
“The children are experiencing great difficulty in dealing with the breakup of the family,” said T. Douglas Stump, the lawyer representing the Rioses and Salvador and Nancy De Loera, who have two children.
The lawsuits accuse Pairazaman of breach of contract, fraud and negligence, and seek at least $10,000 in damages.
Pairazaman, who does business under the name “Hispanic Helpline,” denied all allegations in responses filed June 26. Her lawyer, Michael Rubenstein, said clients came to Pairazaman already knowing what they wanted to accomplish and she helped them fill out the forms.
“She’s not in a position to say what someone’s entitled to,” Rubenstein said. “She’s not a lawyer, and she didn’t claim to be a lawyer.”
A friend, Carlos Ortiz, defended Pairazaman in an article in the first issue of his magazine, Hola Oklahoma, July 19.
The article, written in Spanish, said a group — including local attorneys — made up rumors ruin her reputation.
“Isabel is a good person and has never and never will hurt and is now a victim,” Ortiz said in his magazine. In a phone interview, Ortiz stood by that statement, citing his long friendship with Pairazaman. But he said it will be up to a court to determine her culpability in the lawsuits.
No criminal charges have been filed against Pairazaman, said Debbie Forshee, spokesman for District Attorney Wes Lane. She said the case is still under investigation.
Several obstacles prevent prosecutors from filing charges in such cases, including a language barrier when victims speak only Spanish and the reluctance of illegal immigrants to come forward.
“They are reluctant if they can even do it — and they may not know they can,” the bar association’s Murdoch said. Those already deported cannot come forward, he added.
Even if immigrants come forward with fraud complaints, the charges prosecutors can file are limited. In Oklahoma, it is illegal but not criminal to practice law without a license, said John Williams, director of the bar association. That means the only way to make a person stop is to get a court injunction, a civil proceeding.
Prosecutors could file a charge of obtaining money under false pretenses, but Williams said that charge is usually a misdemeanor.
Brown is representing another of Pairazaman’s former clients who answered a knock at her door and found immigration officers there.
“They pulled her out of the home and stuck her on a bus because she had an outstanding deportation order she didn’t even know about,” Brown said.
Left behind were three children in day care and a husband who did not know what had happened to her, he said.
Brown was able to get an emergency order to reopen her case on grounds she had not been notified of the order and therefore could not have complied with it. She was taken off the Mexico-bound bus near Dallas and is back here, he said.
When filling out immigration applications, Pairazaman typically uses her own address, so deportation orders come to her, Brown said.
“Of course, none of this information is typically communicated by Ms. Pairazaman to the clients,” he said.
And I'm not so sure she's "bad".
OK, notary, but the point remains.
BWDIK??
I agree. The press has a duty to report abuses of the system, even if it's of the rights of accused criminals. But this is special pleading for people who willingly broke the law--op-ed material, not news.
Exactly.......
Sorry, sweets, both of you broke the law....if you want sympathy you won't find it here....
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