Operation “Scheduled Departure” canceled due to lack of interest

Operation “Scheduled Departure” canceled due to lack of interest

Posted on Sep 1, 2008 in Immigration Blog, Opinions by PMC Comments Off

Someone, acting on advice and consent from the very top, concocted a plan for Department of Homeland Security bureaucrats to entice unauthorized (illegal) immigrants to turn themselves in for self-deportation.We lost count of the number of unauthorized immigrants who thought the program was a joke, if not one dumb idea.

“Perhaps someone thought it was a good idea, but it was not. Now we know why the government stopped the whole thing,”

a visiting resident alien said.

“I’ve been around so long waiting that I think I’ll wait a little longer to get things right. It’s about the papers (los papeles). I’ve been waiting for years, spending money and paying the notarios. For what? To go back? Go back to what?”

THE MAN WAS ASKED why he came over illegally (crossing the river). He explained,

“For the same reason everybody came and keeps coming back – to work, to earn money, to save a little to send home. Ese es el rollo. (That’s the routine.) I never asked for anything, except work. I couldn’t get food stamps or anything else because I didn’t have the papeles.”

“I worked hard to make a living and to raise a family. My wife and children are legal, U.S. citizens. I thought that would make me legal, right? I am just as legal as the guy across the street, but I don’t have the papers.”

That was the man’s explanation that the OSD (Operation Scheduled Departure) was misleading because “you don’t qualify if you’re cited in a law enforcement record, whether it was not your fault, you were released or the thing was dismissed. It’s still in the record.”

This one fellow, celebrating with friends at a friend’s wedding reception, had just read in the newspaper that Homeland Security was dropping the program for lack of interest.

“YOU THINK THEY ARE going to give me 90 days to get things in order?”

said the man, married with three grown children, all U.S. citizens and enrolled in schools in Mexico.

“When am I going to get my affairs in order? I am already here without legal status, something your government should have given me a long time ago. I have been working for ranchers in the Hill Country area, doing what ranch hands do. They call us cowboys. That’s what I did after I finished primary and secondary school in Mexico and went to Monterrey. I wanted to be a veterinarian. I became a trained ranch hand. I started with (a) work permit in the next county (LaSalle). The opportunities were better in ranching operations away from the border. I got here because I was good at riding horses and working cattle, which is what I did as a kid at a big ranch in the Bustamante area.”

He said a mayordomo (foreman) hired him and four others. He crossed the river at a Coahuila spot near Hidalgo on the border and met with the others at a ranch on the Mines Road. The foreman moved the group in a truck to a place near San Antonio. Within hours, they were dropped at three different ranch locations.

“WE DIDN’T KNOW exactly where we were,” he said. “But I soon found out. I had never seen so many cows with cuernos largos (long horns).”

Operation Scheduled Departure was put in place in five cities – Charlotte, N.C.; Phoenix; Chicago; San Diego, Calif.; and San Ana, Calif. The operation was dead before it qualified as an experiment.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement had estimated 400,00 to 500,000 illegal aliens would waltz in to declare themselves as unauthorized without a criminal background and wanting to return to their point of origin.

ICE figured there were 30,000 eligible illegal immigrants in the five test cities. Only eight individuals volunteered during the Aug. 5-22 test period. The incentive to go back was not there. Our friendly wedding guest posted the questions:

“Go back? Go back to what?”

The man said some of his paisanos thought that self-deportation would put them in line to get their papeles. The man said he did everything to comply with the requirements.

“EVERY TIME I CHECKED with the notario or the notaria, they kept telling me that something was lacking and that it would cost money,”

he said.

“This went on for years. I finally quit going to the notario because my application was not getting anywhere.”

The man said he and others in the hundreds and thousands are still waiting in line hoping they are missed in the next raid.

The man’s story reminds us of a talk a U.S. senator from Texas made at a St. Augustine Room (La Posada) luncheon years ago. Phil Gramm, who emerged as a leading Texas Republican out of a Texas A&M economics professor’s job, was urging more U.S. investments to assist job-creation programs in Mexico to help the campesinos.

“If I were in living in a rural area of Mexico with a family to feed and without work to earn money, they would have to shoot me to keep me from coming over,”

the senator said.

There’s no mystery to all this. When we first heard the DHS official detail the proposition of Operation Scheduled Departure in a Spanish language network, it sounded like a good idea, but not very smart.

The line did form to the left, and only eight people answered the call.

This man’s story illustrates the problem of a broken immigration system.

The anti-immigrant faction screams “No amnesty” and “Get in line like the rest”, but there is no “line”. Only a massive bureaucracy that gives new meaning to FUBAR.

The man speaks the truth. I have a good friend, another American trucker, who attempted to get his wife and step children legal in the US. He tried to do it, “the right way”! Two years and several thousand dollars later, he said to hell with it an gave up. If it wasn’t the wrong form, they were requesting additional proof of something and always More Money!

We have the technology to streamline the process in the same manner as we issue passports to US citizens. We need to use it and reduce the time it takes to process a request for a Laser Visa or Border Crossing card fromm years to a matter of weeks.

Tags: border crossing, Immigration