N.Y/Region
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Ana Cristibel Sandoval, with her 5-month-old son, Jason, got caught in a tug of war between departments of the United States government.
But in the four years since the police found her there, one arm of the federal government has treated her as a traumatized teenager in need of care and refuge, while another arm keeps trying to deport her.
As immigration enforcement grows more aggressive, the case of Ms. Sandoval, now 19 and living in Freeport, N.Y., with her infant son, is in some ways typical of the government’s conflict over how to handle the 5,000 unaccompanied minors apprehended in the United States each year.
But it took on unusual drama on Thursday, as the larger tug of war between the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security played out in a windowless immigration office in Lower Manhattan.
After Ms. Sandoval, carrying her baby, reported to the office at 10 a.m. for what officials had called “a redetermination of her custody conditions,” immigration officers insisted that they had to send her that same day to immigration detention in Phoenix.
The baby would have to stay behind, they said, according to Ms. Sandoval’s volunteer lawyer, Andrew D. Morton of Latham & Watkins in Washington, who was with her all day and described events in cellphone calls and e-mail messages as they unfolded. He said officers demanded that Ms. Sandoval call her boyfriend, a construction worker, to pick up Jason, who is 5 months old.
“I told them: ‘She’s not calling anyone. She’s not going anywhere,’ ” Mr. Morton said midway through a daylong battle that marshaled his law firm’s influential contacts to keep Ms. Sandoval in New York with her child. In the end, however, her long-term situation was still precarious, suspended between the forces of law enforcement and child welfare.
Months after the police found her, bound and gagged, in the smugglers’ house, the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of Health and Human Services, arranged for her to be transferred from detention in February 2003 and treated for post-traumatic stress disorder and depression at juvenile centers in Texas and in Massachusetts, records show.
A family court judge in Massachusetts ruled last year that she had been abused, abandoned or neglected and that it would not be in her best interests to be returned to Honduras. That seemed to pave the way for her to seek a special juvenile visa, or green card.
But officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement have battled Ms. Sandoval’s lawyers at every step of her four-year legal struggle for permanent refuge in the United States. The crux of the government’s case now, according to briefs filed at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, is that Ms. Sandoval had no right to seek a juvenile green card without the prior consent of the Department of Homeland Security or the attorney general.
Patricia Vroom, the chief counsel handling the litigation for Homeland Security in Phoenix, said yesterday that she was not authorized to talk about the case. She referred questions to Russell Ahr, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who said it was against the agency’s policy to discuss it.
In the past, Homeland Security officials have argued that national security demands a law enforcement approach to illegal immigrants, regardless of their ages. In 2003, Congress passed a measure giving Health and Human Services responsibility for placing unaccompanied minors. But friction over the interpretation of the law has grown as a new influx of volunteer lawyers from corporate firms rallies to cases like Ms. Sandoval’s, challenging government lawyers who are under pressure to win deportation cases.
On Thursday, Ms. Sandoval’s deportation officer, Ricardo Perez, had seemed sympathetic to her, Mr. Morton said, telling him that if it were up to the New York office, she would be allowed to stay in Freeport and simply be required to report back periodically under an order of supervision.
“But they say Phoenix is calling the shots,” the lawyer reported in a call late Thursday afternoon.
Just what turned the tide remains a mystery. But about 6 p.m., Mr. Perez, the deportation officer, returned with news. As Mr. Morton told it, Mr. Perez said, “I don’t know who you know, but they changed their minds.”
It was dark when Ms. Sandoval emerged from 26 Federal Plaza, happy to be going home with her baby under an order of supervision.
“They wanted to separate me from Jason,” she said through a translator yesterday. “They wanted to send me to Phoenix. But my lawyer wouldn’t let that happen.”
Still, she is frightened. “I’m afraid that they’ll deport me,” she said. “I have no one in my country; my mom is dead. I don’t want to see my father. He used to beat me.”
In a 2005 letter in Ms. Sandoval’s court file, Theresa M. Rhein, a clinical social worker who treated her at a residential treatment center in Attleboro, Mass., described her as “very likeable, warm and engaging” and “very motivated to succeed in school.”
She warned, though, that because of the life-threatening abuse the teenager experienced at the hands of the smugglers, she was afraid to be alone and had flashbacks, nightmares and suicidal thoughts that were often set off when she felt powerless and overwhelmed.
“Ana does not have any family connection and wants very much to be in a loving relationship,” the therapist wrote. “This puts Ana at very high risk for placing her trust in someone who may hurt or manipulate her.”
According to court documents, Ms. Sandoval’s family, for its own financial gain, hired smugglers to bring her to the United States. Those smugglers passed her in Mexico to others who took her to Phoenix and who are now in prison.
When she turned 18, Ms. Sandoval said, and was too old to live in her group home in Massachusetts, she called the brother of a Honduran woman friend for help. The brother, 32, whom she had never met, drove from New York to fetch her and bring her to his home. He became her boyfriend and is Jason’s father, and they live together in a small apartment in an industrial area of Freeport, on Long Island.
“I don’t really have friends,” she said yesterday. “I don’t go out very much, because I’m afraid immigration will pick me up.”
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