Before she can step foot into a college classroom, high school junior Cristina Heredia will have to reapply for the federal reprieve on deportation that she has now.
The 17-year-old, who hopes to work in medicine, is one of more than 2,900 Arkansas residents who were granted “deferred punitive action” status in the year since President Barack Obama declared a moratorium on prosecutions of those who were brought illegally to the United States as children. The president’s order took effect Aug. 15, 2012.
As of July 31, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had received slightly more than 3,700 applications for deferred removal action from people living in Arkansas and more than 550,000 nationwide. Applicants must be between 15 and 30 years old, have entered the United States before June 15, 2007, and lived here continuously since then.
Deferred action provides administrative relief from deportation, under which the Department of Homeland Security allows a noncitizen to temporarily remain in the United States. Under the program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, permission to stay in the country is good for two years, after which an individual can apply for a renewal.
The majority of people who seek deferred actioncome from Mexico or other Latin American countries, although thousands have applied from Asian and Caribbean nations, such as South Korea and Jamaica.
A couple thousand more people in Arkansas might still be eligible for the deportation reprieve, according to caseworkers at Catholic Immigration Services, the state’s only nonprofit organization recognized by the federal government to assist immigrants with legal services, including deferred action.
The program doesn’t provide a path toward citizenship.
In Arkansas, the costly and lengthy process for applying for deferred status has not deterred long lines at legal-aid clinics, where applicants must provide documents to prove they have been in the United States since 2007, meet education requirements and have not been convicted of a serious crime.
Heredia applied for deferred action as soon as sheheard she could. She and her 18-year-old brother, Lorenzo Heredia, traveled from their home in Star City to a legal-aid clinic in Monticello organized by Arkansas Coalition for the DREAM, which had teamed up with the Little Rock chapter of Justice for Our Neighbors to bring the organization’s only lawyer, Julie Larson, to the clinic.
“I was nervous and excited at the same time,” Cristina Heredia said.
By November, about three months after Heredia and her brother applied, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services notified them that their applications had been approved, pending a signature that they needed to travel to Memphis to get. Arkansas does not have an immigration court, so oftentimes immigrants must travel to Memphis for variouspaperwork.
Cristina and Lorenzo Heredia spent about $500 each on the application fee. Their family - which added two more children after arriving in the U.S. 16 years ago - had the money, but some caseworkers said many families can struggle to pay the fee, some waiting to apply until they can afford it. Like many immigrant families, the Heredias also occasionally send money back to family in Michiocan, Mexico, which they left to escape poverty.
More than one-third of deferred-action-eligible youth live in poverty, according to Migration Policy Institute estimates in a review of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals after one year. The institute’s website describes it as “an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C., dedicated to analysis of the movementof people worldwide.”
Luz Mondragon, 19, spent about $700 applying for deferred action and obtaining a passport and identification to attach as required documentation. Mondragon, fromDumas, has five siblings, three of whom applied at the same time she did. One of her siblings is not yet old enough to apply and the youngest was born in the United States.
“It was a lot to come up with,” she said of the money needed to apply.
Mondragon’s family also sends money on occasion back to family in Michiocan in central Mexico.
Mondragon also went to the clinic in Monticello, which reached a part of the state not served by Catholic Immigration Services.
Catholic Immigration Services offers discounted consultations along with two nonprofit immigration legal-clinic providers in the state: Justice for Our Neighbors, which is a national program established by the United Methodist Church, and the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville Law School. The free clinics are held monthly and mostly usetrained volunteers to process a handful of cases each month.
Special Sanders, the southeast Arkansas regional director of Arkansas Coalition for the DREAM, said a lack oflegal services was the biggest problem faced by immigrants applying for deferred action in her area.
Although its immigrant population ranks 37th nationally, Arkansas has the fifth-highest rate of immigration, a position it has more or less held for more than 20 years.
Only one nonprofit in the state has been recognized by the Bureau of Immigration Appeals to represent clients in immigration law, the same number as West Virginia and Vermont, both of which rank low in immigrant population and immigrant growth rate, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Montana has no sites listed on the bureau’s website.
Among neighboring states, Texas has 74 nonprofit immigration legal services sites, Oklahoma has four, Missouri has 11, Tennessee has 14, Mississippi has three and Louisiana has 11.
Arkansas also ranks 50th among states in the nation in lawyers per capita, with just one for about every 500 residents, according to ArkansasDemocrat-Gazette calculations using 2013 American Bar Association data and 2011 U.S. Census estimates.
Missouri and Louisiana rank ninth and 10th in lawyers per capita, with one for every 250 people, according to the analysis.
Outside of nonprofits, people seeking immigration legal services must consult private lawyers or trust “notarios” - notaries who are sometimes able to take advantage of some Spanish-speakers who understand “notario” to mean “lawyer.”
Jim DePriest, deputy Arkansas attorney general in the Department of Public Protection, said that his office has dealt with a handful of cases in the past few years regarding notario fraud, including two in Northwest Arkansas earlier this year, but that the problem isn’t huge for his office.
In 2005, the Arkansas Legislature passed Act 66, requiring any business that advertises legal services but isn’t legally recognized to offer them or does not employ a licensed attorney to note that in its advertisement.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 08/19/2013