Obama's Immigration Conundrum
Posted on Feb 7, 2009
By Bill Boyarsky
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090207_obamas_immigration_conundrum/Recently, however, I met with Ahila Arulanantham and Marisol Orihueta, attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. They told me a different story. One of their clients, for example, is Diana Santander (full name: Oscar "Diana" Santander Leyva), a transgender person. The ACLU lawyers gave me copies of the court documents they'd filed on her behalf. Her story illustrates how immigrants can be unjustly locked up for long periods.
In her native Mexico, law enforcement officers treated her brutally because of her sexual status. On one occasion, they forced her to perform oral sex on officers, then burned her thighs with cigars. Another time, police officers attacked her with a knife, beat her with a gun butt and called her a "->-bleeped-<-ing ->-bleeped-<-got."
Trying to escape the torture, Santander fled to the United States in 2004, entering illegally. In 2007, she was arrested and convicted of prostitution and trespassing and turned over to federal immigration authorities for deportation. Later, she learned that the brutality inflicted on her by the Mexican cops amounted to torture as defined in the United Nations Convention Against Torture. She applied for asylum.
