Emily Bazar
USA Today
March 24, 2008
SANTA TECLA, El Salvador — When Oscar Ordoñez, 56, pleaded guilty to attempted theft in Colorado, he didn’t realize he could lose his right to live in the USA. Now he sits on his sister’s balcony overlooking the green Salvadoran hills, dreaming of the life he left behind and plotting his illegal return.
Estella Lemus, 27, cries as she describes the hunger, danger and injuries of her illegal border crossing and says she won’t do it again. The seamstress, who earns up to $5 a day in her poor neighborhood north of San Salvador, worries about how she’ll repay the $3,000 her family borrowed for her trip.
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Nearby, Pedro Berrios, 25, reads to his 5-year-old son in their cinder-block home next to the filthy Tomayate River. Berrios will keep trying to enter the USA illegally, he says, because “I don’t see another way out of here.”
The lives of Ordoñez, Lemus and Berrios converged on Feb. 28 when they boarded a plane in Texas with 116 other men and women. They were being deported to El Salvador, targets of the U.S. government’s crackdown on illegal immigrants.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been raiding job sites, renewing its efforts to track down illegal immigrants with criminal records and stepping up deportations. Last year, a record 282,548 illegal immigrants were sent home, more than double the number in 2001.
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