Her name is Julieth, or at least it used to be. She’s in her mid-40s, and it’s as if she’s caught in a bad movie — unable to prove who she is, who her kids are, even that she is their mother.
It doesn’t matter that she risked her life to help the federal government bust a money- laundering operation run by Colombian drug cartels, or that she and her family spent years in a witness-protection program, moving, changing names.
It doesn’t matter that her oldest son went to college, or that her 15-year-old boy is battling leukemia, or that a crooked customs agent conned her out of $10,000.
It matters only that she is Colombian, that she doesn’t have a green card and that her husband entered the United States illegally. Her story is convoluted, confusing and wrapped in mystery.
What is clear is that Julieth finds herself caught in the vortex of an overwhelmed U.S. immigration system.
Now she and her husband expect to have to start over in another country, expect to see their family pulled apart.
“In my 23 years of immigration practice, this is among the more difficult cases that I have encountered,” said David Simmons, a Denver attorney who worked with Julieth last year but is not representing her now.
But in the eyes of former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm, that is the nature of the beast — everyone has a heart-tugging story.
“You have real, live human beings, and yet you can’t make public policy based on individual stories,” he said. “Every snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty, but it’s still an avalanche. And that’s what it is when you’re trying to make immigration laws based on individual cases.”
It’s those conflicting views of the system that make it difficult for even seasoned attorneys to navigate.
“Immigration law is the most complicated law on the books aside from tax law,” said Elaine Komis of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, an agency in the Department of Justice. “There are exceptions upon exceptions upon exceptions.”
There may be no exceptions for Julieth — one of several names she was given in the federal witness- protection program. She spoke to The Denver Post on the condition that she not be identified because she fears retaliation for her court testimony in the early 1990s.
In an interview at her attorney’s office, Julieth outlined a story that began in 1988 when she was in her early 20s, already the mother of a young son and daughter.
Push into, out of safety net
She arrived in the United States that spring on a three-month visa, settled in Los Angeles, obtained a work permit and found a job as a bookkeeper at a travel agency. She grew suspicious of the large wire transfers her boss asked her to make, often in the $30,000 to $60,000 range.
In 1990, the federal government busted the operation, which was being used as a money-laundering front for three Colombian drug cartels, according to court documents. Julieth was among those indicted, but she agreed to cooperate and provided testimony that sent others to prison.
She was moved into the Witness Security Program run by the U.S. Marshals Service, according to court documents reviewed by The Post. The federal government brought her parents, her son and daughter, and a niece to the U.S. and moved all of them into the program, rushing them from Colombia without documents because the danger was so great.
For seven years, she lived her new life, in one state and then another and another. Along the way, she met a man named Jose, married and had three more children.
By the mid-1990s, the family was living in Colorado. But in 1997, Julieth said, her Colombian-born daughter, by then a teenager, went to New York to live among family members who were not in the program. As a result, Julieth and her family were removed from protection.
Dave Turner, spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, would not discuss her case.
“The primary reason that people leave the program or are kicked out of the program is that they choose to return to their home turf, where they are endangered, or they choose to make themselves public, by talking to the press, or by letting people know they are a program participant,” Turner said.
In the program, Julieth said, federal agents took all her documents — her green card, birth certificates — each time they moved her and changed her name. When she was kicked out, she had no paperwork.
Julieth asked for help from a customs agent she had dealt with during the money-laundering case. She paid him $10,000 to go through the process. Her current attorney, Sarah Miller, provided The Post with copies of four canceled cashier’s checks, made out to the agent.
That agent ultimately was convicted of smuggling in another case and sent to federal prison.
Undocumented lives
In the meantime, Julieth and her husband operated a successful construction business, employing as many as 45, bought a home in Colorado and raised their children. Her oldest son graduated from high school with a 3.9 grade-point average and went to college.
As time went on, Julieth kept fighting for the documents that would establish her identity and, perhaps, get her and her family members on the road to citizenship. But she was unable to get help, even from the state’s congressional delegation.
In 2008, Julieth hired Simmons to represent her in a bid for political asylum for her and her husband. During that process, immigration officials determined that Jose had slipped into the country illegally in 1993. He was detained, told he would have to appear at a deportation hearing, and released. He didn’t show up for the hearing in June 1993.
Federal law at the time required that Jose’s hearing notice be sent to him by certified mail. It’s not clear, however, from documents available in his file whether that was done, both Simmons and Miller said.
In the eyes of the law, it didn’t matter.
On Jan. 21, federal agents arrested Jose, and an immigration judge ordered his deportation.
Today, he sits in a detention center operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and could be sent back to Central America any day.
He has the option of seeking a new hearing, and Miller believes he would have a strong case under a section of federal law that would allow him to stay in the United States if he could show he had been here for 10 years, had no criminal history, and that his deportation would cause a member of his family to suffer “an exceptional and extremely unusual hardship.”
Miller said he would qualify on all three requirements — his and Julieth’s teenage son was recently diagnosed with leukemia, for example, and needs ongoing medical care.
But appealing will require Jose to stay in jail, probably for eight months or more, awaiting a hearing.
“I think I can survive it,” Jose said by telephone from the detention center, “but I think about my family, my children, my mother, my wife — I don’t want to give them a hard time. It’s really painful, for them, for me.”
If he is deported, Julieth said she will follow him — to where, she is not sure.
“I can’t go back to my country,” she said simply.
Leaving has its own set of consequences, though. She would be barred from returning to the U.S. for a decade, and her children — both those born here and the two older ones brought here — would be left in a kind of immigration limbo, with many unanswered questions.
Immigration morass
But her case is just one in an immigration system that is overwhelmed by cases and unclear priorities. Just last week, in the midst of a congressional hearing, the Government Accountability Office released a report calling for better state and local enforcement of immigration laws after concluding that lax oversight led to scores of arrests in minor incidents instead of in major crimes.
“The system is clearly a mess and needs to be reordered,” said Jonathan Blazer of the National Immigrant Law Center, a policy organization that defends low-income immigrants.
But making changes won’t happen quickly, and Julieth and her family may not have much time.
“I’m feeling so bad because I think the government used me, you know, took advantage of me,” she said.
Miller continues to fight and has been told that officials in the U.S. Marshals Service will look into the case.
In the meantime, Jose said he is prepared to leave the U.S. but desperately hopes to stay.
“I just want them to give me a chance — give me a chance to go to the immigration judge. Maybe he will listen to me,” he said. “If he doesn’t want to listen to me, and he says I have to leave the country, I’ll do that. I just want a chance, you know?”
Kevin Vaughan: 303-954-5019 or kvaughan@denverpost.com
