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From the Red Bank Register July 17, 1912

COPYRIGHT © The Star-Ledger 2003

 

Date: 2003/08/10 Sunday Page: 015 Section: NEW JERSEY Edition: FINAL Size: 1373 words

 

Immigration problems ride these roads

 

Crashes in S. Jersey city bring issues to fore

 

By BRIAN DONOHUE

STAR-LEDGER STAFF

 

The city of Bridgeton lies deep in South Jersey, a faded urban outpost amid the endless farms that earn the Garden State its nickname. But glance at the license plates of cars parked curbside along the city's gritty northern edge and you can hardly tell what state you are in.

 

Pennsylvania. North Carolina. Virginia. California.

 

The neighborhoods of battered Victorians house thousands of Mexican laborers who work the farms of Cumberland and Salem counties. Having illegally crossed the U.S. border or overstayed visas, many laborers lack the documents required to get a New Jersey license or registration.

 

But thousands drive anyway.

 

Desperate for transportation in an area with no trains and few buses, the workers lift plates from junked cars or obtain licenses and registrations in states with looser laws. They take the wheel praying they don't get stopped. When they crash, many simply run away.

 

Since Jan. 1, the city has seen 235 traffic accidents, 139 of them hit-and-runs. That rate is more than three times that of Newark, the state's largest city. Nearly all the hit-and-runs, police say, appear to involve Mexican migrants who flee largely out of fear they will be arrested or deported.

 

"From City Hall north you have 80 percent out-of-town tags," said Lt. Jeffrey Wentz, the city's acting police chief. "You get behind some of these clowns and tell me if they've taken a driver's test."

 

Drivers have slammed into houses and hit telephone poles. They have fled three-car pileups where the accident wasn't even their fault.

 

One immigrant was arrested trying to flee on foot after slamming his car into a truck driven by an off- duty policeman.

 

In the most serious incident, the newlywed husband of a police dispatcher was struck by a van and killed while riding his motorcycle along Pearl Street on June 9.

 

The van driver, Federico Ortiz, 20, a local migrant worker, fled the scene on foot and was arrested the next morning. His van carried expired temporary cardboard Pennsylvania tags, and he had no insurance or license.

 

With an official population of 22,771 and an undocumented population estimated at 6,000 to 10,000, this sleepy city struggles with many of the social problems associated with illegal immigration, such as overcrowded housing and hospitals trying to care for uninsured patients.

 

But it is the trouble on the roadways that has brought immigration issues to the fore like nowhere else in New Jersey.

 

The city's impound lots are overflowing with cars being hauled in at the rate of 70 a week because their drivers lacked valid licenses, insurance or registration.

 

Weeks after the June 9 fatal accident, the mayor asked for help from the New Jersey State Police, which last week assigned a special tactical patrol unit to enforce traffic laws in the city.

 

Immigrants, meanwhile, said they are living in fear, caught between the need to get to their jobs and the laws that keep them from driving legally.

 

For months, Franco, a 21-year old from Mexico, used his battered Chevy to travel to his job picking tomatoes on a farm in Cedarville. Two weeks ago, he said, his car was impounded because he had lifted the car's California license plates from a junker friends had driven from Los Angeles.

 

Franco said he had no choice.

 

NO CAR, NO WORK

While some area farms hire buses to carry workers to and from the fields each day, the farm on which he works does not. Asked how he was getting to work without his car, he simply shrugged.

 

"I'm not going to work today," he said.

 

Bridgeton Mayor Michael Pirolli said he is at a loss for a solution.

 

While he has asked the police to crack down on unlicensed drivers, he also is calling on the state to change its laws and allow undocumented workers to drive legally.

 

"New Jersey takes a position that they will not issue licenses or registration to undocumented aliens, but at the same time the state is perfectly willing to take income tax and unemployment and sales tax from them," said Pirolli. "I'm going to do what I'm being forced to do, which is to enforce the laws. But it's a task bigger than our local resources can accommodate."

 

Recently, the state began requiring license applicants to provide several more forms of ID - a move immigrant advocates said makes it difficult for even legal immigrants to obtain licenses.

 

With security the top priority, Diane Legreide, director of the state's Motor Vehicle Commission, said changing those rules is unrealistic. To address Bridgeton's woes, either the farmers need to provide better transportation for their workers or the federal government needs to reform or enforce immigration laws, she said.

 

"I empathize with (Bridgeton officials), but I don't think by licensing illegals you solve the problem," she said.

 

To obtain licenses, many migrants go to North Carolina, where drivers do not have to prove legal residence in the United States in order to obtain a license.

 

Others take their Mexican driver's licenses and register their cars at what Lt. Wentz calls "mom-and- pop" motor vehicle agencies in Pennsylvania or Delaware. Unlike New Jersey, Pennsylvania has a network of more than 11,000 private dealers or agents authorized to issue plates and registrations.

 

Legreide and Lt. Wentz say New Jersey and other states must coordinate their laws and policies to make sure illegals can't skirt the state's laws by getting registration from other states.

 

A CRASH 'EVERY DAY'

In the meantime, accidents involving migrant workers are occurring "every day without exception," said Sgt. Dan Mourning. And an entire underground industry has emerged to get migrant workers from Mexico on the road.

 

At its center are people such as Linda Bishop, a 46-year-old former farm worker who gets $583 a month in Social Security disability. For $50 a pop, she helps migrant workers register their cars in Pennsylvania and recover them when they are impounded.

 

Over the past three years, she said she has helped more than 2,000 people, recording the names in a green spiralbound notebook she keeps at her side. Bishop calls her activities a "community service," and weeps as she describes the plight of Mexican workers.

 

"I'm poor and they're poor, so I help them," she said. "A lot of people in this town treat the Mexicans like poop."

 

Seated on her porch one day last week, Bishop pulled out a shiny new Pennsylvania license plate she obtained that morning, along with the Mexican driver's license the customer provided to obtain it. The printing on the license is blurred, the edges uneven, the laminating flimsy. Bishop said she simply tells customers what documents they need and gives them a ride to the office.

 

"That's a fake license, I'm almost positive," she said. "But it's not up to me to decide what's fake and what's not."

 

Police blame her and others like her for keeping illegal drivers on the road, although they said it does not appear she is breaking the law.

 

"What she's doing is immoral, but not illegal," Mourning said.

 

As Bishop speaks, a line begins to form on her front lawn as Mexican men arrive seeking her help in getting their cars on the road.

 

Among them is Martin Quiros, 30, a Mexican migrant who spends his days picking lettuce and cilantro on a farm in Salem County, 40 minutes outside Bridgeton. There are no buses to the farm.

 

With his Mexican driver's license, he plans on getting Bishop to take him to Philadelphia to register a car he planned to buy the next day. "If the police see us with tags from another state, they stop and pull us over," he said, leaning up against a friend's battered Lincoln with Pennsylvania plates. "But we don't have any choice."

 

Then, he got in the car and drove away.

 

_____________________________________________________________________________________________ Brian Donohue covers immigra tion issues. He may be reached at bdonohue@starledger.com or (973)392-1543.

Our local paper recently had a story about the 100th anniversary of the St. Ann's Festival in Hoboken, a celebration not only of the beloved saint, but of all things Italian. In a dig at the largely unauthorized Mexican immigrant population, the commenter remarked that the church and the festival were 'founded by legal immigrants." People seem to have forgotten what a large swath of the Italian immigrant wave that came here in the late 1800's-early 1900's were actually illegal immigrants. Here is a NY Times story from 1931 describing the growing alien smuggling rings bringing in illegal immigrants mostly from Italy and Poland.

The Star-Ledger Archive

COPYRIGHT © The Star-Ledger 2007

A TALE OF HORROR AND HOPE

Darfur

refugee shares his story to save his nation

By BRIAN

DONOHUE

STAR-LEDGER STAFF

The first soldiers swooped down on Daoud Ibarahaem Hari's tiny Sudanese

village in helicopters, leaning out the doors, raining bullets down onto the

dusty streets, killing men, children, everyone they could.

Once the streets were empty, he recalls, they came on camels and horseback,

killing Hari's brother and uncles, raping the women and burning the

grass-roofed houses to the ground.

"There is no village," he says now, three years after the massacre. "The

village is dead."

Hari fled across the desert of the Darfur

region of Sudan and found refuge in Chad. Of the

hundreds of thousands in refugee camps there, few, if any, have done what

Hari did next: He went back to Darfur

.

Using a false name and passport, he returned six times over the next three

years, leading Western journalists through the region where the Sudanese

government and janjaweed militias have engaged in three-year campaign of

atrocities the U.S. government labels genocide.

Someone, he said, had to show the world what was happening.

Hari showed the reporters the wells where janjaweed had dumped dead animals

and human bodies to poison the water and keep villagers from returning.

He interpreted for them the women's accounts of being gang-raped by

janjaweed militiamen.

He pointed their cameras to the burned huts, charred bodies of mothers and

their babies, huddled in twos and threes.

And those were just the first chapters in a nightmarish ordeal that later

landed him in a Sudanese jail for his work, and finally ended eight weeks

ago when he arrived in the United States.

Today, Hari lives in Asbury Park, one of a tiny handful of Darfuris

who have been granted refugee status in the

United States since the violence began in 2005. A spokesman for the United

Nations High Commission on Refugees said he may be the only Darfurian

refugee resettled to the United States in 2006.

The former camel herder has stepped out of one of history's darkest chapters

into a new life here in America.

"It's different oxygen here," the 33-year-old said. "It's like paradise.

"I hear people here talking about taxes!" he says, shaking his head with a

smile. "In Darfur

, it's `that village is dead, that woman was

raped.'"

THE TROUBLE BEGINS

António Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees,

describes the crisis in Sudan as "the largest and most complex humanitarian

problem on the globe."

It began in 2003, when the Arab-led Sudanese government struck back at the

mostly black civilian population in the Darfur

region of western Sudan after ethnic African

tribes there staged a revolt.

Government-backed militias known as janjaweed targeted civilian populations

and ethnic groups from which the rebels primarily draw their support the

Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa. At least 200,000 people have been killed, and an

estimated 2 million driven from their homes now live in camps in Sudan and

Chad.

Hari says his goal is to join the growing movement of peace activists

demanding an end to the atrocities in his homeland. Human rights advocates

say his voice could provide a crucial boost to the international effort to

end the war.

While the Darfur

peace campaign has been bolstered by the work of

celebrities such as George Clooney, Mia Farrow and Nobel Peace Prize winner

Elie Wiesel, it often has lacked the voice of Darfuri

telling their story.

Hari said he learned English little by little: studying briefly in school,

listening to BBC radio broadcasts, meeting foreigners when he would run

camels and livestock across the border to markets in Egypt and Libya and

finally, speaking with aid workers during his stint as a refugee in Chad

"He was working for me last year, but give him five years and I'll be

working for him," said Paul Salopek, a journalist who was arrested and

jailed with Hari while on assignment with National Geographic.

"Millions of people have been affected, but very few have his communication

skills and the worldliness to tell the story. No matter how good hacks we

(journalists) are, nobody can tell it like a Darfurian," said Salopek.

To do that, Hari will have to tell his story over and over again. To church

groups. To reporters. To politicians. To crowds at rallies and fundraisers.

On television.

That, he knows, will not be easy.

Because each time he tells it, he relives it. And so it comes out slowly,

with long pauses, and sentences that dissolve into silent, distant stares.

It is a story that is not over. Hari's mother, his brothers, his sister are

all somewhere in Darfur

, where he knows they could be killed any day.

"It's okay," he says, his long frame gliding through a spring rain along

Main Street in Asbury Park. "No problem. I can talk. Maybe if I don't talk,

then I go crazy."

A VILLAGE RAVAGED

The start of Hari's story is one that groups like Human Rights Watch say has

played out across Darfur

, where aerial photos show the hundreds of

burned villages as black scars scattered amid the white desert sands.

One morning in the summer of 2004, the janjaweed came to Hari's village, a

small enclave of 300 mostly Zaghawa camel herders near the town of Muzbat in

northern Darfur

.

"The bullets were just everywhere," Hari recalled. "They killed everything

alive ‹ the women, the children, the animals."

The villagers fled, while the few men who had guns tried to fend off the

janjaweed until the women and children could escape to the countryside.

Hari said his brother was shot and killed and the rest of his family

scattered. His two sisters and father stopped in a valley and set up camp

with other villagers. His mother and another brother wound up in the city of

Fasha.

There is no independent corroboration of the attack on Hari's village, but

his account is consistent with accounts of what took place in villages

across northern Darfur

during the same time period, according to Human

Rights Watch and U.S. relief officials.

Hari continued across the border to Chad, where, the Red Cross says, camps

hold an estimated 200,000 refugees from Darfur

, many suffering from lack of food and water. In

Chad, refugees are confined to camps and are not permitted to work.

But Hari could not keep still ‹ or silent.

He fled the camp and went to the capital city of N'Djamena, where his

English skills helped him befriend aid workers and journalists, who began

hiring him as a guide and interpreter for tours of the Chadian camps and

trips into Darfur

.

"He's one of those few people who, when you go to a village, are naturally

curious about the world and about outsiders," said Salopek, a two-time

Pulitzer Prize winner who hired Hari as an interpreter last July. "They see

a stranger and they glom onto you, whereas most people hold back."

Hari served as an Arabic interpreter for the BBC, the New York Times, NBC

News and several aid agencies on their forays into Darfur

. To hide his Darfurian identity, he adopted a

pseudonym ‹ Suleiman Abakar Moussa.

But he could hide for only so long.

Just hours after crossing into Darfur

on Aug. 6, Salopek, Hari and their driver were

captured at gunpoint by AK-47-toting members of a pro-government militia,

the men said. They were held three days, then traded to the Sudanese

military for a box of uniforms, according to Salopek.

They were charged with espionage, entering the country illegally, passing

information illegally and disseminating "false news." Inside one of Sudan's

notorious jails, Hari says he was beaten and tied to a tree during

interrogations.

After a letter from rock star Bono and former President Jimmy Carter and

the intercession of New Mexico governor and Democratic presidential

candidate Bill Richardson, who flew to Sudan to intercede, the men were

released on Sept. 9.

Richardson remembers Hari as the tall figure with bloodshot eyes walking

from the jail where he had been held. Of the three prisoners, he said, Hari

looked the worst.

Hari was returned to Chad, where government authorities began tracking his

every move, threatening him with deportation, saying they would trade him

back to Sudan in exchange for Chadian prisoners. Hari moved from house to

house, running for his life.

"He was a marked man," said Chris Nugent, a Washington, D.C., immigration

attorney who represented Hari in his bid to come to the U.S.

After appeals from Salopek, other journalists and attorneys in the U.S.,

officials with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees whisked Hari

to Ghana, where he was interviewed and approved for refugee status by the

U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He flew to Houston in early March and

then took a Greyhound bus to Asbury Park to be with his sponsor.

Eight weeks later, he talks of the drive with astonishment ‹ the desert

turning to farms, the farms giving way to cities.

Lori Heninger, Hari's sponsor, is giving him a place to stay in the Asbury

Park home she shares with her husband. The Darfur

peace activist who first met Hari on a trip to

Africa recalls how he repeated again and again after he first arrived: "It's

too big. This country is too big."

ON HIS MIND, IN HIS HEART

On a drive over the Goethals Bridge, peering down on endless lots of cars

just unloaded at Port Newark, Hari wonders who could possibly buy them all.

Inside Frank's Deli & Restaurant in Asbury Park, he marvels at portions and

waistlines far larger than any he's ever seen.

And when the waitress comes, here is how the culture-shocked camel herder

who just escaped genocide eats a cheeseburger.

Americans use utensils, he knows, so he lifts the knife and fork, touches

the sizzling patty once, then decides against it, and puts the utensils

down. With long, slender fingers, he picks it up ‹ no top bun, no ketchup ‹

and takes awkward nibbles around the outside edges.

After nine bites, the talk turns to his family still in the refugee camps.

He pushes the plate away ‹ done.

"If you are happy, but your family is not happy . . ." he says, the sentence

trailing off.

"I mean, I have this cheeseburger and this Coke, everything. But they might

not have a chance to eat. I'm so lucky, not like them."

Hari talks a lot about his own luck.

"Thank God I am okay. I never lost any part of my body," he says, holding

his long, smooth fingers up in front of him. "I'm so happy to be here. But

I've lost something very big in my life."

In his work with refugees from other countries, Nugent has learned that some

people fleeing war and persecution draw power by continuing their political

struggles once they are in the United States. Others simply need to fall

silent, to try to forget the past and go on with their lives.

Friends suggested Hari should simply focus on settling in, on adjusting to

life in America before delving into activism.

"He talks about things, but it is obvious that some of those things trouble

him, and rightly so," said Heninger. "We try to let him talk as he's ready."

But Hari, Nugent said, "really does live and breathe the genocide

internally."

"Darfur

is still on his mind. And the question is, `Is

it healthy for him?' He thinks it is. He is strong and courageous, and it's

a source of empowerment," he added.

Hari plans to go to school, to get a job. "There are jobs everywhere here,"

he says.

But first on the list is telling America about Darfur

.

"I have to do a lot of things for those people," he said. "I will not be

silent."

So far, there has been one television interview and a lecture at a New York

City theater. Newspapers and television stations are calling. Nugent, his

attorney, is trying to set up a meeting with U.S. senator and Democratic

presidential candidate Barack Obama. Salopek has e-mailed Mia Farrow to set

up a meeting.

Hari will tell them all his story. To save Darfur

. And maybe, to save himself.

___________________________________________________________________________

__________________

Brian Donohue may be reached at bdonohue@starledger.com or (973)392-1543.

PHOTO CAPTION: 1.Daoud Ibarahaem Hari, one of the few Darfuris

to be granted refugee status in the United

States, lives in Asbury Park. At top, rebels drive through eastern Chad near

the Darfur

border. 2. Hari in his homeland, which he fled

as janjaweed militias attacked. "They killed everything alive ‹ the women,

the children, the animals," he said. CREDIT: 1. ANDREW MILLS/THE

STAR-LEDGER; (At top)LES NEUHAUS/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

GRAPHIC CAPTION: MAP: Northern Darfur

CREDIT: THE

STAR-LEDGER

TAG: sl2007-463e17a45b

URL: A TALE OF HORROR AND HOPE

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Playing with my daughters over the weekend, we got to chalking up the
driveway at my parents' house in north Jersey and my sister made a hopscotch
court the way she did when she was a kid (see photo 1) My wife, a Queens
native, was left scratching her head at the design and then proceeded to
draw a board the way she did as a kid, with a design requiring a one foot
start and one foot turnaround and other changes (see board at the bottom of
photo 2).

I wonder if there are other regional variations. Clearly, further study is
needed. But I bet there's a dissertation in here somewhere.

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Middletown, NJ - Person takes not one, not two, but four - four - parking
spaces.

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Just another sign - literally - of how bad it's gotten for the NJ Nets. This
is a photo I took this morning on Broad Street in Newark, basically saying,
"we stink, but sometimes we play some teams you might want to watch." And
how bout that catch phrase: "It's all about the matchups." Really gets your
blood pumping, eh?

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Photos from men's room at Atlantic City Convention Center.

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