New INS Rules Put Cloud Over Parade

The way band director Jorge Barrera sees it, the Grinch made an unwelcome visit to his high school this holiday season.

Every year for the past 16, Barrera has proudly led 150 Mexican students over the border to march in the Christmas parade in Calexico, Calif. Not this year.

U.S. immigration officials have stopped approving non-emergency waivers for Mexicans without visas. Barrera and his students are staying home. In a push to tighten security at the border, the Immigration and Naturalization Service is requiring all foreign visitors to hold valid passports and visas. The change is forcing the cancellation of planned surgeries and field trips and creating frustration along the border.

The impact lands particularly hard on poor families, who often cannot afford or qualify for official documents. A Mexican passport costs $91, and the U.S. fee for a visa, which gets a person the right to an interview with a consulate official, runs $100 for adults and $13 for children under the age of 15.

Calexico’s annual parade, scheduled for today, just won’t be the same without the thousands of Mexicali students and their proud parents, said Hildy Carrillo-Rivera, executive director of the Calexico Chamber of Commerce. Only three of the 25 Mexicali groups that regularly participate are slated to attend, she said.

“It’s homeland security at work,” Carrillo-Rivera said. “Unless these little kids are going to have bombs stuffed in their backpacks, I don’t see what the threat is.”

Christmas parade day is typically one of the biggest shopping days of the year in Calexico, where the economy has already taken a hit since Sept. 11. Alex Stereo manager Herman Maciel said he depends on the Mexicali shoppers and is worried that sales will be lower today than they usually are on parade day.

A few doors down, Calexico Beauty Supply manager Rosemary Wong said the INS change will affect the merchants and the town as a whole. “It’s a longtime tradition and it’s kind of hard to break tradition,” she said. “But after 9/11, nothing is going to be the same.”

Barrera, whose classroom is filled with trophies and photos of his award-winning drum-and-bugle corps, said he feels as though he was invited, but his family wasn’t. About 40% of his students at the public school do not have visas, he said.

Color guard member Lourdes Milagros said she cannot afford the documents because her mother earns just $60 a week working at a factory. Lourdes, 17, has marched in the Calexico parade seven years in a row and can’t believe she is missing this year. Her friend, Victoria Alejandra, said she is disappointed too.

“It’s unfair,” she said. “We have gone for years and suddenly, we can’t go. It makes me sad.”

Immigration officials acknowledge that the children are not truly a risk to national security, but say they have a duty to enforce their rules.

The policy, which permits waivers only in “unforeseen emergencies,” dates to the mid-1970s but was all but ignored in recent years as agents routinely granted waivers for school trips to Disneyland and Sea World.

Immigration officials said they expect the change to help reduce fraud. An estimated 3% of people who go to the U.S. on waivers do not return, and others forge letters from funeral homes or hospitals to get waivers, officials say.

The INS notified schools and charity organizations in November about the change in policy. Officials began denying the waivers this month.

In Calexico, INS Port Director Michael Freeman said he used to grant 99% of the waiver requests -- as many as 3,000 each month. That number tripled each October when children were admitted into the San Diego Zoo for free.

Last week, Freeman approved only 10% of the 735 requests. The hardest cases are the children who want to have reconstructive surgery in the U.S., he said.

“You have a personal opinion and a professional obligation,” he said.

Liza Davis, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana, said officials will consider requests for surgeries and field trips on a case-by-case basis.

“We are going to be fairly liberal in our interpretation,” she said. “We’re not saying it’s going to be a rubber-stamp, but we want to help as many kids travel as we can.”

Adolfo Beltran, whose family runs a tour bus company in Mexicali, said he canceled 57 trips this month, a loss of roughly $100,000 in business.

Beltran said his company in the past has carried about 30,000 Mexicali schoolchildren to theme parks throughout Southern California every year.

The field trips are the only opportunity many children ever have to leave Mexico, Beltran said.

“I know this new law is to protect the U.S. border, but I think the government is sending the wrong message to Mexican schools,” Beltran said.

At Fresh Start Surgical Gifts, an organization that provides free reconstructive surgery to children, spokeswoman Sabine Soddemann said the change in INS policy will make it difficult to continue assisting Mexicans.

Last weekend, Fresh Start employees had to beg immigration officials to allow 80 scheduled doctor’s appointments in the U.S. to go on as planned. The INS gave them a 30-day grace period, Soddemann said.

Soddemann said the nonprofit organization plans to work with families to get the necessary documents and anticipates having to raise additional funds to pay for passports and visas.

“These are all patients who can’t pay for medical treatment,” she said. “I’m concerned for future patients.”

At the Mexican Consulate in San Diego, Deputy Consul General Javier Diaz said he doesn’t believe the decision-makers in Washington were taking into account the effects locally when they decided to stop granting waivers.

Diaz said he hopes that INS and State Department officials will continue to show some leniency. “Life must go on at the border,” he said. “We feel this is one region and this sort of thing only makes it difficult.”

Carrillo-Rivera of the Chamber of Commerce said she unsuccessfully tried to convince INS officials to change their minds.

“We have had a wonderful relationship with our sister city and this is not helping,” she said. “What bothers me most is that the government is raining on my parade.”