Deported NLV woman recounts long journey

Thursday, Oct. 21, 2004 | 11:04 a.m.

In September 2002 Noemy Mercado Mondragon lost her 9-year-old daughter, Genesis, to a gang member's stray bullet.

She didn't think things could get worse.

But in the past five months, she has been in jail, her three children were placed in the state's custody, she has been deported, her car was stolen and her house was robbed.

"It's been tragedy after tragedy," she said.

On the other hand, she's also been handed an envelope with $700 by a total stranger, had a prominent local attorney defend her for free, a high-ranking U.S. senator step in on her behalf and the federal government grant her humanitarian parole -- a "decision made very rarely," according to an immigration official.

She has also brought on a federal investigation against a local immigration official who she said abused his power and didn't allow her due process after a car Mercado Mondragon was in nearly rear-ended his car. The agent had her deported within days of the late June traffic incident.

"I just want to see justice done," she said of the case, which might have begun with a complaint she made while she was in Mexico, separated from her children, this summer.

Last Wednesday night, however, none of that mattered.

Mercado Mondragon had driven from Tijuana and was home again with her mother and children, handing out blocks, dolls' clothing and a tiny copy of "Pinocchio" in Spanish that fits in her oldest daughter, Tannia's, hand.

Her 10-year-old daughter, Heidi, said, "I knew you would come back," and held her. The girl didn't cry, but Noemy did.

"It was like everything that has happened has made her grow up so fast," Noemy said.

Hard journey

In a series of events that sounds almost made up -- Mercado Mondragon says she is writing a nonfiction book titled, "The Life of an Undocumented Woman in the United States" -- this 30-year-old North Las Vegas resident has lived an unusually wide spectrum of experiences during the past half of her life.

She stepped over a dead body while crossing the border as a 15-year-old, barely the age her daughter Tannia is today.

She lived in fear of gang violence in East Los Angeles as her children grew and came to Las Vegas seven years ago only to lose Genesis to gang violence in September 2002.

"I came here thinking it would be better for my children, and it wound up being worse," she said.

Then, still recovering from the loss of her daughter, a red light at the Charleston Boulevard exit off of I-95 on June 29 turned into another loss, when the car she was in nearly rear-ended the car in front of her; the driver of the car in front turned out to be a local immigration official.

The cars nearly collided and stopped. The official, whose name Mercado Mondragon says she never learned, told her and her husband, Alejandro, to pull over in a nearby gas station. She is separated from her husband, who is not the father of her children, but they had run an errand together that day, she said.

The official accused them of causing damage to his car. At the gas station, the official asked if they had proof they were legally in the country. When they said they didn't, Mercado Mondragon said, he pulled the keys out of the ignition and dragged each of them from the car.

He called the Nevada Highway Patrol to the scene. Mercado Mondragon says the state trooper took no photos of the cars, since there was no damage done to either one.

Trooper Angie Chavera, a spokeswoman for Nevada Highway Patrol, said there was no NHP accident report on the incident.

The immigration official asked the trooper to take the couple to the North Las Vegas detention center, where they were separated. To this day, Mercado Mondragon says she doesn't know where Alejandro is.

But she says the official told her she had no right to see an immigration judge and would have to wait at least six months in jail if she chose to do so.

He told her to sign a form indicating she would leave the country voluntarily.

"I said, 'Don't kick me out, I have a daughter in the hospital' " -- referring to Heidi, who has juvenile arthritis -- "and lost another daughter in a shooting."

"'I don't care," he allegedly said. "Go back to Mexico."

Formal investigations

Mercado Mondragon said she thought she had no choice but to leave the country.

Eva Garcia Mendoza, a local immigration attorney who wound up being contacted by staff members of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and who took on Mercado Mondragon's case pro bono, said that the mother of three had a right to go before an immigration judge and that an argument could have been made to cancel any deportation order based on the hardship her U.S. citizen children would suffer if she were forced to leave the country.

Reid came into the story via Nancy Shubert, a 64-year-old poker dealer at the Luxor casino who, along with her daughter Colleen Cassidy, took an interest in helping Mercado Mondragon after Genesis was shot. Cassidy works with the U.S. Postal Service and collected about $700 from her colleagues to donate to Mercado Mondragon after the shooting.

Garcia Mendoza applied for the humanitarian parole that Mercado Mondragon was finally granted Oct. 8.

But before Mercado Mondragon got that far in her odyssey, while still in Mexico in August, she decided to make the trip from Ensenada, her hometown, to Mexico City, and then to Tijuana, where she lodged a complaint in a government office.

She said medical exams at that office took note of her bruises, which she said had been caused by the immigration official's rough treatment.

That complaint may have generated an investigation now being conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Office of Investigations in Washington, though Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for the U.S. agency's Western region could only confirm that an investigation is under way.

"She's made some serious allegations about an ICE employee ... and the matter is being reviewed and we are taking it seriously," she said.

The federal official added that having Mercado Mondragon "back in the country provides us with an opportunity we didn't have before" in continuing the investigation.

Garcia Mendoza said she thought the investigation was with a federal Inspector General, but Tamara Faulkner, a spokeswoman for that office, said she could neither confirm nor deny that.

Kice said that granting a humanitarian parole -- which allows Mercado Mondragon to stay in the U.S. for a year -- is "a decision made very rarely."

Human rights?

A federal statistical report from the Department of Homeland Security -- the parent agency for ICE -- said "(p)eople may be admitted under humanitarian parole to receive medical treatment or because they are injured or acutely ill."

It also says that only 14,826 humanitarian paroles were granted in 2003 -- down from 25,141 in 1998.

At home Thursday night, Mercado Mondragon said she hoped the federal investigation "reaches the truth."

"What they did to me I'm sure they do to a lot of people," she said. "I don't know why they violate people's human rights."

Garcia Mendoza said her main challenge is to figure out how to get Mercado Mondragon some relief under immigration law that will allow her to stay in the country with her children when the year is up.

Mercado Mondragon wonders if the complaint she lodged will set up roadblocks in that process.

"Maybe if I say everything I saw and that (the immigration official) said to me, it will hurt my future," she said.

Meanwhile, she looks forward to taking her children to school every day.

Her first day back, Thursday, when she arrived at the entrance of Faye Herron Elementary School, her 6-year-old son, Jonathan, looked up at her and said, "don't go."