“I still drive; I’m not gonna lie,” says an undocumented Mexican national. We’ll call her Mary. Mary is 26 years old and she’s been in the United States since her parents brought her family across the border when she was three. She lives in Southeast Alaska now, and says she’s scared to drive because she doesn’t have a license. But she has a 2-year-old son (he’s a U.S. citizen), and although she has a fiancée (also a U.S. citizen), he’s not always there to drive when she needs to go somewhere.

Mary has visited attorneys, paid them to tell her there’s no immigration status she’s eligible for. “This country makes it really impossible for immigrants,” she says. “If I hadn’t met the person I’m with now I would have gone back to Mexico.”

But now Mary has reason for optimism. Earlier this year, at her church, which she attends every Sunday, she heard about a free consultation to advise people with immigration problems. In April she met with Robin Bronen, an attorney and co-founder of the Alaska Immigration Justice Project, based in downtown Anchorage. Bronen walked Mary through the various types of visas available, and asked about Mary’s parents. Her mother had died from cancer, and her father had been deported, for being arrested so many times. Bronen asked what her father had been arrested for, and the answer was drugs and repeated abuse of Mary and her mother. Was it documented? Bronen asked. “Yes, we’ve called the police on him. I pressed charges on my own father,” Mary answered.

And with that small piece of information, Bronen explained that with proper documentation of Mary’s father abusing her, she would likely be eligible for a U visa, which is for immigrant victims of a variety of violent crimes. In April of this year Mary, Bronen and the Alaska Immigration Justice Project began preparing her application package, which was submitted in September. Within six months Mary and the AIJP expect her U visa to arrive. For the first time in her life, she’ll be a legal resident of the country she’s always called home.

“If [Bronen and the AIJP] hadn’t told me what the different types of visas were, I wouldn’t be able to apply right now,” Mary says. None of the other attorneys she’d paid had ever mentioned a U visa; nor had Mary shared the story of her abuse at her father’s hands with them. “AIJP has been great,” she says. “They’ve been very positive, and told me I have nothing to worry about. They’ve made a lot of things happen and I’ve never gotten this far with anybody else.

The Alaska Immigration Justice Project was founded in October 2005 by Bronen and Mara Kimmel (the wife of gubernatorial candidate Ethan Berkowitz) after Catholic Social Services closed its own immigration legal services program, a program for which the two had worked. The core mission of the AIJP is to protect the human rights of immigrants and refugees, and since its inception the organization has provided immigration services to approximately 700 Alaskans around the state. Bronen is its executive director, and the AIJP currently has a staff of nine, including four lawyers and three paralegals. The agency celebrated its fourth anniversary at Kimmel and Berkowitz’s house in late September.

The AIJP focuses on representing immigrant victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, as well as people seeking asylum or refugee status because they’re fleeing persecution and torture in their countries of origin. It also provides services for families trying to reunite with family members who live outside the U.S.

“A lot of people are placed into deportation proceedings because their U.S. citizen spouses haven’t filed the immigration paperwork that they’re required to do,” Bronen explains. “They marry an immigrant and then if there’s abuse they use their immigration status as a way of controlling their spouse. It’s really horrible because women are isolated because of language and culture issues; if they don’t speak English, they don’t know the resources that are available in the community, then they’re told by this person they love that if they contact a person to get assistance they will get deported.”

The 1994 Violence Against Women Act included provisions that allowed for immigrant victims of domestic abuse to get their immigration documents. AIJP partners with the Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault in order to make immigrant victims who might qualify aware of the services it provides. Bronen estimates that of the 700 clients the AIJP has served, 150 to 200 were victims of a crime.

The AIJP’s success rate is phenomenal; Bronen says that due to the their extensive screening and information gathering they’ve been 100 percent successful in the cases involving sexual abuse or domestic violence.

But it’s not just crime victims who come to the AIJP needing help, and Bronen agrees that the country needs some form of comprehensive immigration reform.

“One of the challenges is people just don’t understand how difficult it is to get your immigration documents,” Bronen says. “If you’re a U.S. citizen and fall in love and marry an immigrant, and think, ‘okay, I fell in love with this person from England, it should be no problem to get her her immigration documents. I’m a U.S. citizen, what’s the big deal?’ It is a big deal; it’s not easy, depending on how you enter the U.S. and what you did afterward, that impacts whether or not that U.S. citizen gets to actually file the appropriate immigration documents on their immigrant spouse’s behalf. So there are people in our community who are in situations where they don’t have immigration documents, and they can’t get them, and their U.S. citizen spouses want to get that for them, but the law says they can’t.”

In December 2007 Bronen was asked to speak at the World Affairs Council at the Anchorage Hilton. She planned a generic speech about comprehensive immigration reform and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the effects NAFTA had on why people were coming to the U.S., particularly from Mexico.

The day before Bronen’s speech, she received a death threat by fax. The person who wrote it said he was going to see her at the World Affairs Council meeting. There was police protection at the meeting, which came and went without incident. But the threat illustrates the tone the conversation about immigration and immigration reform has taken.

After Bronen spoke at the event she received another communiqué via fax. It reads, in part, “The illegal Mexican is the political equivalent of an AIDS infected intruder. Subject to proper authorization via the political process, it must be destroyed unless our nation to die [sic]. Deportation is an insufficient response in the case of the Mexican because it will merely walk across the border again. A terminated illegal Mexican is gone; the termination has the added advantage of being an example.” The author also mentions a “spay and neuter program to control unnecessary costs associated with procreation,” in the context of proposing life doing hard labor for “invaders” as an alternative to “termination.”

“I got really afraid,” Bronen says. “It’s not about my physical safety, but that people have that much hate to people within our community—who contribute so much to our community. It is not okay that that’s where the conversation goes to, and we’re not talking about the values that we need to be upholding because of the community in which we live. I look at the health care debate and how hateful that’s become, and it makes me really concerned about what will happen with comprehensive immigration reform. Honestly, for me, I’m just thinking about that U.S. citizen father or mother who all they want is for their immigrant spouse to be able to get their drivers license, to be able to work, to not live in fear, and they can’t. If they leave the country, some of them, they’ll never be allowed back. So you’re faced with this choice of stay here under the shadows or leave and maybe never come back to be with your children or spouse.”

“Why should someone have the privilege of driving a car down the street when they don’t have the legal presence to walk down that same street?”

That’s the question asked by proponents of House Bill 3. The piece of legislation would require proof of legal presence in Alaska in order to get an Alaska driver’s license, and it would also mandate that the driver’s license expire on the same date the individual’s legal presence ends. Representative Bob Lynn sponsored the bill, with co-sponsors Representatives Mike Hawker, Mike Chenault, Bill Stoltze, Jay Ramras, and Craig Johnson, all Republicans.

It seems an innocuous enough question on the surface, but the bill is sure to be controversial when the legislature reconvenes in January. Immigrant rights groups like the Alaska Immigration Justice Project oppose the bill, which they say would only make it more difficult for undocumented immigrants who may be in abusive situation—including those they serve—to escape that from their abuser.

A new political group called Alaskans for Legal Presence (ALP) supports House Bill 3. Leading ALP is former East Anchorage Assemblyman Paul Bauer, who in 2007 pushed a failed ordinance that would’ve had Anchorage police conduct legal status checks during traffic stops.

Many undocumented immigrants, like Mary, the AIJP client mentioned above, were never here legally in the first place, so they simply don’t have driver’s licenses. But others get licenses while they’re here on temporary visas, then hold onto them after the visas expire—something proponents of House Bill 3 believe is a serious issue.

“[House Bill 3] follows the sovereignty and rights that every state and nation has to protect its legal citizens from the financial burden of those with the intent to stay here legally,” Bauer says. “It identifies those visitors living within our borders by keeping them honest and from becoming a burden on our society if they become illegal.”

Bauer acknowledges that the state DMV has no clue how many foreigners with expired visas are driving on the streets, because the DMV doesn’t currently track immigration status. House Bill 3 would change that.

He says that Alaskans for Legal Presence exists to help HB3 get passed—“It’s nothing to do with law enforcement checking citizenship status,” like his 2007 ordinance would have done. “It’s essentially to pass this bill, and for education, so people don’t go off the wall saying this is a Real ID thing or infringement on immigration. If anything it’s to protect legal citizens, to protect you from those who are illegally in our country driving on our streets illegally.”

Ironically, HB3 would probably do nothing to stop Mary from driving illegally.

She’s never driven here legally, and she’s been ticketed for driving without a license three times. But each time she paid her ticket immediately, and since she’s never been able to get a driver’s license, she effectively never existed in the system, which means she wasn’t cited as a repeat offender on the second and third times, the way someone who’d had a license before would have.

Alaska consistently rates number one in the country for domestic violence and sexual assault, and those numbers include immigrants, documented and undocumented. Bronen is worried the passage of House Bill 3 would make it more difficult for undocumented immigrants who are victims of crime to get access to safety and resources.

“So they would not be able to get a drivers license—what does that mean with regard to their ability to leave their abusive spouse with their kids?” Bronen asks. “They may not have any ID in the state, what does that mean for somebody who’s being abused by a U.S. citizen? And again, are those the values we want for our community?”

She also says it’s inappropriate for state officials to be evaluating a person’s federal immigration documents, and thinks that the $15,000 price tag on HB3’s fiscal note is far from adequate to pay for training Department of Motor Vehicle personnel on all of the different immigration statuses a person can have.

“All of the people who are in really hard situations that they don’t want to be in, if our community knew who they were and knew what their situations are, my hope is we would be a compassionate community and would try to make it easier for them. Instead, people are so afraid,” Bronen says. “It hurts our entire community when there are large numbers of people in our community who are afraid to access any services.”

bjk@anchoragepress.com