Immigrant Becomes Immigration Expert Witness

Thursday, 18 November 2010 22:12

In 1957, 8-year-old Celestino Fernandez left behind his adobe home with dirt floors, no stove, no hot water and only a couple of hours of electricity per day. 

He moved from Mexico with his family to Santa Rosa, Calif., where his life consisted of going to school and working on an apple farm. 

“After school I would change and would go out to the field and orchards,” Fernandez says. 

Nestled in his professor’s office surrounded by books, Fernandez nostalgically paints a picture of his childhood working in the apple orchard. His father picked the best apples off the trees that went to the supermarket and Fernandez, together with his mother and sisters, gathered the fallen apples that traveled to factories for processing. The family earned 10 cents per box.

“Literally, every single day, we were there – year after year,” Fernandez says. “I still have stretch marks at the bottom of my back of all the bending that I did when I was young.” 

But he was ambitious. He graduated from Sonoma State Uni­versity, completed his doctorate at Stanford University and has been a full-time sociology professor at the University of Arizona ever since. 

Based on his years of research in cultural identity and immigration, he developed a unique model to assess the extent to which a person is bicultural. Eventually, immigration attorneys started asking for his help as an expert witness to assess the cultural identity of their defendants. 

“I mostly do it because I think that the judge ought to have the best possible information and if you are going to have justice you need to have accurate information,” he says.

In recent years, Fernandez has served as an expert witness in 25 cases to assess the cultural identity of undocumented immigrants – a potentially lucrative consulting business.

And litigation about immigration has boomed. Operation Streamline, an expedited deportation procedure, alone already processes more than 53,000 people in Federal District Courts along the U.S. - Mexico border each year. 

Most of his clients, like him, were brought to the U.S. by their parents and have spent the majority of their lives in the U.S. “They were brought over when they were three months old, three years old, five years old and, in most cases, they have never gone back,” Fernandez explains. “They were raised in L.A., in northern California and Phoenix and their families never took them to Mexico.”  

As a result, “most of them un­derstand some Spanish. They don’t speak it. If they do, they speak like Americans with an English accent,” Fernandez says.

Switching back and forth between English and Spanish, Fernandez asks the defendants about school, family, television, music, American and Mexican history – their everyday lives. “I ask them, ‘So what did you do when you were deported?’ They say, ‘Well, I went to get some food. I gave them a dollar and they gave me this stuff back and I didn’t even know what it was.’ They don’t know the currency, for example, because they have never seen it, they have never used it,” Fernandez explains.

U.S. judges can take into account an immigrant’s cultural identity and community ties in sentencing. In all but one case, his expert witness reports helped reduce the prison sentence by an average of 15 months. 

“There are hundreds of individuals, thousands perhaps, that are in this situation,” Fernandez says.

At least half of the felony cases at Tucson’s Public Defender Office involve undocumented defendants, according to Public Defender Eréndira Castillo-Reina.

Approx­imately 3,200 felony and 22,000 misdemeanor illegal immigration cases were filed in Arizona in the fiscal year 2009, according to statistics from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The numbers have increased in the past decade. “The Bush and Obama administrations have put emphasis on securing the border and one of their prongs is clearly prosecution,” Castillo-Reina says. 

One example is the expedited deportation procedure, Operation Stream­line.

In the air-conditioned, windowless courtroom of the Tucson Fed­eral Court­house, 50 undocumented migrants nervously await their group trial. Most of them, dressed in filthy clothes and torn shoes, are exhausted from walking through the deadly desert for days and spending hours in temporary detention centers. With desperate looks on their faces, one after the other echoes “culpable,” meaning “guilty.” After one-and-a-half hours, 50 undocumented migrants are sentenced and deported.  

There is enough work for Fer­nandez, but he is not in it for the money. The work can be exhausting and emotional. 

“When I sit there and talk with these guys for two hours in this very small and confined space through this meshed screen, I had a number of them just cry and break down,” Fernandez says. This makes the work challenging.

“Yes, I am doing my job as a professional,” Fernandez says.“But I had the immigration experience. I was a kid. I know. It is not something that is easily put aside.”

Written by Kirsten Boele You are reading Immigrant Becomes Immigration Expert Witness articles