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A South Bronx community organizer – tortured by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet‘s government in the 1970s – is being deported after living here illegally for 27 years.
“I feel scared to go back,” Victor Toro, 68, said Thursday. “I’m still legally dead there. It’s a difficult situation.”
On March 2, a federal Immigration Court judge denied Toro’s pleas for asylum, saying he should have requested it when he first arrived – and ordered him to return to his homeland.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement lawyers had argued the anti-Pinochet group Toro co-founded in Chile was a terrorist organization.
His lawyer called the ruling a “serious blow” to the white-bearded grandfather, who heads the culture and community group La Pena del Bronx, and a blow to asylum-seekers everywhere. They plan to appeal.
“This ruling is patently unfair and sets aside the weight of the evidence,” said the lawyer, Carlos Moreno.
ICE took Toro to court after he was arrested on an Amtrak train near Buffalo in 2007 for not having immigration papers.
Toro, a longtime advocate for immigrant rights who waded across the Rio Grande in 1984 to enter the U.S., claims he was afraid to turn himself in and request asylum, citing U.S. support for Pinochet’s brutal regime.
A democracy replaced the regime in 1990, but some of the leaders who had Toro tortured remain powerful, his lawyer says. They expelled Toro from Chile in 1977, declaring him dead.
Judge Sarah Burr said in a written ruling that Chile is a changed country and a safe place for Toro.
Not bad. 27 years of living here illegally and he’s finally been ordered deported.
Of course “the comnunity” is all up and arms. Me? I say screw him. You come illegally, you go home when you’re caught. You take a risk to come, you run the risk of going home.
And incidentally, the Che picture behind him is quite nice. Maybe he should head down to Cuba? Surely Che’s revolution did wonders for that country, right?