MANEUVER MAY STOP DEPORTATION

Akron Beacon Journal (OH)

ATTORNEY FILES MOTION THAT COULD KEEP MEDINA MOTHER OF THREE FROM BEING SENT TO EL SALVADOR

Author: Julie Wallace and Gina Mace, Beacon Journal writers

Dateline: MEDINA

The attorney for a Medina woman who is on the brink of being deported to El Salvador filed a motion Friday to set aside her convictions for felonious assault and kidnapping.

If approved, the move would mean that Sandra Orantes Cruz would be resentenced and given a fighting chance to have her deportation order overturned.

The 30-year-old mother of three was adopted at age 6 by a Twinsburg couple but never sought legal citizenship.

"I don't want to get too excited," Orantes Cruz, 30, said from the Seneca County Jail, where she is being held on the immigration case. "But it's something. I had nothing before but a lot of prayers."

Attorney James Chin's motion, filed in Medina County Common Pleas Court, contends that Orantes Cruz was not advised of the immigration consequences by her court-appointed attorney, David Gedrock, when she rejected a plea bargain and gambled on taking the case to trial.

Gedrock said he had no problem with the motion.

"I told her I'm not an immigration attorney. . . . I'm not qualified to give immigration advice," Gedrock said Friday. "I said if she had a problem, she should make contact with an immigration attorney."

Chin said the goal of the motion is to have her three-year sentence rescinded, with a new sentence of less than a year being handed down in its stead.

In theory, such a maneuver would remove the threat of her deportation. The Board of Immigration Appeals overturned a 2001 deportation order when a similar sentence change was made in another court.

Common Pleas Judge Christopher Collier, who presided over Orantes Cruz's jury trial and handed down the three-year sentence, scheduled a hearing for 2 p.m. Tuesday.

"It's very hopeful," Chin said, cautiously. "If it is approved, it's not even a deportable offense anymore. So then I'll try to get her out of jail and get them to terminate her deportation case."

Medina County Prosecutor Dean Holman said Friday his office will not object to the altered sentence. He has already voiced his opposition to the deportation order. saying he thinks it's unfair because she's already been punished, but he also said she probably would have received a shorter sentence had Collier been aware of her difficult history.

"I believe if the court had all the information, the sentence would have been substantially less than a year," Holman said. "That's why I've agreed to this."

Dan Kesselbrenner, director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, said Friday that the move to amend Orantes Cruz's sentence could help her avoid deportation. But, he said, the change cannot be based strictly on sympathy.

"If (immigration) thinks it's being done because the judge just felt sorry for the person and not because of a legal error, then it's still a conviction as far as immigration is concerned," Kesselbrenner said. "It has to be a judge saying, 'Let's fix it,' not a judge saying, 'I feel bad.' "

Orantes Cruz and her five siblings ended up in an orphanage in El Salvador after their mother was stabbed to death in 1978 and their father gave up custody. All but the oldest boy were adopted by American families, with Orantes Cruz coming to the United States in 1981. But by age 16, she was on her own, estranged from her adopted family.

She worked as a barmaid and as an exotic dancer to pay the bills before marrying an Army man, who is the father of her oldest son, John, whom she calls Nino. She says that relationship and a subsequent one with the father of her middle son, Alejandro, were abusive. The father of her third son, Owen, was a man she had sex with one night while separated from Alejandro's father.

When she left Alejandro's father in 2001, she sought refuge in a battered women's shelter in Medina County. A program director for the shelter described her as behaving in a manner consistent with those suffering from battered women's syndrome.

By April 2002, Orantes Cruz was on her own again, living in an apartment with her boys and walking to her job at a salad-packing factory roughly four miles away. She admits now that the pressure of her situation got to her, and she sought solace by drinking. Within months, that choice caught up to her: A night of drinking with a former boyfriend got out of hand; she somehow ended up with a knife, and he ended up with a cut on his finger, and she found herself in handcuffs.

Her biological sister, Morena Sweitzer of Akron, has been raising her sons, now 10, 5, and 3, in her Akron home during Orantes Cruz's imprisonment. Sweitzer has said she doesn't think her sister will survive in El Salvador -- they have no contacts there anymore, and her sister no longer speaks Spanish.

Orantes Cruz said Friday that she tried calling the embassy in El Salvador to make plans just in case she is deported. But she said she hung up after growing frustrated because the man was speaking Spanish and she couldn't understand him. She said she's been watching Dora the Explorer cartoons in the jail to pick up the Spanish words used in it.

She said she talked to her sons by telephone Thursday. Nino is doing well at school, Ali started kindergarten this year and Owen attends preschool. She said it hurts her that Owen, whom her sister has raised since 11 months, acts like one of her sister's children, but she said she knows that is to be expected.

"It's hard, but that's what I did," she said. "The only thing I know is that I want to be with my kids. I did bad things, and I'm sorry. But I want to be there for them."

Memo:

Julie Wallace can be reached at 330-996-3542 or jwallace@thebeaconjournal.com