Air American
Immigration Policies and Red Tape Make for Good iPod Radio

“The show helps people get familiar with the immigration process they’ll have to navigate.”

Host David Hart and engineer/announcer Armando Mosquer live on the internet. Photo by Ryan Brown.

By Ryan Brown

Maria (an alias) sits in a small room, basically a large closet, with another woman and two men. Her voice, as it is recorded onto the hard drive of a brand-new white Apple computer, can be seen as a pastel waveform.

No one in the room, besides Maria herself, knows her true identity. She agreed to this meeting and interview under the condition that none of her real information would be disclosed.

Maria tells her story of immigrating to Miami from Cuba, which involved a fraudulent marriage. This type of marriage, Maria explains, is set up by a “runner.” A runner alerts winners in Cuba of the U.S. Department of State Diversity visa lottery to those people willing to pay the lottery winner a fee to allow them to pose as family to gain legal entrance into the United States.

Maria shares this secret with two Miami immigration lawyers, David Hart and Andrea Olivos-Kah, and with the rest of the world via Hart’s weekly podcast “Immigration Fridays.”

ON THE AIR

Immigration Fridays began in September 2005, around the time that Apple announced it would be adding an online directory of free podcasts produced by the public to its music site iTunes.

Hart, 43, took on coworker and fellow immigration lawyer Olivos-Kah, 38, as co-host, bought a small mixing board, new computer and professional microphones and quickly set up a makeshift recording studio in a tiny storage room in his downtown Miami office.

“David asked if I would participate and I happily agreed,” says Olivos-Kah. “I think it’s a great way to inform the public, through a medium that is accessible to most and that can also be portable.… The show helps people get familiar with the immigration process they’ll have to navigate.”

The studio walls are lined with shelves littered with law books and instructional guides to the audio software used to produce the show.

The ad hoc producer of the podcast is the firm’s 27-year-old office manager, Armando Mosquer, who learned how to use the equipment on his own.

“We use a program called Garage Band that comes installed when you buy an Apple computer. … It came with an instruction manual … the tool I had to learn was trial and error,” Mosquer said.

The show first began as sort of an interview/lecture series intended to shine some light on the complex, often harsh process of immigration.

“Using the Internet and the iPod this way seemed like an exciting idea,” Hart said.

Hart began by booking guests, such as local legal professionals, on the show and discussing a topic. Eventually, as the show grew more and more popular, it became more personal. Hart started receiving e-mails from immigrants or people thinking about immigrating to the United States who had specific immigration questions or problems. His show has, since its creation a little over a year ago, developed into more of a Q and A, the topics for which usually come directly from questions e-mailed or phoned in by people struggling with immigration issues.

Roughly 4,500 people now subscribe to the podcast, episodes of which can be streamed on a computer at immigrateusa.com or downloaded to an iPod by subscribing to “Immigration Fridays,” via iTunes, for free. Hart receives daily e-mails from people around the world who want to share their stories and ask questions about immigrating to the United States.

“The podcast is meant to try to answer questions. Most of our listeners are in some kind of immigration process,” says Hart.

There are actually two versions of the show, one in English and one in Spanish. Both are produced very quickly, usually on Thursday night or Friday afternoon, and are posted online, ready for download, by Friday night.

The team rarely skips a week; the show is currently on its 64^th episode.

BACKSTORY

Hart, who immigrated to the United States from Montreal in 1983, began his career as an immigration lawyer in New York in 1990. His first assignment was to accompany a U.S. citizen and his wife, who was from Trinidad, to their interview at the immigration office that was to review their marriage and determine its legitimacy.

“In other words, they [the government] wanted to make sure it was a real marriage.… I was there to shepherd [the clients] through the process,” says Hart.

He had been handed the client’s file only 15 minutes before he got on the subway to go to the interview. “When I actually reviewed the papers … I found out, just before being called in, that his marriage to his [new] wife predated his divorce [from his first wife] … so, at that point, he was basically a bigamist.”

Hart opened his own immigration firm in Miami in 1992, on the 10th floor of a small building downtown, which allows a clear view of the birds circling the top of the Flagler Street courthouse.

Now, the majority of Hart’s clients are people trying to immigrate to the United States to start a business.

“It’s not like if you or me set up a business,” Hart says, his eyes wide and focused. “If our business fails, we move on and try again. If these people’s businesses fail, they have to leave the country.”

ISAP

Hart’s podcast comes at a time when the immigration process is becoming more difficult, specifically because of the recent creation of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program created by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

ICE presented this project in June 2004 as a “less restrictive alternative to detention.”

One of Hart’s clients, a woman from Zimbabwe who wishes to remain nameless, agreed to speak to the SunPost about her experience, last month, with ISAP in Miami.

“As I was walking out of the immigration court,” she says, “immigration officials apprehended me. Mr. Hart was asking where they were taking me but they wouldn’t say.… They took me to like a mini kind of jailhouse next to the courthouse downtown … then put me in the back of a truck, a barricaded truck with no windows, and took me to the main immigration office on Biscayne. This is where they put on the ankle bracelet.”

According to woman X, she was not notified in advance that any of this could happen, that she might be chosen randomly and rounded up.

She notes that some of the immigration officers were “very unprofessional.”

Now the woman is given a schedule and must log everything she does during the day, from when she awakes until she goes to sleep. She is required to hand in these logs to immigration officials, whom she has to meet with at least three times a week, as opposed to the yearly court dates she had to attend before being apprehended. The woman says she has never missed one of her court dates since she came to the United States in 2003.

“My schedule does not allow me to go to an immigration office three times a week. I had to plead and cry my lungs out. I don’t know what else to do.… I’ll have to take a leave of absence from work.”

The woman works as a registered nurse at a well-known hospital in Miami and has a daughter, a U.S. citizen, in high school.

The weekly meetings have made it hard for her to pick her daughter up from daily school activities.

“If I can’t accommodate my own child, how can I live?” she says.

Another part of ISAP protocol is the tracking bracelet, worn on the ankle.

“I have holiday parties, family weddings to go to,” she says. “You can’t miss the bracelet. It’s not like a piece of jewelry; it’s huge.”

THE RAIDS

On April 19 of this year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began conducting countrywide raids of businesses suspected of using undocumented workers.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff declared the sweeps and arrests in at least nine states constituted the greatest operation of its kind in U.S. history.

Many of these raids and arrests took place in Florida.

On April 28, eight days after the first raids, Hart created a podcast to discuss and investigate them. The show included a call-in from an eyewitness of a raid in Boca Raton. The witness was a young woman, a preschool director and recent immigrant from Venezuela.

“I was walking into a Target,” said the woman. “One group was standing against the wall wearing civilian clothes and another group was facing them wearing black and blue. It seemed like an aggressive type of situation, I didn’t want to get involved…. I heard them yelling that they didn’t have to have their papers on them … others were saying this was an abuse, that this country wouldn’t function without the work of immigrants.”

Hart says this “enforcement first” approach is counterproductive, noting that many immigrants, even those who have obtained legal status, become frightened by pronouncements of these raids and end up not showing up to work out of fear of being detained or arrested.

Hart noted that these sweeps have especially affected Miami’s workforce.

“In downtown Miami, where there’s a lot of buildings under construction … I spoke to a supervisor who said he didn’t see the immigration agents, he saw workers — fleeing.”

“Part of why these raids are taking place is because U.S. citizens have been victimized by individuals assuming their identity,” said Barbara Gonzalez, a Miami spokesperson for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“In one case,” she adds, “an American citizen in Colorado was arrested for a traffic ticket and taken to jail. The ticket was actually given to an illegal immigrant who had stolen the person’s identity.”

Gonzalez notes that in the past month 1,200 more illegal immigrants have been arrested in countrywide raids.

“The bottom line is — anyone in the country illegally shouldn’t be surprised if they’re arrested … that’s our job,” Gonzalez says.

“She’s missing the point,” says Hart. “As long as work exists, they will come. Build a wall 100 feet high; it will not matter. This is not really about homeland security, it’s about business.… If we continue on this path, companies will establish plants, factories and other kinds of entities overseas.”

THE SYSTEM

“Our system doesn’t work,” Hart tells the SunPost. “I think that ignoring the people living in the U.S. without legal status, or thinking you’re going to deport them, are not realistic options.”

According to a study from the Center for Immigration Studies, the United States’ immigrant population (legal and illegal) reached a new record of more than 34 million in March of 2004, an increase of 4.3 million just since 2000. Almost half of those, or 2 million, are estimated to be illegal or undocumented immigrants. In 2004, immigrants –both legal and illegal – accounted for 47.9 percent of the population in Miami-Dade County, or 1,611,000 people.

"The podcast is basically the implementation of modern communications, through the iPod and MP3 player, to disseminate useful and important information to the immigrant community in the U.S. and around the world,” Hart says. “I predict that we will have major changes in our immigration laws next year, and hopefully our podcast will contribute to the dissemination of this news as it occurs.”

Comments? E-mail letters@miamisunpost.com