by Caleb Fort
Daily Lobo
Chao Sio, a Kenyan lecturer at UNM who was arrested for an expired visa, said she is not going to fight deportation.
She expects to leave for Kenya on Monday.
Sio is not going to appeal, because during the proceedings, she would not be released from the Cornell Companies detention center where she is being held.
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"It would take forever to pursue this in court," she said in an interview at the center Wednesday. "I'm not going to sit here and wait for that. I'm just ready to get it over with."
Sio was arrested Sept. 14 by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents.
She had applied for political asylum but was denied.
She told her lawyer to file an appeal, but her lawyer left the state and dropped Sio's case without telling anyone, she said.
Correspondence about her appeal, including a final order to leave the country, was sent to the lawyer instead of Sio, she said.
John Lawit, the lawyer now representing Sio, said that is common practice during appeals.
"It's really important to stay in contact with the attorney when you're doing appellate-level work," he said.
Lawit would not discuss the details of Sio's case, because she had not authorized him to do so.
Lawit, who deals with immigrant cases for UNM, has not seen any similar cases at the University, he said.
However, such cases are common, he said.
"In this country, there's a tremendous problem with people who get final orders of removal but never report for deportation," he said.
Sio said she did nothing wrong.
"When this happened, I was very disappointed in the system," she said. "I didn't even know why they (the officers) were there. I told them to just give me my passport and I would leave, but, of course, they had to follow procedure."
Sio taught Swahili and a refugee health class at UNM. She was also involved with nonprofit groups, including Women Can International and Fighting AIDS in the Homeland.
Sio's deportation will not be a setback for her groups. She was planning on returning to Kenya next year to begin work on
anti-AIDS projects, she said.
"It will be better for my work to be there," she said. "There's thinking about strife and problems, and then there's seeing it and being in the middle of it. There's not comparison."
She applied for political asylum, because in 2003, a newly elected Kenyan government was harassing her father, she said.
However, things have settled down, and she is not afraid to go back, she said.
Sio said she is bored at the center, but she is more bothered by the thought of being imprisoned.
"The queen could put you in her palace, lock you in the nicest room and feed you her best food," she said. "But you would still be a captive."
Nonetheless, she said she is glad she has had the experience of being incarcerated.
"Sometimes I get very angry, but very few people get to experience what I'm going through," she said. "As frustrating and annoying and exhausting as it is, I don't regret being picked up by the agents."
Her arrest has made the U.S.'s immigration problems more personal, she said.
"It's one thing to read a statistic on paper about how many people have been arrested for just being here," she said. "It's another to actually see people in prison."
