Pastor facing deportation over '92 case

The federal government wants to deport Jose Walter Bohorquez of Bolingbrook by sending him back to his native Colombia as part of the Obama administration's crackdown on illegal immigrants with criminal records.

What makes his case unusual is that Bohorquez came here legally, committed his crime 18 years ago, served a little more than a year in prison and has been an apparently solid citizen in the 16 years since.

Two years ago, he even took over as pastor of a small Evangelical church in Albany Park, El Taller del Maestro.

In November, however, Bohorquez was returning from a visit to his brother in Colombia when he was detained at the Miami airport by immigration officials who spotted his old criminal conviction, confiscated his green card and ordered him to report to an immigration judge in Chicago to face deportation proceedings.

SYSTEM HAS LITTLE ROOM FOR DISCRETION

If they had come after Bohorquez 15 years ago, I doubt that anybody would have made a peep on his behalf. You sure wouldn't have been reading about this from me.

But to try to deport him after all this time, during which Bohorquez would seem to have been a contributing member of our community, raises more issues of fairness with the one-size-fits-all Obama effort to look tough on immigration by going after "criminals."

And that has given Bohorquez many allies from the campaign to fix our broken immigration system.

"It doesn't seem to make sense to anyone to send him back to Colombia," said Matt Soerens, an organizer with World Relief DuPage, which works with evangelical churches on the immigration issue and is supporting Bohorquez.

While some aspects of Bohorquez's case are unusual, there are many more immigrants like him caught in a system that doesn't leave much room for discretion, Soerens said.

On Saturday, Bohorquez is supposed to deliver the opening prayer at an immigration reform rally with Sen. Dick Durbin being organized by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

The rally is part of a series of events being carried out by immigration-rights activists to turn up the pressure on Congress to move ahead with reform legislation this year -- despite clear signals that neither the president nor Democratic leaders want to bite that off so soon after the controversial health-care bill.

Former Gov. Jim Edgar is even supposed to headline an appearance here today with business leaders who will be making the case that comprehensive immigration reform is necessary for the health of Illinois' economy, in keeping with Edgar's prior statements that Republicans need to quit turning off Hispanic voters. Some believe it would be a nice start if Edgar could just get his good friend Rep. Mark Kirk to see the light.

Bohorquez, 42, is still hoping the immigration court will allow him to stay here.

It's not as if he has been in hiding all these years.

He still had his green card, held jobs as a shoe salesman and loan officer, got married to a woman he met through the church and had two kids. He had even made some other trips out of the country in the years since his conviction, including to Guatemala to help start a new church, and wasn't challenged on his return.

Bohorquez does not minimize the seriousness of his 1992 criminal conviction --on a charge of money laundering -- three years after he was brought legally to the U.S. in 1989 by his parents, who were already permanent legal residents and later became citizens.

He was a 24-year-old computer student on a soccer scholarship when, he says, an acquaintance talked him into delivering a bag of cash to someone who turned out to be an undercover DEA agent.

"I knew it wasn't for Christmas presents," said Bohorquez, who pleaded guilty and was treated like the little fish he was, serving 15 months in prison. "It was a stupid dumb mistake, and I paid for it."

The year after his release, he got involved in the church and says, "Since I met Jesus, I haven't done nothing wrong."

I'd rather keep the immigration focus on those people whose only wrongdoing was to enter the country without our permission. But most of those folks would rather keep their heads down to avoid trouble.

Instead, we get individuals like Bohorquez or Rigo Padilla, the UIC student tripped up by a traffic arrest, whose best chance of staying here is by going public, as the faces of immigration reform.

There are many more such faces. You see them every day, all around you, and probably don't realize it. They keep their heads down. If it takes a Jose Walter Bohorquez to remind us of them, so be it.