Students, activists protest imminent deportation of Boston school teacher
BOSTON --Students and supporters rallied Wednesday behind a beloved schoolteacher facing deportation, urging Gov. Mitt Romney to intervene and ask federal officials not send him back to his native Ivory Coast.
Obain Attouoman, 42, a teacher at Boston's Fenway High School, fled political persecution in 1992 and later applied for asylum in the United States. But he missed a hearing with an immigration judge in 2001 and was ordered deported. He lost an appeal, and is scheduled to leave the country on Friday.
His students and colleagues delivered a letter to Romney's office on Wednesday, asking the governor to ask the White House and the Department of Homeland Security to stop Attouoman's deportation.
"I look to him as a role model," said Efrain Arias, 17, an 11th-grade student of Attouoman. "I would like to be like Obain, a person that throughout his life has fought for justice ... now he's being deported because he missed a hearing. I don't understand it."
A Romney aide who accepted the letter told the group that the governor had received many letters in support of Attouoman, but his press office declined to comment on the request.
About 100 students and adults also rallied Wednesday afternoon outside the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston.
"I don't want to leave you because you are my people," Attouoman told his sign-waving supporters.
Attouoman's case is not unusual -- some 186,000 immigrants were deported in 2003. But his case has captured the attention of the media and powerful politicians because of the outcry from his students and the community.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said his status was unchanged.
"He is under a final order of removal, and (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is moving forward to remove him from the U.S.," spokeswoman Paula Grenier said.
Attouoman was a teacher in the Ivory Coast. He was jailed in 1990 and 1992 for advocating for labor unions and for his involvement with the leftist group that later came to power in the West African nation.
He came to the U.S. on a visitor visa and applied for asylum in 1994, according to his attorney, Susan J. Cohen.
Attouoman's application for asylum was rejected in 2000 and his case referred to immigration court. He claims he missed the 2001 hearing because he misread the handwritten date on the notice. He received a deportation order days later.
He asked for another hearing, but a judge rejected the request. The Board of Immigration Appeals in Washington dismissed his appeal in February 2002, Cohen said.
Attouoman was arrested on a deportation warrant in November 2003, but he was released last March after hundreds of supporters rallied. Another protest last month won him a three-week reprieve.
The clamor has caught the attention of U.S. Sens. John Kerry and Edward Kennedy, who asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on March 1 that the deportation be deferred.
Supporters have now launched a last-ditch effort by asking Romney, the state's highest-ranking Republican, to use his ties to the White House to help Attouoman.
"The clock is ticking," said supporter Horace Small, executive director of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods, "and in less than 48 hours, this man may be deported, and it's wrong." 