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| Thompson: The GOP '08 hopeful showed more openness to immigrants as a senator than he has as a candidate. Mary Ann Chastain/AP |
Thompson helped immigrants in legal peril
He intervened twice as a US senator for noncitizens at risk of deportation, records show.
By Ariel Sabar | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the December 10, 2007 edition
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KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - Fred Thompson has made the tough enforcement of immigration laws a cornerstone of his presidential campaign platform, running television ads in Iowa titled "No Amnesty" and skewering rivals for their immigration records.
But at least twice as a US senator, Mr. Thompson personally intervened on behalf of immigrants at risk of deportation, according to papers in his Senate archives here and interviews with the immigrants.
In 1999, he pleaded with the US Immigration and Naturalization Service to reinstate a green-card application from a Korean family who became illegal when their visas expired. In 2000, Thompson passed a private law to grant green cards – or permanent residence – to a disabled Bolivian widow and three of her children. Under public law, the family would have had to leave the United States.
The episodes reveal a greater open-mindedness toward immigrants in legal limbo than has been evident from Thompson on the campaign trail.
"I'm very appreciating about what he do," the Bolivian widow, Jacqueline Salinas, of Memphis, Tenn., said in a phone interview last week. "He's a blessing for my family."
She says she became a US citizen this year.
In letters to federal officials and in remarks in the Senate at the time, Thompson said the families deserved special treatment for "humanitarian reasons" and their "extraordinary circumstances." In memos to Thompson, Senate aides also noted the prospect of positive media coverage.
The headline of an August 1999 news release from his Senate office read, "Thompson Introduces Legislation to Assist St. Jude Cancer Patient."
Ms. Salinas and her husband came to the United States in 1996 on tourist visas so their 7-year-old daughter could receive medical care for a rare cancer. About a year later, her husband and a 3-year-old daughter were killed in a car accident that Salinas says left her paralyzed while seven-months pregnant.
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