Navy protests treatment of sailor's wife, baby

[thedrifter]

Immigration detainment at issue

Navy protests treatment of sailor's wife, baby

By David Hasemyer
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

September 18, 2003

The Navy is demanding action over allegations the Australian-born wife of a U.S. sailor was briefly denied food and medication for her baby, held in jail, handcuffed and left without prompt medical attention when she was detained upon returning to the United States last Friday.

Immigration authorities stopped Nadia Vetter, who has been living legally in the United States for two years, as she carried her 8?-month-old daughter though a customs checkpoint at Los Angeles International Airport.

They were returning home to San Diego from Australia, where they traveled to see Vetter's seriously ill grandmother.

"I am incensed and enraged," said Navy Cmdr. Ryan Zinke, whose command hustled to help Vetter's husband, Petty Officer First Class Rob Vetter, free his wife.

Vetter has been released on a 30-day parole before she must return to Australia, immigration officials said. She says she will seek to stay here.

"I want to know why my husband can fight for his country and I can be treated like this," said Vetter, released Tuesday night after a five-day detention. "They are supposed to protect the country from terrorism, not housewives."

The allegations ? against a backdrop of heightened border security ? have angered a local congressman, spurred Navy lawyers into action and have immigration leaders in Washington trying to explain.

"We are going to be working with the agencies involved to determine what happened," said Cmdr. Jeff Bender, a spokesman for the Navy's Judge Advocate General's office.


Investigation pursued
The commissioner of the U.S. Border and Customs Protection Agency, whose agents first stopped Vetter at the airport, has called for an investigation.
"There is a way to properly defend the homeland and treat people humanely, professionally and kindly," said Richard Quinn, the acting assistant commissioner for congressional affairs for the agency.

A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which took custody of Vetter and held her most of the time, said officials in her agency don't know what happened and can't yet respond to the allegations.

Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Escondido, wants answers, too.

"I don't get upset very often, but I did when I heard about this," he said. "I understand the need for homeland security but no one should have to go through what she went through if these allegations are true."

Officials caution that they must carefully sort through the claims because they are emotionally charged.

But to the Vetters, there is no emotional inflation to the events.

After she was married in October 2001 to Rob, a combatant crewman assigned to the Naval Special Warfare Center, Nadia Vetter applied for permanent residency, though immigration officials say the application has lapsed.

She also applied for and was granted a paper allowing her to leave and return to the United States. She said in an interview she thought it was valid for two years.

Shortly after obtaining the travel document in February 2002, she went to Australia. Upon returning, she presented it to customs officials at LAX who made a note of it in her passport, the Vetters said.

Vetter, 29, said she believed she no longer needed to carry the document because it had been recorded in her passport.

She didn't think anything about not having the document with her when she returned to the United States last Friday.

After all, she said, she had crossed the border into Mexico and back without trouble three times in the last year.

"They saw the stamp in my passport and let me go without saying anything was wrong," Vetter said.

"So I thought everything was fine."

But to immigration officials in Los Angeles everything wasn't fine, Nadia Vetter and Navy officials said. Immigration officials said she needed to present the document.

She said she tried to explain her trips to Mexico, showed them her military dependent's card and pleaded to get her baby, Madeleine, home after the lengthy flight from Australia.

"They didn't listen," she said, during a telephone interview from a holding facility at the Los Angeles International Airport.

"They said 'Sit down and be quiet. We don't care what you say. We're sending you back.' "

Confusion quickly turned to panic.

When she asked to call her husband, immigration officials said, 'No, you don't have any rights,' " she said.


Child became ill
Her daughter was hungry and getting sick, the mother said. The infant's eyes were running, her forehead was clammy-hot with fever and she hadn't had a bottle in hours.
She cradled the baby and looked again to a detention officer for help, asking for water to mix baby formula.

"They asked me if I had money to buy the water," she said, explaining she had Australian currency and 65 cents in U.S. change.

"Oh, my God, I couldn't believe they wouldn't give me water for my baby," Vetter said.

Finally, she said, an agent whom Vetter described as "the only one who cared," gave her a bottle of water.

Although they hadn't talked, Rob Vetter, 30, learned of her situation when he went to pick up his wife and daughter at the airport.

"They told me I couldn't talk to her, that she had no rights to see me," he said. Finally, he said, a sympathetic airport medical technician told him they had been moved to a nearby clinic, where he could find them.

There, he talked with his wife, who by then was getting sick with a sinus and ear infection. Rob Vetter said that when immigration authorities intervened, he asked to take his child home.

"She's an American citizen. You have no right to keep her," Vetter said he told an official.

Pete Gordon, interim assistant director for the Los Angeles customs office of Immigration and Border Protection, said they wanted Vetter to take his daughter but he said no.

"What we were told by him is he would have a problem with day care and couldn't take the child," Gordon said.

Vetter says he was never told he could take his daughter.

Now into the early hours last Saturday, Vetter said she and her child were taken to a holding facility in Los Angeles.

The next day, Petty Officer Vetter said he was able to leave with his daughter, whom he took to the San Diego Naval Medical Center, where she was treated for dehydration and an ear infection.

But his wife had to stay behind.


Put in holding cell
She said she was then taken to a jail where she was handcuffed and put in a holding cell with two women awaiting criminal proceedings.
For the next five days, no amount of pleading with immigration to check their records got results, she said.

"It was as simple to them as she didn't have the paper. That was it. They could have checked," she said.

Officials did look, Gordon said. What they found was that Vetter's application for permanent residency had been denied because she failed to appear for a hearing on her application.

Border protection officials say the paperwork remains an issue. Immigration enforcement authorities say they cannot respond to Vetter's allegations of mistreatment because they have not yet investigated.

The immigration agency has told the couple that the application for permanent residency has lapsed because she missedthe hearing, Gordon said.

The Vetters said they did not receive a notification of the hearing, but will do whatever is necessary to ensure Nadia can stay.

"I'm never, ever leaving my husband and daughter," she vowed.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Hasemyer: (619) 542-4583; david.hasemyer@uniontrib.com



CRISSY PASCUAL / Union-Tribune
Navy Petty Officer Rob Vetter, his wife, Nadia, and their daughter, Madeleine, relax in their Coronado home Wednesday as they seek to return to a normal life.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/m..._1m18held.html

Sempers,

Roger