NY immigrant advocate, tortured during Chile’s dictatorship, faces deportation in asylum bid

[Judi Lynn]

NY immigrant advocate, tortured during Chile’s dictatorship, faces deportation in asylum bid
By Associated Press, Updated: Thursday, July 14, 2:39 AM

NEW YORK — Victor Toro rarely passes unnoticed as he ambles down the busy streets of the south Bronx, wearing a red bandana over his white beard and ponytail. People who have seen him in the newspaper and on TV call out to him by name. After three decades as an immigrants’ rights activist in New York, feeding the poor in soup kitchens and fighting to keep kids off drugs, this native Chilean is one of them.

But Toro’s days could be numbered in the tumultuous New York borough, where he has planted so many roots as founder of the La Pena community center.

A deportation order hangs over the former leftist guerrilla, who co-founded Chile’s Revolutionary Leftist Movement in the 1960s and was later tortured and exiled by agents of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

After stops in Europe, Cuba and Nicaragua, Toro entered the United States illegally in 1984 from Mexico, where he feared that Pinochet’s spies were closing in on him. But despite being married to a native Chilean who has U.S. citizenship, having a daughter and granddaughter who also live legally in the United States, Toro never tried to get legal residency.

More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ny-immigrant-advocate-tortured-during-chiles-dictatorship-faces-deportation-in-asylum-bid/2011/07/14/gIQAR87eDI_story.html?wprss=rss_national