As the House and Senate try to meld different visions of immigration legislation, debate has focused on the employment needs of U.S. industries, the costs of controlling borders, fears about terrorists sneaking into the country and public perceptions about problems attributed to an immigrant influx.

What Congress has spent little time discussing is how current immigration laws affect people already living in the United States and how new laws could change their lives.

Among the legislative proposals on the table are those that would make it a felony to be in the United States illegally. It currently is a violation of civil statutes.

Current law requires anyone who wants to legalize his or her status to leave the United States and apply to enter the U.S. from their home countries, currently a yearslong process. People who have been in the United States illegally are barred from re-entering for up to 10 years, depending upon how long they have been here.

Some versions of proposed legislation would enable people who have been in the country for specified periods of time to register to legalize their status without first having to go to their homelands.

Here is one story of a family who is receiving assistance from a Catholic legal services agency that illustrates the complexities of current immigration law when family members have different legal status.

Living in fear
Isabel hit bottom in 1998, after her husband, Ibrahim, was arrested by immigration officers who came to the door of their home in Washington looking for someone else. Though their circumstances have improved somewhat since then, the couple lives in fear that at any time someone from the government will come and take Ibrahim away so he can be deported.

A shy, quiet woman, Isabel asked that even though she is now a legal U.S. resident her family's real names not be used in this article to help protect her husband and their children, who are U.S. citizens.

At Isabel's low point when immigration agents took her husband away, she and Ibrahim had two children, ages 2 years old and 4 days old. The agents came looking for an acquaintance of the couple who had used their address on a government form. When they asked Ibrahim to provide proof of his own immigration status, he couldn't. He was arrested on a charge of allowing false use of his address.

Ibrahim was detained for 40 days, leaving Isabel alone to care for the children, without an income, uncertain of when, or if, Ibrahim would return, she told Catholic News Service in an interview in the office of her Catholic Charities attorney.

Eight years later, the couple is still trying to sort out Ibrahim's immigration status so that he can work legitimately and they can stop looking over their shoulders, they said. Their main concern is that he not be deported to Burkina Faso, his homeland. What is left of his own family there has little to offer him in the way of support and the country is unknown to Isabel and their children, who now number four. They are 9, 7, and 5 years old and 4 months old.

Isabel came to the United States from Ivory Coast at the age of 17. She entered legally, under her uncle's diplomatic status, to help take care of his children and home. A few years later in 1991, after a dispute with her uncle, she left his household, only to learn that her passport had expired and that he hadn't kept her visa up to date. She had no means of support, no identification, no visa and spoke no English.

Her family in Ivory Coast was unable to help her financially. Returning there was not a viable option, she said, because of the ongoing civil war and little chance of finding employment.

With help from friends, Isabel was able to pull together a life under the radar of immigration authorities. She took classes to learn sewing and crocheting, did volunteer work and, after she and Ibrahim married in 1996, focused on caring for their children, two of whom had serious illnesses as infants.

Ibrahim arrived in the United States in the mid-1990s and for a while had legal status to work because he was applying for political asylum, she explained. After his asylum application was rejected, he was no longer eligible for the license necessary to work legally as a vendor on Washington's streets, the main job he had held.

Since then, Ibrahim has made a living in various ways that don't require proof of legal residency, she said. But he earns less than he did when he ran his own business as a vendor, Isabel said.

Ibrahim and Isabel have been getting help from Immigration Legal Services of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington for several years. Their attorney, Caitlin Brazill, in 2000 tried to persuade the immigration service to defer Ibrahim's deportation order because their then-infant son was in precarious health.

The request was rejected, and Ibrahim was told to go to a government office on a certain date with his bags packed to go back to Africa. He didn't go. And ever since the family has been fearful that federal agents will show up any day with a deportation order and put him on a plane to Burkina Faso.

After years of worry about her own status, Isabel finally received her permanent legal residency visa, known as a green card, a few months ago. While that allows her to stay in the United States, if her husband is deported Isabel isn't prepared to either stay here without him or to pack up the family and go to Burkina Faso.

"I don't know that country," she said. "There's nobody there for us."

She worries that if they had to go to her home country, Ivory Coast, her 5-year-old son --- who loves to read and wants to be a policeman --- might be the target of armed gangs known to kidnap young Muslim boys and kill them or turn them into servants.

In fact, the risk of that happening helped persuade the immigration judge who granted her legal residency.

"The judge said, 'I can't send a young Muslim boy to where they kill Muslim boys,'" she said.