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 those who want to legalize their status to leave the United States and apply from their home countries. People who have been in the United States illegally are barred from re-entering legally for up to 10 years.

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

Where to go?
Terry Lopez is a U.S. citizen, born and raised in El Paso, Texas. Her husband, Juan Solis, arrived from Mexico illegally in 2002. Trained as a pharmacy assistant, he found himself out of a job in his home state of Queretaro, Mexico, when the medical practice where he worked dissolved and he lost his license.

Lopez and Solis met in American Falls, Idaho, where he had a steady job. In short order they married and had twins in February 2005. After the babies were born, she returned to work last May and in November they bought a house. With their lives settling down, they began the process of clearing up his legal status, filing the paperwork to get him a "green card" as the spouse of a citizen.

A few weeks later, the couple's life was in turmoil. One cold December day, he and his brother drove to work for a change. They were stopped by police because the car's windows weren't properly cleared of ice. Solis was cited for not having an Idaho driver's license, a misdemeanor. Idaho law requires proof of legal residency to get a driver's license.

He went to court expecting to simply pay a small fine. Instead, Solis was fined $500 and given a six-month jail sentence that was suspended on the condition that he waive his right to a hearing on his immigration status. Then he was told by the judge that he was barred from being in the state for two years as a condition of probation for the suspended jail sentence.

Jason Brown, a caseworker for the citizenship and legal services program of Catholic Charities of Idaho, said that in the courtroom that day information about the procedures and what would happen if someone entered a guilty plea was not translated well into Spanish because a substitute interpreter was used. Solis is not fluent in English and he never understood that he faced possible jail time and that he could ask for a public defender.

"His wife and I heard the interpretation and it was not accurate," Brown said. Instead of paying a fine and going back to work as he expected, Solis was turned over to waiting immigration officers and taken to Denver for processing.

An immigration judge quickly released him on his own recognizance because of his pending green-card application. But Lopez said when she and Solis returned to American Falls from Denver and went to the courthouse to ask questions at the magistrate's office, they were bluntly informed by the judge's secretary: "You can't be here. Judge (Mark A.) Beebe barred you from being in Idaho for two years. He sentences all the Mexicans to that."

Lopez, who spoke with Catholic News Service in several phone interviews, said she hit bottom emotionally a few weeks after Christmas. The family fled for a while to her mother's home in California, worried that the judge's order meant police would arrest Solis for being in his own house in Idaho. They returned in January for an immigration court appointment and were nervously trying to figure out what to do.

Because of their trip to California, Lopez missed too much work and needed a new job. Her husband couldn't risk working. Money was getting tight and bills were adding up. They feared losing the home they had just bought.

Lopez said that when she met her husband she and her son were living on public assistance, getting help with food, housing and child care.

"My husband insisted we get off all that, 100 percent," she said. Until the setbacks of the last few months, the only public aid they had received since they married was medical care for their children. Needing help from others was especially hard on Lopez, who was sure they had been on the right path.

"When we got married, we decided to make sure Juan's legal status was taken care of," she said. "If we were going to make goals and plans, we needed to take care of it."

By mid-April things were looking up a bit. Lopez is working full-time at a potato processing plant while Solis stays home caring for the toddlers and her 7-year-old son.

Out of fear of being arrested, "he hardly goes out of the house," she said. "He even gets in the car when it's still in the garage and we immediately leave town when we do go out."

Lopez said she knows other people in American Falls who have had the same condition imposed on them by Beebe and it resulted in deportation.

"One lady and her husband were walking to the park," she said. "They were cited for jaywalking and her husband was deported."

Until his green card comes through, Lopez said her husband's strategy is to avoid coming to the attention of police at all costs. "I don't know who might be looking for us, but we don't want to risk it," she said.

Beebe, magistrate for Power County, where he is the only judge for a population of about 7,500, told CNS he commonly bars people from being in Idaho as a condition of probation.

"The court deems that, as a condition of probation, ordering someone not to return to the state to be a reasonable condition under state law," he said.

Immigration violations fall under federal law and are generally not enforceable by state-level courts. But Beebe said it's within the court's purview to say that as a condition of probation someone convicted of even a misdemeanor cannot violate any laws, including federal immigration law.

If they violate that condition, the court revokes probation and imposes the full jail sentence that was suspended, he explained.

Someone such as Solis, who was released on his own recognizance by federal immigration authorities, might not necessarily trigger a probation violation merely by being in the state, Beebe said, unless he is found to have broken some other law, such as driving without a license.

Beebe said he commonly includes that condition in perhaps 50 misdemeanor cases in Power County during the peak season for migrant workers, roughly April through November.

"I think it works," he said. "A lot of illegal aliens end up going back home."

Solis' next appearance before an immigration judge is scheduled for August in Boise.

---CNS