En Español

Above the pleasant gurgle of a fish tank full of large goldfish, two white plastic bags full of groceries hang from the ceiling. Every month, Lilia says, an exterminator comes to the Julian to fumigate and give out mice traps. But the cockroaches and rodents prevail. She knows, because she hears them scurrying across the floor at night.

Lilia has lived in the Julian Hotel, near 16th between Mission and Valencia Streets, with her 12-year-old daughter, also named Lilia, for three years. They are the only remaining family in the hotel after the owner raised rent and converted several rooms to tourist-rates, rentable by the night rather than the week or month. This can cost owners between $20,000 and $35,000 per room depending on the hotel’s location.

The tiny, narrow room is taken up primarily by the twin-sized bed Lilia shares with her daughter. Easter egg pink walls brighten the space and the green linoleum floor is immaculately scrubbed and mopped. Their small white dog Muñeca sleeps in the bottom shelf of a dresser.

The mother and daughter came across the border separately from Guadalajara – Lilia senior in the trunk of a car, and Lilia Jr. with family members and fake identity papers.

When Lilia came, she had no idea what to expect, and even less about the price of rent in the Bay Area. She hoped to send money home to her husband, who had accrued a serious debt from a failed business he owned.

“My sister offered that I should come here because I needed to help my husband with his debts,” says the youthful looking 40-year-old, her hair pulled tightly back into a bun. “So I stayed with my sister. But then I felt like I was a burden with my child.  So I moved.”

With her hourly wages at a Mission District taqueria, the $468 a month room at the Julian is the only place she can afford.

Unlike families who remain in hotels for years, Lilia is working hard to boost her income so she can secure more desirable housing and get out of the Julian.

With so little space, every surface is multifunctional.

“Families use SROs as a roof-over-their-head safety net,” says Maria X. Martinez from the Department of Public Health. “And given the lack of affordable housing in San Francisco, SROs unfortunately become a permanent state of sub-standard transitional housing.”

Lilia doesn’t feel comfortable coming home late at night after her shift at the taqueria, or even going to the bathroom in the middle of the night because of screaming in the halls. At night, there are no managers to patrol behavior in the hotel. Lilia Jr. is so frightened to stay home alone that she sleeps at her aunt and cousin’s apartment on 18th Street most nights.

“I feel sad when I’m alone,” shrugs the Everett sixth grader, lounging on the bed with a lollipop. On mute, the television covers the latest about Sammy Sosa’s skin lightening treatment.

“I worked just as hard as I did in Mexico for the same money,” Lilia admits. “The only thing that was better is that I had my own home, but we lost that.”

Conducted for the San Francisco Human Services Agency in the spring of 2009,  as part of a project for the School of Public Policy at Berkeley, Fribourg’s study focused on SROs in four neighborhoods: Chinatown, the Mission, SOMA, and the Tenderloin. From the findings, Fribourg compiled a “master profile” of SRO residents. The first slide summarizes this master profile.

En Español

Shaded in the old cemetery at Mission Dolores, two statues wait for Rome’s word.

The first: Father Junipero Serra, the missionary celebrated by many for founding 9 of California’s 21 missions – including Mission Dolores on June 29, 1776 – and shunned by some Native Americans for his treatment of their ancestors. Serra died in 1784.

The second, a representative of those ancestors: The Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk woman born over a century earlier, in upstate New York. For years her statue stood as the only symbol of the Native Americans who lived and died near Mission Dolores. If canonized, Kateri will become the Catholic Church’s first Native American saint.

There is no limit to the number of canonizations – declarations of a deceased person to sainthood – the Pope can authorize, and advocates of  the two candidates represented in the cemetery are both working on documenting their second miracles– the final step before canonization.

Would it be significant if Kateri were canonized before Serra, who is thought by some to have murdered her fellow Native Americans?

“If you’re an Indian opposed to Serra, if you believe Serra was a genocidal maniac, why would you feel better if she was canonized first?” asks Steven Hackel, associate professor of history at University of California Riverside who is writing a biography of Serra.

“Lots of people would think it is a powerful statement,” he continued. “But she was a Mohawk woman disconnected from her own community.”

A statement from the Vatican acknowledging that missionaries carried out violence against native cultures, he says, would be more impressive than recognizing “one of yours became one of ours.”

But even Native Americans disagree on Serra.

Like Blessed Kateri, 54-year old Andrew Galvan, the curator at Mission Dolores, is a Catholic and a Native American. Yet he has “lived and breathed” Serra for 30 years and supports his canonization.

Andrew Galvan is a descendant of a Bay Miwok man and an Ohlone woman who were baptized at Mission Dolores in 1794 and 1802. Earlier this year, Galvan added two wooden headboards in the cemetery to commemorate them and the thousands of other Native Americans buried nearby. Galvan calls Serra “a good individual but a bad institution.”

“We Indians are tied to Missions even though they signify the end of our traditional ways,” says Galvan. “These were Indian houses of worship, monuments to surviving colonialism.”

Father John Vaughn is Serra’s vice postulator, the person in charge of sainthood-related records and investigation for the missionary’s case. “If you judge Serra by today’s standards you can find a lot of things that he would do differently,” he says.

Both Kateri and Serra have had their virtues extensively prodded by the Vatican as they’ve moved through the steps toward sainthood to earn the titles Servant of God, Venerated, and currently, Blessed.

A person must be dead at least five years before steps toward sainthood process can begin, although the pope can override this rule in special cases, as happened with Mother Theresa after her death in 1997.

To be declared Venerable, or “heroic in virtue,” a biographical case is compiled, which cites historical testimonies that the person was without a character flaw.

When the case is ready to be submitted to the Vatican, a summarium book is prepared, containing all the official papers. The book is dripped with holy wax, tied with ribbons, and delivered to Rome. Then prayers are said in hopes that the Congregation of Rites will accept the unblemished character of the candidate.

Galvan delivered Serra’s summarium book to the Vatican in 1983. “We handed it to John Paul II and asked what to do next. He said, ‘You must pray and you must insist.’”

In the 1980s, both Kateri and Serra had a single miracle, beyond medical probability, confirmed by Rome’s Congregation of Rites. This earned them beatification and the title “Blessed.”

Only five Americans from the United States are currently beatified, and to become a saint, an honor bestowed on ten Americans so far, a second miracle is required.

That can take years, but in August serious reports of possible miracles on behalf of each candidate surfaced.

A 9-year-old boy in Seattle who prayed to Blessed Kateri mysteriously recovered from flesh-eating bacteria. And a Panamanian artist, who lives without skull over a 5-by-7 inch square of her brain, says blessed Serra keeps her alive.

“Every time I go into surgery there is no hope for me,” exclaims Sheila Lichacz over the phone from Panama, where the 66-year-old artist and devout Catholic lives part-time. Serra revealed himself to Lichacz over the course of numerous trips to California for brain surgeries, she says.

Lichacz prays to Serra and so far it seems someone’s been listening – she’s survived 14 surgeries to remove brain tumors over the past 45 years and still has the energy to travel to Jerusalem and between her homes in Florida and Panama.

Why pray to a saint instead of the Big Guy?

“Saints are closer to you-know-who to ask for favors,” says Galvan. “If a miracle happens, you sure are indebted to Nancy Pelosi for whispering in Obama’s ear.”

Both Serra and Kateri camps see the recent possibilities as distinct and very hopeful. But finding a miracle large enough for Rome is difficult.

“Standards for miracles fluctuate as science widens,” says Vaughn. “We feel you can have a lot of miracles, but we need the kind that will endure past scrutiny, something that can be explained only by God’s special intervention.”

Miracles with a capital “M” are attested by witnesses and dissected by canon lawyers and medical doctors.

It’s a world that moves ever so slowly, but canonizing saints is by no means an antiquity. Pope John Paul II, the pope before the current pope Benedict XVI, simplified the canonization process, and beatified and canonized more than all the previous popes put together.

“Historical cases are harder to do and take longer,” says Galvan. “There are no living witnesses. So postulators think: is it possible to find living descendants of people who interacted with Serra?”

Another source of information are writings by and about the potential saint. More than 80,000 pages of Serra’s writings are held in Mission Santa Barbara, all of which were examined to assess his character.

Sister Kateri Mitchell directs the Tekakwitha Conference, which is devoted to Blessed Kateri and the only Catholic Native American organization in North America. Mitchell says she hears dozens of reports of “little miracles in people’s lives” resulting from prayers to Blessed Kateri.

To her, 9-year-old Jake Finkbonner seems something more than an everyday miracle.

Finkbonner was hospitalized in 2006 with a devastating Strep A infection after injuring his mouth in a basketball game. “Father Tim came down to the hospital and he said, ‘Okay, pray for Blessed Kateri’s intercession,’” remembers Elsa Finkbonner, Jake’s mother, who lives with her family in Sandy Point, Washington.

The family anticipated death, but Jake mysteriously recovered, though he bears scars of 27 surgeries on his face.

Ms. Finkbonner draws parallels between her son and Blessed Kateri. Both were scarred on the face – Kateri from smallpox, Jake from flesh-eating bacteria – and both are Catholics of Native American descent – Jake’s father is from the Lummi tribe.

“Jake thinks it’s pretty neat a miracle is being attributed on his behalf,” says Ms. Finkbonner. “But the greatest miracle in our eyes is that he was able to come home alive.”

After nearly two and a half years of preparation, the case for Finkbonner’s experience with Kateri was submitted to Rome in July. “There seems to be a lot of hope around it,” says Mitchell. “I think we’ve just waited so long. We’re just hoping this potential miracle will become a reality very soon.”

Sister Mitchell says Kateri is intriguing in part because, although she died at 24, she understood the complexities of spirituality and religion. Kateri held onto her traditional Mohawk spirituality while having the “desire to know a God that was truly unknown.”

The 2002 U.S. Census counted just under half a million Catholic Native Americans, about one eighth of the total Native American population.

“If we have a saint that has been recognized and given this title by the Catholic Church, this would be very affirming for us,” says Mitchell.

In the meantime, all either party can do is wait.

“I know I am a miracle. There is no question about it,” says Lichacz, who says she will continue to pray to Serra several times a day, asking him to stop the growth of her remaining brain tumors. The vice postulator’s office at Mission Santa Barbara continues to review her case. It’s still unclear whether it will be submitted to Rome.

En Español

For an ordained Soto Zen Buddhist priest, Jana Drakka is stressed out.

“How do I live as a monk out here? I can’t beg as a monk would traditionally,” Drakka said recently outside the Royan, a single room occupancy hotel on Valencia Street where she does grief counseling.

“Japanese monks are supported by the community. The Catholic Church takes care of their nuns.” She paused to consider that luxury. “I have to make a meditative effort to not worry about rent.”

It’s an odd place to arrive for someone who has spent the last several years helping San Francisco’s down-and-out find peace. But it’s also a state of mind that keeps her connected with the hundreds of SRO residents she ministers to in the Mission District and Tenderloin.

“Because she’s been close to the edge she can identify with people,” said Blanche Hartman, Drakka’s Soto Zen teacher who is 83 and has lived at Zen City Center and Tassajara, the monastery’s rural mountain retreat, since 1972. “So people feel respected.”

Drakka insists that the Za-zen meditation is what keeps her together through stints of homelessness and hunger.

The monk holds one of her weekly meditation sessions in a community garden at Langton and Howard Streets. Drakka runs this and several other groups for free.

A chicken hutch leans against a building at one end of the garden, and Drakka’s students sit around a picnic table at the other. A patchwork of plots, many tended by SRO residents, surround them.

The Langton garden group can attract anywhere from two to twenty students.

Traffic on Howard Street roars by and a few pedestrians holler to friends in the group. All regular students of Drakka’s, they sit for a ten-minute sitting meditation. She sits among them, her long, narrow face still and smiling slightly, her unwavering eyes focused downwards.

Afterwards, Pam Walker, who has lived in the Mission Hotel since 1999, said, “I love this noise. The enclosed feeling, but you’re still part of the world outside.”

Drakka calls her life among SRO tenants and homeless – offering them meditation, stress support, and sometimes just an open ear – her “Zendo without walls.”

The monk works two days a week as “grief/stress support” within Tenderloin Housing Clinic, and provides one-on-one counseling for both staff and clients. Call it non-religious, but she admits her work is basically Zen philosophy and meditation in disguise.

“I’ve never found anyone who can’t find a bit of peace from this,” says 57-year-old Drakka.

“Learning not to react to your anger is important in an SRO,” says Bill Williams, Drakka’s student who lives in the Royan, explained. Williams has devoted part of his room to create his own zendo. He has a mat, a bell and a few Buddhist statues.  Meditation, he says, reminds him to “live in joy, even among the troubled.”

Drakka found her own peace – or at least Zen Buddhism, when she moved to California almost 20 years ago. Her 37 years before arriving in San Francisco were a series of lifestyle incarnations.

Since age 7, Drakka wanted to know more about the “life of the spirit,” she says. Born as Elizabeth Anne Potts to a working class family in Falkirk, Scotland, the monk has lived as a grade school teacher, a Wiccan Priestess, and a psychic reader. Among other sorts of healing and drugs, she said, she has tried communal dreaming, distance healing, chromo-therapy, acid and ecstasy.

Like many of her clients now, Drakka too was homeless. That was in 1993. She had just left an abusive relationship with a female lover, and she applied for a slot in Zen Center. “Few people come to practice because they’re happy,” she says smiling.

At first Drakka was a bit taken aback by the Center’s beautiful Julia Morgan building, which seemed “very wealthy” to her. She guesses that she was the first and only student at Zen Center living on government assistance.

Ordained as a Soto Zen monk in 2001, she lived in the San Francisco Zen Center for 15 years, doing housework and community outreach in addition to her studies. One time when Zen Center didn’t have work for her, Drakka posed in the nude as an artist’s model. Then in 2004 she found her true passion.

The Mission Neighborhood Resource Center wanted someone to teach meditation to the homeless. Within a couple weeks, she ended up with six meditation groups with homeless and in SROs.

She would have continued living at the Zen Center, but she began to run into problems there.

When the Zen Center asked her to train a group of beginning monks to assist with the homeless meditation program, Drakka pushed back. “How do you train people to be alright with homeless?” She refused.

Shortly after, she was moved from her small courtyard room into a guest room, “and when you get that guest room,” says Drakka, “you know that’s it.”

Linda Gallion, head of Tassajara reservations at the Zen Center, was there when Drakka left. “When Jana started working with the homeless population it was so clear that was her calling.” The Zen Center model, she adds, is such that “we don’t keep people in the same position. It didn’t make sense for her to switch to another position.”

“It wasn’t really my choice to leave,” says the monk. Nonetheless, Drakka asked the Zen Center for financial help to “take dharma out onto the street,” and the center gave her $10,000. They also made her sign a contract saying she wouldn’t ask for money again.

She moved out of the monastery in March 2008, working full-time as a sort of unorthodox chaplain on the streets and in SRO hotels.

“As a monk, it’s hard to start your own thing,” she insists. “But until we all get into the community and spread the teaching in useful ways, how are people going to know what Buddhist monks do?”

The most difficult of her duties, she says, are the memorial services in the Tenderloin Housing Clinic’s 16 hotels in the Tenderloin and Mission District. There are more than 500 SRO hotels in San Francisco, 50 in the Mission District alone. Drakka has performed hundreds of memorials.

“It’s been long enough I’m starting to bury people I know.”

Four case managers have left the Tenderloin Housing Clinic over the past few months, and subsequently there have been four deaths. Drakka can’t help but make a connection.

“They’re like family, although it’s sort of not supposed to be that way,” Drakka said as she recently prepared for a memorial in the back windowless room of the Royan, in her opinion one of the better-run SROs.

She placed an incense bowl, a candle, and flowers from the corner bodega on a small table at the front of the room. Metal chairs were folded out across the linoleum in short, neat rows.

Drakka sorted through a faded black folder containing the Kaddish, and various non-denominational prayers.  “Sometimes only two people come. We’ll see,” she said, pulling out Psalm 23. “Reyna was a Baptist.”

Over a dozen people showed up. Drakka lead the room in hearty voice through three verses of Amazing Grace. After inviting those present to drop a bit of incense onto burning charcoal, mourners stood one by one, remembering Reyna’s cooking and love of bingo. “She gave a lot more than she ever got back,” said one mourner. Through prayer, Drakka sent Reyna off, “into deep silence, carried away by the great ocean of birth and death.

At another memorial a few days later in the Harland Hotel, only three people came to pay their respects. Residents buzzed in and out of the heavy front door. And the case manager, who had misinformed Drakka that the service was for a woman, remained in his office. “It’s a sign that things there are falling apart,” Drakka said, nodding toward the closed door.

Later, walking through the Tenderloin and rolling a cigarette, Drakka talked about her own loneliness. “I know very few people who live life this way. There’s no support system out here. That’s why so few people do it,” she said. “Nobody knows why you’ve got no hair. Nobody knows what I’m wearing and nobody could care less.” She gestured to her long black robes.

“It’s tough because she’s trying to minister to people who can’t support her,” said Hartman, “Yet they really need someone to work with them.”

“She’s there for the people who have no one else,” said Williams, a meditation student who lives in the Royan.

Meanwhile Drakka continues to look for ways to support her nonprofit, Jana Drakka Community Services. “Today I connected with a detox center for homeless,” she wrote on her Facebook page recently. “They want my services but I have no funding. I offered one morning per week…a donation of any amount is most welcome. Bows.”

“I’m keeping going,” she insists at one of our last meetings in a Tenderloin diner. “I know about despair. But I can’t stop because of that. It’s not within my control in a way. I never decided to do this, I have to.”

At the time Mrs. Celebi-Ariner purchased the ticket, ICE was still waiting to hear back from Air France regarding when they would accommodate her husband.  The ticket insured that he could leave Thursday.  By mid-day, he was no longer listed on the roster at the jail.

“I’m not allowed to go to the airport tomorrow,” Mrs. Celebi-Ariner wrote in an email to Mission Loc@l last night. “They might, *might* let me see him, again through the damned glass, at 7 in the morning.”

Celebi-Ariner, 37 and a French citizen, was arrested more than two weeks ago after overstaying the 90-days allowed under the Visa Waiver Program.

France only received 102 deportees from the United States last year.

“ICE is not used to deporting Frenchmen, though they have a streamlined system of deporting Mexicans,” explained Randall Caudle, the Celebi-Ariner’s immigration attorney.

While Celebi-Ariner sat in jail, his wife Pelin, applied for a deferral of deportation, hoping for a day in court – and perhaps a lasting union in San Francisco. The request was denied.

If you enter the United States on the Visa Waiver Program, overstay, and get deported, the airline that brought you here is required to make return travel arrangements and pick up the bill, said ICE spokesperson Virginia Kice.

Rather than wait for ICE to make his travel arrangements, Mrs. Celebi-Ariner decided to avoid a further delay and buy the ticket.

“His family did pay for his ticket but that was their choice. His family wanted his return to France expedited. We agreed to make that accommodation. But this is a case by case basis,” said Kice.

Related articles:

Privilege Became Punishment for Popular Street Cart Vendor

Vendor is Out

Ice Spirited Immigrant Youth Out of State

En Español

Juan, in and out of detention centers since he was 10, recently remembered the feeling during his last stay. “I thought I’d never come out,” he said, his black hair gelled back into a thick, tight ponytail.

Two months ago, the 18-year-old was released from the Log Cabin Ranch, a residential transitional home for male juveniles in Half Moon Bay. But getting out was only half the battle.

Instead of a warm homecoming, returning to the Mission District left him “feeling like shit.” Then the volunteers who had been his only regular visitors in detention contacted him. Again, the Comunidad San Dimas leaders stepped in, inviting him into a group and giving him some new clothes. “They’ve been helping me not to go back to the street.”

Keeping kids off the street and turning lives around is what the volunteer-run Comunidad San Dimas is all about. But after spending several weeks talking to volunteers and young men, it’s clear that there’s no straight line to success. Life in the Mission District – life for many urban teenagers – is sometimes too complicated for even those with the best intentions.

A Catholic ecumenical community based out of St. Peter’s Church on 24^th Street, you could say that Comunidad San Dimas began with a bang.

“Most churches only offer their religious services and they close the doors to youth at risk,” said Director Julio Escobar. That became impossible for St. Peter’s in 1992 when two men were shot within earshot of the church.

The late Father Jack Isaacs, along with neighbors Jenny and Nate Bacon, who worked for Innerchange, a Christian missionary order, decided the 106-year-old congregation of 1,200 had to do something.

With the arrival of the Sureño gang on Mission streets in the 1980’s, gangs formerly divided by street blocks began instead to divide by gang colors, police said. The Sureños claimed blue and the Norteños, red. Drug dealing shot up and violence did as well.

The Bacons and their volunteers found that if young men like Juan had any chance at all of staying out of trouble, they needed encouragement – plenty of it. That meant jobs, friends, a support group and a place to sleep.

“It takes doing different things that get them attached to us, dependent on us, instead of them being dependent on their gang,” explained Escobar. “We need to be as strong as the gang in terms of support and family membership.”

Visiting them in juvenile hall is a start. Offering aid when they get out also helps.

Volunteer San Dimas ministers, now some 50 strong, began to make themselves available 24-hours a day for court dates, job hunts, hospital visits, and family support.

A handful of San Dimas volunteers began to open their doors, and eventually the ministry created Casa San Dimas, a volunteer-run transitional home.

It too is run almost entirely by cash from volunteers’ pockets, along with a small amount of funding from an organization of doctors committed to violence prevention, according to Escobar.

Often one of the ways young men discover San Dimas is through support groups. At a recent Mission Dolores meeting, a mix of ten volunteers and youth sat in a circle.

One of them was Anthony, who has been involved with San Dimas for eight years. This time he brought along his baby girl and her mother.

“She’s going to be either a baby dog or a Toosie Roll for Halloween,” grinned Anthony as the group asked to hold the daughter, who has inherited her father’s dark brows.

As the group settled down, the missionaries asked participants to read through a Bible-related skit, but jokes came more easily than doctrine.

Escobar, the director for the last three years, said that religion often falls flat, but the youth can relate to the ministry’s namesake Saint Dimas, the good thief, who was crucified on Jesus’ right side.

Believers often pray to Dimas when they want to acknowledge wrongdoings and be forgiven.

“He’s not expecting you to repent, but to have a knowledge of what you’ve done,” said Anthony of San Dimas. “That’s good enough.

Back in the group, participants talked about their own demons.

“I feel like there’s a spirit lying on top of me when I sleep,” said Jesus, a baby-faced 19-year-old in a flat-brimmed Giants cap. It weighs me down, he said. “You can tell it’s there, but you can’t wake up.”

“I heard myself screaming but no one else heard me screaming,” said Anthony, recalling his own nightmares.

“It kept happening for months,” added Jesus. “Mom told me you’re not at peace. I tried to be a lot calmer now and it’s better.”

To combat his stress, Jesus said he tries to “read a book, draw, get away” and make time by himself.

Conversation then migrated into stereotypes and how hard it is to get a job as a Latino with tattoos, baggy pants, or both – descriptions that, to varying degrees, fit the majority of men in the room.

Escobar said that some of their best referrals come from kids in trouble who are leaders and draw others in.

When those volunteers actually come from within the gang community, said Escobar, San Dimas becomes that much stronger.

Escobar met one of those, Angel Miguel Serrano, in 1997 when Serrano was a 16-year-old gang member serving time at the Juvenile Justice Center on Woodside Avenue in San Francisco.

Something clicked. “He was trying to put positive things in his life with God,” said his best friend Agustin Dionicio, “even though his friends would laugh at him.”

When Serrano got out he encouraged other gang members to join the ministry, luring them in with talk about the private, family-style support as well as the bowling, camping, and baseball.

A year and a half later, Serrano was using a phone booth on Potrero Avenue when a car rolled past him and fired a single bullet that pierced the 19-year-old through the heart.

This reality is one that Escobar and other volunteers at San Dimas face every day.

Volunteer Juan Carlos Esteban remembers a 15-year old named Joker.

“Truly I felt like he was my little brother,” said Esteban who wears a beanie on the crown of his head above his ears, and works as a community coordinator. “Everybody left but he was the only one that was staying all the time over there.”

After a while, Esteban didn’t have access to a car to give Joker a ride home from the Mission Dolores group, so the kid stopped coming. A month later Joker started hanging out with the gang again, and before Esteban could do anything, Joker was killed.

“When you join something, you get used to something,” said Esteban. “You used to comb your hair this way all the time. If you’re going to change that it’s going to be really hard.”

But some kids stick around.

Dionicio, a broad-faced 28-year-old who spoke for nearly an hour at the September memorial for Serrano, is one of those. He was one of the 14 Norteños who showed up at San Dimas after Serrano’s death.

After the ceremony, Dionicio, tattoos poking out of his collar, said, “There’s a lot of guys who want to make the change. But when you’re around your friends you get a different kind of mentality. When you say something about church, a lot of friends don’t like that.”

Dionicio is one of the few of Serrano’s old friends who still attends San Dimas. He is writing a book that he hopes will explain to kids that living as a gangbanger is without glamour.

One of those who has learned that is Jesus, who found San Dimas about five years ago during a two-year placement in juvenile hall.

“At first I came to get a ride home,” said Jesus, now a student at City College. Eventually he went to listen, but most of the 30 or so others who started with him are back on the streets, in jail or have been deported.

“You have to be very patient because they’re going to step forward and they’re going to step back,” Esteban said.

Sometimes the Mission Dolores group has 20 kids, sometimes just one. Esteban has had youth come to the group on Thursday night, and by Sunday he’s visiting them in juvenile hall.

On a recent evening Juan, the young man released only two months earlier, was doing well. He hoped to stay away from his childhood pattern of getting into trouble. He had earned his G.E.D. and was looking for a job.

After the group at Mission Dolores, the volunteers and the youth piled into a minivan for a late night trip to play pool.

“I don’t want to go back,” Juan said before hopping into the van. “I’m trying to do what I was dreaming about in there.”

The Amuse Bouche street cart vendor was reigning terror on the Orcs in World of Warcraft when ICE showed up at the door. He was married to a U.S. citizen, he explained. They were applying for his green card, but the paperwork had not been turned in. The agents waited for Murat to turn off his computer, then handcuffed and arrested him.

“It was completely unexpected and out of the blue,” said Murat Celebi-Ariner’s wife Pelin.

For the last week and a half, the hip denizens of the Mission District’s unlicensed food vendors have watched as one of their own crashed into a world where many of their Latino neighbors live day-to-day: the one inhabited by agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, deportation proceedings and the collateral damage of families split by unexpected departures.

It’s a world where life for the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States — and the 2.8 million residing in California — can change out of the blue.

If Celebi-Ariner’s imminent deportation to Paris hardly seems like hardship, it has helped to illustrate a story that many readers have tired of: the undocumented worker who gets picked up and sent home. In 2008, immigration deported 102 French citizens, compared with 162,120 Mexican nationals, according to a removal query provided by ICE. The same week that the street cart vendor was taken way, a Honduran mother’s 16-year-old son was whisked away by ICE to a detention center in Oregon.

“We live in the Mission,” said Mrs. Celebi-Ariner. “I am sure there are a lot of fellow deportees and suffering families around us, which definitely gives you a taste and a lot of empathy for everyone else who is suffering.”

Suddenly, with the tall, skinny Celebi-Ariner, the ordinary had become unusual: someone who easily blended into the Mission’s hipster scene was taken away.

“It’s very odd that they went after him at all, ” said Allison Davenport, legal services director for Centro Legal de la Raza.

In the Celebi-Ariner case, all that kept the couple from safety was making an interview appointment with immigration on time. If they had scheduled an appointment, ICE may have left their apartment.

Instead, a week and a half ago, on the same day agents lead her husband away, Mrs. Celebi-Ariner, 33, found two voicemails waiting for her. In each, her husband repeated the same words: “They took me.” It’s a call that at least 17,123 others in San Francisco made or wanted to make in the 2009 fiscal year, according to ICE figures.

“It was horrible,” said Mrs. Celebi-Ariner, a poet who holds dual citizenship in Turkey and the United States. “The worst part was there was no getting in touch with him or anyone. It was like all of a sudden the ground swallowed him up. It opened up and swallowed him.”

The couple had known each other since before they can remember. Every summer in a small beach town in Turkey they would play together. They hooked up seven years ago, but they were in two different countries and the long-distance relationship didn’t work. They fell in love again last summer and decided to live together.

“Back in Turkey, we had sort of a whirlwind romance. It was a wonderful summer,” recalled Mrs. Celebi-Ariner. “We decided we didn’t want to be apart anymore.”

It wasn’t just a case of bad luck for Murat Celebi-Ariner. The Frenchman entered the U.S. in March on the Visa Waiver Program for the second time. The program allows low-risk visitors from 35 countries (mostly European) to enter the U.S. without having to get a visa.

“It’s a formal promise that you will return to your country in 90 days,” explained Sharon Rummery, spokesperson for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

If someone enters the country on this program and decides to stay past the three-month mark without applying for permanent citizenship — known as a green card — or a visa, they waive their rights to formal deportation proceedings.

“You need to be earning a certain amount of money, which I wasn’t, to sponsor Murat,” explained Mrs. Celebi-Ariner. “So we needed to get another friend of ours to sponsor him and give over all her tax documents.” It took time to compile their documents, including her husband’s birth certificate from France, and find $1,500 to pay for it all.

Forty percent of the 12 million undocumented people in the U.S. are visa overstays, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. They enter the country legally, and then stay after their visa expires. People on the waiver program are considered unauthorized if they don’t leave after 90 days.

“There’s a widely held perception that the only people here illegally are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border,” said Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

San Francisco’s undocumented community has long included a fair number of Irish, Eastern European and others, some who have overstayed their visas. And for those who came on the visa waiver program, there are limited opportunities to fight your case if caught.

Here’s the gist: If you get a visa, you get a trial. If you’re on the waiver program, you’ve given up that right.

The trick to visa waivers is, “You waive your right to have an immigration hearing if you overstay or are picked up by ICE. Everybody else inside the U.S. does,” explained Davenport.

Although ICE won’t confirm it, Randall Caudle, Celebi-Ariner’s immigration lawyer, was told by an ICE official that they’re starting to crack down on visa waiver violators. “Up until this case I haven’t seen ICE actively go after a visa waiver overstay,” said Caudle. “It seems to be a new initiative.”

People who have overstayed are easy targets because all the authorities have to do is search in a database for those with missing exit dates. In Celebi-Ariner’s case, ICE knew exactly where he was because he had written his address on his entry papers.

In an attempt to defer her husband’s unexpected deportation, Mrs. Celebi-Ariner filed the overdue green card application, along with a request to delay deportation.

Before the couple’s decision was rejected, Virginia Kice, ICE’s western regional spokeswoman, made clear the hopelessness of such a deferral. “This guy’s a visa waiver. It’s not even relevant.”

Davenport added, “Deferrals are pretty hard to get.”

It could be another two weeks before authorities put Celebi-Ariner on a plane back to France. Until then, Pelin’s husband will wake up every day in Yuba County Jail, as he has since his arrest.

Only one other European is currently being held at Yuba. The jail houses about 400 prisoners, of which on average 180 are ICE-contracted, up slightly from last year. One of five detention centers in northern California, Yuba divides prisoners by the severity of their crimes and ICE detainees are not held separately from the general population.

Davenport said, “There are a lot of people who don’t necessarily need to be detained.”

There were 32,000 people in ICE custody on a particular day in January 2009, according to an AP report carried out under the Freedom of Information Act. On average, the detainees headed toward deportation had been imprisoned for 72 days.

The number of detainees held for visa overstays is unclear. Customs counts the number of people entering the country legally on visas and visa waivers, but counting them on their way out is trickier. There hasn’t been an accurate count of the number of visa waiver violations, according to Department of Homeland Security officials.

Jess Ford at the Government Accountability Office said several committees on the hill have asked GAO to look into the issue. They expect to report results in late spring of 2010.

The United States Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology, or US-VISIT, is a system established in 2004 to track entry and exit of visa holders.

“If they don’t depart in a timely fashion there’s a system that will alert authorities,” said Kice.

Yet there are thousands who live in the U.S. for years without consequences. It is unclear why, of all the visa waiver overstays, ICE tracked down Celebi-Ariner.

Kice mentioned that Celebi-Ariner  “wasn’t supposed to be working” several times during an interview with Mission Loc@l. The popularity of his enterprising food cart could have brought him to the unwanted attention of the authorities, some guessed.

An idea Mrs. Celebi-Ariner presented was Murat’s name. “We think it more now than we did at first,” she said. “He’s got this Turkish name and this Turkish father, which they’ve questioned him about.”

“This was not random enforcement action. Our arrests and enforcement are based on violations of the law,” Kice insisted.

Murat Celebi came to visit his girlfriend Pelin Ariner in March on the Visa Waiver Program. Ariner became an American citizen in June, around the same time Celebi’s allotted time expired.

Waiver overstays are not eligible to change their status. Visa holders, however, can change from one type of visa to another.

If the couple had married by June or before, Ariner could have petitioned to adjust her husband’s status to permanent resident, lawyers said. She could have done this before she became a citizen, but there is at least a six-year backlog of permanent residents petitioning for status changes in their immediate family.

“I wasn’t ready to get married,” she said when questioned about why they didn’t seal the deal sooner. “Frankly, I didn’t want to do it just for that. We wanted to think about it more, so we let it expire.”

Celebi-Ariner may have to stay out of the country for as many as five years. There are avenues to apply to return sooner, but they are not easily secured, immigration lawyers said.

Murat’s father, Alpay Celebi, just wants his son home “as soon as possible.” In a comment, he asked, “Dear Americans, be kind with them. “

Jory John had an idea. A simple way to get together, have fun, and help feed people. John started the Peanut Butter Plan earlier this year and the word has spread through Facebook.

Now there are affiliated groups meeting in more than 25 cities in places as far as Fayetteville, Ark., Calgary, and London.

Pelin Celebi-Ariner had already gotten word, but on Tuesday night she still hoped her husband would be able to return home to their cozy apartment in the Mission District.

By Wednesday morning it became clear that her husband Murat, the popular owner of the Amuse Bouche street cart,  wouldn’t be coming back to cook in their small, well-stocked kitchen. Instead, the newlyweds will remain separated as he is deported back to France.

Murat Celebi-Ariner, 37, was arrested in his home a week ago for breaking the terms of the United States’ Visa Waiver Program. Since then, he has bided his time in the Yuba County Jail, unable to see his wife but for two hours over the weekend.

He is still detained at Yuba, which is one of four Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracted jails in Northern California, the others being Kern, Sacramento, and Santa Clara counties.

Celebi-Ariner will remain in custody until he is deported back to his native country, France.  The wait could be as long as two weeks, said Randall Caudle, the couple’s attorney.

Virginia Kice, an ICE spokesperson said, “the visa waiver program is a privilege.”

The program is intended for visitors from countries deemed low-risk to the United States. Participants in the program are allowed to visit for a maximum of 90 days. In March, Celebi-Ariner entered the country on the program to spend time with his then-girlfriend Pelin.

In such a case, said Caudle, “Typically one would get a visitor’s visa. The trick is customs is not going to let you in if they think you’re going to come in, get married and stay here.”

Under the rules of the waiver program, Celebi-Ariner surrendered his right to court jurisdiction upon entry into the United States. ICE’s decision to deport him was decided without formal deportation proceedings.

“It’s not intended for people who are coming here to settle here permanently to work or to marry,” said Kice. “Its advantageous, but the downside is you don’t have much legal recourse.”

Celebi-Ariner may have to remain outside of the United States for minimum five years, but terms vary from case to case, said Caudle.

Some 40 percent of the 12 million undocumented who live in the United States have overstayed their visas, according to Pew Hispanic.