Clemency lifts burden, offers hope for ex-con
Within hours, Daniel Maher’s name was everywhere.
“Did you hear the good news?” asked his colleagues at the Ecology Center in Berkeley, where the 44-year-old works. Gov. Jerry Brown had just pardoned 56 ex-convicts in a preEaster act of clemency. Maher was among them.
Then, a day later, his name was everywhere again: President Trump was tweeting that Brown had pardoned five “criminal illegal aliens” and asked, “Is this what the great people of California want?” First on the list was someone whose crimes included kidnapping and robbery. That was Maher.
For two decades, those crimes — for which he served five years in prison in the 1990s — had made Maher vulnerable to being deported to a country where he’d never been a citizen.
“I always felt like there was this weight on my shoulders,” Maher said. “I wouldn’t take the risk to actually live. I was on edge. I never knew if this month was going to be the last
month.”
He added, “I wish Trump wasn’t so negative about it. I fear sometimes that he will get directly involved, that he will try to deport me: one individual in one state. He has the power to make my life miserable.”
But Trump isn’t the only one who reacted negatively. Travis Allen, a Republican running for governor, said Brown was “blatantly trying to find a work-around to federal immigration law in order to keep illegal immigrants guilty of kidnapping, robbery, spousal abuse and drug dealing in the state. His actions are dangerous.”
Maher knows that many people will look at him and see only an ex-con. But he says he’s more than his distant past, and that everything he’s done to try to atone proves that.
Of the five people facing deportation whom Brown pardoned March 30, Maher’s rap sheet was the worst. His conviction came in 1994, when Maher was 20 and robbed a San Jose auto-parts store. He says he was angry and had fallen in with the wrong crowd.
“It’s hard for people to believe the kind of person I was back then,” Maher said. “I don’t recognize who I was.”
Maher came to the U.S. from Macau, a Portuguese colony, when he was 3 years old. After he left, Portugal handed the island back to China. His sentencing judge stripped him of his U.S. residency. When he got out of prison, immigration officials were waiting and ready to deport him to China — a nation in which he’d never lived.
China, however, refused to take him, so federal authorities let him go in 2001. He got a job in a plastic processing plant through an Alameda County program for hard-to-employ people. He worked on the line, separating plastic bottles from paper and cardboard. He trashed the recyclables smeared with food. Eventually, he was promoted to a managerial position.
Now, he’s the program director of the Ecology Center, Berkeley’s residential recycling program. He helps lead educational programs around the city, including classes and outreach at farmers’ markets. He also teaches a recycling academy course to at-risk youth.
“Daniel has worked with consistent dedication and devotion on behalf of our organization and community,” said Deborah Beyea, the center’s deputy director. “He has made significant contributions . ... The Ecology Center would not have achieved the success we’ve had over the past decade without him.”
Besides a good job, Maher says, he wanted what many people want: a partner, children, stability. But the possibility of deportation was always there, and he couldn’t have supported a family from China. He went to work, then home to his Hayward apartment. He stopped aspiring for more.
Until he met Katrina Manubay, a single mother raising a young son. They met at a mutual friend’s barbecue in April 2015, fell in love and made plans to get married. He wanted to be a father to the boy.
However, Maher wasn’t free of his past. That June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers picked him up outside his home, enforcing a deportation order issued more than a decade before. The agency apprehended Maher as part of a sweep of Chinese immigrants who had been issued final orders of removal. He hadn’t yet told Manubay about his past.
“Talk about timing,” Maher said. “I was planning to break it to her much further along. She got the real shock treatment. Her having to find out that way, I was regretful of that.”
For three months, Maher was held in a privately run jail in the high desert town of Adelanto (San Bernardino County). His boss at the Ecology Center held his job open for him. His colleagues absorbed his duties and picketed the local ICE office to ask for his release, gluing printer copies of his face onto posters.
After the Asian Law Caucus took up his case, ICE let Maher go — but kept open the possibility he could still be deported. The agency did not respond to requests for comment.
“I think if they were to send me back (to Macau), I wouldn’t have had much of a Plan B except trying to get out of there as soon as I could,” Maher said. “I don’t speak the language. I don’t know anything about China’s systems or government or how to read the street signs. I wouldn’t have had a fighting chance.”
In late 2015, Maher drove to Sacramento and asked legislators for their support. His lawyer at the Asian Law Caucus said it was Maher’s best hope. Some lawmakers wrote letters to Brown, urging him to consider a pardon.
“The pardon process exists because society recognizes that people can change their lives and make amends,” wrote Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco. “Daniel has proven that he is a valuable member of our community who deserves a second chance.”
Last week, after the governor said yes, Maher sent a text to Manubay. It was a string of smiley faces. That evening, on the couch in their two-bedroom apartment, Maher said, “When would you like to visit the Philippines? Let’s start making those plans.”
She had tears in her eyes. They married last summer, and her family overseas wanted to meet her new husband.
First, Maher’s pending order of removal will have to be settled. The pardon will allow the judge to terminate the case, said Christina So, a spokeswoman for the Asian Law Caucus.
Afterward, Maher can regain his permanent legal resident status, she said. He will be able to travel again after that. He wants to go to Tijuana for a few days, just because he can. And later, to Macau, his birthplace. The world was closed to him for so long.
He also wants to do more advocacy work helping immigrants facing deportation.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever get a moment of Jerry Brown’s time,” Maher said. “He’s pretty busy. But I’d love to sit down and thank him for my second chance. This one opportunity is the validation of all the work I have done. It gives me the opportunity to be the husband and father and son — you name it — everything I should have been all along instead of getting in trouble.”