By Manny Zambrano
PUNCH correspondent – Chicago Area

BROOKFIELD, Wisconsin –Two prominent Filipino doctors went to prison recently to serve a four-year sentence for keeping and under-paying an undocumented Filipina housemaid for over 19 years.

Dr. Elnora Calimlim and her husband, Dr. Jefferson N. Calimlim, whose parents Bernard and Violeta Calimlim are natives of Dagupan City, were sentenced to four years in Federal prisons after they were found guilty by a jury of four counts of conspiracy.

The jury determined that they conspired to obtain labor and services by threats of harm and physical restraint; obtain the labor and services of a Filipino national by threats of serious harm to and physical restraint; concealing an alien from detection for the purpose of private financial gain; and conspiracy to conceal an alien from detection for the purpose of private financial gain.

The couple went to prison after Judge Rudolph Randa of the United States Court of Eastern Wisconsin in Milwaukee denied their Motion for Judgment of Acquittal or Dismissal and their motion for Bond Pending Appeal in an order issued last Feb. 22nd.

Their son, Jefferson M. Calimlim, 32, who was accused of conspiring to harbor an illegal alien, was sentenced to three years probation, including four months of house arrest with an electronic monitoring device, and fined $5,000. He was found guilty of one count of harboring an alien but acquitted on two other charges.

But their son did not appeal Judge Randa’s verdict.

During the trial, the maid, Irma Martinez, and her parents, Juan H. Martinez, 69, and his wife Ceferina, both of Gainza, Camarines Sur, whom the US government had flown to the US from the Philippines, testified in court by staying in Chicago while preparing for trial.

DISTRESS CALL

This conviction of a forced labor without employing violence of the Calimlims is believed to be the first in the nation.

Randa also ruled that Miss Martinez is entitled to restitution worth $934,420 for working 15 hours a day and being underpaid well below the minimum wage during the last 19 years by the Calimlims.

As immigrants for more than 30 years, the Calimlim couple is deportable to the Philippines for failure to naturalize as US citizens after they serve their prison term.

It was the divorced wife of Christopher Jack Calimlim, the younger brother of Jefferson Junior by two years, Sherry Bantug, who placed a distress call at the hotline of the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2004 that “a woman is living in the Brookfield home of the Calimlim couple.”

In the early morning of Sept. 29, 2004, Federal agents knocked at the door of the Calimlims and rescued Martinez from the basement.

Martinez came to the US on July 21, 1985, at the age of 18 and did not speak English, accompanied by Elnora’s father.

Both the Correction Institute and Northeast Ohio Correction Center and United States Penitentiary Hazelton in West Virginia are low-security facilities that have 1,365 and 1,932 populations, respectively. They are going to be at the Jefferson and Elnora Calimlims’ quarters, respectively, for about four years even as they await resolution of their pending appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, Illinois.

The Calimlim couple was reportedly driven to prison facilities by Jefferson’s brother, Dr. Johnny Calimlim, a veterinarian based in Los Angeles, California; Wisconsin’s Filipino American community activist Princess Emraida Kiram, vice chair of the National Federation of Filipino American Associations’ Region 3, and two other friends, Rica del Rosario and Anita Go.

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