Four-year-old Miguel has an evening routine: He stares
out his window across southern Colorado’s painfully flat San
Luis Valley, waiting for his father, Roberto, to return from work
at the Worley & McCullough potato processing plant near the
town of Center. But on the evening of April 17, the routine was
broken when Roberto didn’t come home. That morning,
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers raided the plant and
arrested him and 17 of his coworkers. Roberto was taken to a jail
in Denver, more than 200 miles away. He didn’t see his family
again for 10 days.
At first, Elena (the family asked that
their real names not be used), told their three children that their
father was just working longer hours, coming home after the
children were in bed and leaving before they woke up. But after a
few days, 6-year-old Alex overheard his mother crying on the phone
— something about his father being in a jail in Denver.
Rather than trying to explain things like immigration and
why people from something called “ICE” took his father
away, Elena tried to convince her oldest child that he had
misunderstood.
“Daddy is in Denver working with his
cousin, not in jail,” she assured him again and again. She
even called the school and asked Alex’s teachers to
corroborate her story.
After 10 days, Roberto finally
returned home. To the children, it seemed the family’s
nightmare was over. But just a few days later, a letter came in the
mail, ordering him to report to an immigration office in Alamosa,
the bureaucratic hub for this vast agricultural valley. Roberto
didn’t come home that night, either.
For two more
weeks, Elena made up stories about the jobs he was doing with his
cousin in Denver and the new car that he would be bringing home any
day now. Alex seemed satisfied, and the stories helped Elena
disguise the fear that had taken over her own life.
The San Luis Valley bust was just one in a string of
increasingly regular raids across the country. In
December, ICE agents converged on six Swift & Co. meatpacking
plants in multiple states simultaneously, hauling away hundreds of
workers. This summer, agents continued to ratchet up the pressure,
netting 14 arrests in a raid on a U.S. Forest Service contractor in
Idaho and over 100 more suspected illegal immigrants at an Oregon
food processing plant.
Each raid tightens the grip of
fear among immigrants living in the United States, sending tremors
through their communities. Meanwhile, states have passed strict new
immigration laws that exacerbate the anxiety. Yet evidence suggests
that the raids have done little to curb undocumented immigration.
Meanwhile, by further ostracizing “illegals,” the raids
may actually worsen the problems associated with undocumented
immigration and hamper assimilation for generations to come.
“This is a little bit of theater. It’s not
unlike taking off our shoes at the airport,” says Tomás
Jimenéz, assistant professor of sociology at the University of
California, San Diego. “Like it or not, a lot of these people
have children who are born in the United States that are American
citizens, and their children will grow up here and stay here. If
many of the children of these immigrants start out having their
parents labeled illegal … it can have a ripple effect on
assimilation well into the future, and that’s not good for
the United States.”
Roberto immigrated to
Colorado from Mexico 13 years ago and has lived and worked
illegally in the valley’s mushroom farms and potato
facilities ever since, using a fake social security
number. Elena followed him here, and all three of their children
were born in Colorado as American citizens. Since the San Luis
Valley raid, Roberto has spent more than three weeks in detention
centers, constantly living under the threat of deportation. During
that time, federal marshals convinced him to testify against his
former employer. He must stay in the state, and he can’t work
or drive while he waits to testify, which could be several months
or longer. In the meantime, Elena says, there is mostly just fear.
“Everyone’s afraid now. People are panicking,
and lots of people are afraid to leave their houses. I
haven’t gone to the grocery store in a month, I’ve been
so scared of getting picked up.”
That anxiety has
been widespread among all the valley’s immigrant workers, not
just the families of those arrested in the raid. Immediately after
the news broke that ICE was in town, a tidal wave of rumors flooded
the tiny communities and the 8,000 acres of farm and ranch land on
the valley floor.
“The next day, a text message
went around that there would be a raid at the school,”
recalls George Welsh, superintendent of the Center Consolidated
School District. He estimates that about 20 percent of the
district’s students come from homes where at least one family
member is here illegally. “We had to send around another
message saying, ‘The school is the safest place for your kids
to be …’ but some families disappeared with their kids
and still haven’t come back.”
—-
Welsh says
before the raid, he was preparing next year’s budget for the
district based on an anticipated student population of 580, but has
since revised that projection down to 525 students and may be
forced to eliminate a number of teaching jobs as a result.
It’s become increasingly difficult to get the word
out on what people’s rights are, says Welsh. Rumors spread
that ICE might be staging meetings to net additional arrests. Welsh
responded with e-mails assuring parents that meetings organized by
the San Luis Valley Immigrant Resource Center were valid. The
assurances were met with more rumors that ICE may be staking out
the meetings or the Resource Center office itself.
“Now we have to take into consideration where people feel
safe for meetings,” says Sara Spring, an advocate with the
Center. “We use a lot of churches, but a lot of people are
still really scared to drive anywhere.”
A new law
requiring Colorado police to report suspected illegal immigrants
whom they arrest has added the fear that a routine traffic stop
could lead to deportation. In response, many illegal immigrants
leave the house only when absolutely necessary. But now, some
refuse to risk being discovered even for the most urgent of
circumstances, according to Francisco Lucas, a Guatemalan immigrant
and local leader in the immigrant community.
“Now
if there is an accident or case of domestic violence, people
don’t report it,” says Lucas. “There could be
kids involved who are citizens, but they’re not getting help.
Parents are scared to take sick kids to the hospital because they
might ask for a social security number.”
Approximately 29 percent of all agricultural workers in
the nation are undocumented immigrants, according to the
Pew Hispanic Center. So when ICE arrests dozens of immigrants, the
effect is felt.
“When it first happened, there was
definitely a reaction. Some workers just didn’t show
up,” says Don Shawcroft, vice president of the Colorado Farm
Bureau, who also runs a family ranch outside La Jara. Most workers
soon returned, but he says the raid raised the anxieties of farmers
and ranchers who are caught between trying to obey the law and
finding enough workers to get their crops in.
Shawcroft
says he’s concerned about finding enough labor, but he also
sees a “justified concern about who is coming in to this
country,” and he sees the raids as an effective form of
border security. At first glance, the statistics seem to support
this: During the first quarter of 2007, after the ICE enforcement
was visibly stepped up, apprehensions of illegal immigrants were
down by 31 percent from the previous year. “Raids put the
scare in ’em,” Shawcroft says. “Bad news travels
back to Mexico or Guatemala and slows it down for a time.”
But Pia Orrenius, an economist with the Federal Reserve
Bank in Dallas, suggests otherwise. The economy’s health, she
says, has a much greater influence over immigration than
enforcement. If the economy’s good and jobs are plentiful,
immigrants will figure out a way around the fences, raids and
deadly desert along the border; if it’s bad, they’ll
stay home. Indeed, even as apprehensions — an indicator of
how many people are illegally crossing the border — fell,
construction also dropped off in the U.S. thanks to a housing
slump. According to Jim Haughey, chief economist with Reed
Construction Data, construction jobs, which are the most desirable
and lucrative for new immigrants, have declined since last fall,
and as many as 100,000 jobs could disappear by late 2007.
“I saw this happening (a drop in border apprehensions) a year
ago and I knew that about a year later, after we saw a slowdown in
arrests, we’d see a slow down in the economy, and of course
that’s exactly what we have seen,” says Dawn McLaren, a
research economist from Arizona State’s W.P. Carey School of
Business who has studied the relationship between immigration and
the economy. “It’s not that immigrants cause the
economy to do well or poorly, it’s just that they’re
reacting specifically to the job market.”
Some immigrants have fled the valley in fear following the
raids, but for Roberto and Elena and most others, the
economic incentives and promise of better opportunities for their
children are worth all the risks, even if it means more time in
detention. “We’re just trying to maintain our faith and
thinking about the children,” says Elena. “All we think
about is finding a way for them to grow up bilingual here. Going to
Mexico would be very difficult for them now.”
They
now support their family by putting their trust in the Immigrant
Resource Center, which has provided food, diapers, rent and utility
assistance while Roberto waits to testify. Friends and extended
family are also helping out.
The couple is anxiously
watching the debate over immigration legislation in hopes that a
new immigration law may offer a path to citizenship, or at least a
longer stay. Right now, the odds seem stacked against the family.
Roberto’s status could be in limbo for years. He has no way
to apply for citizenship because he has no family in the country
legally. Elena applied for legal status through her brother six
years ago, but with the current backlog of cases, she may have to
wait another eight years.
In the meantime, they’ll
continue to live in fear, and like so many other families that have
come here for a better life, huddle a little bit further into the
shadows.
The author is a writer and radio
producer based in Taos, New Mexico.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Fear in the Valley.
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