FEARING DEPORTATION, IMMIGRANTS RETREAT
Life for those already in the shadows darkens
The black and white Chevrolet SUV rolled into the Home Depot parking lot in southeast Houston. Day laborers huddled under slim trees, their bicycles on the ground nearby. Raindrops from an early morning shower dripped through the leaves.
Al Yañez stuck an arm out his window and waved hello. Some of the men, recognizing the Houston police officer, responded with a nod. Others crossed their arms, avoiding eye contact.
A few months ago, Yañez could count on friendly exchanges. Maybe even some leads. At least a hello.
Yañez pulled up beside three men waiting for work.
“Que tal?” Yañez said, stepping out of the vehicle. “Slow day because of the rain?”
“Yeah, there was nothing,” replied Fabian Mendoza, 42, scuffing his clean boots. The others looked around, their heads fidgeting like finches.
“I’m Officer Yañez,” he said, reaching out to shake each man’s hand. “I work here in the community. I’m not here to bother you or anything, just want to hear your perspective.”
He went on to repeat the same message he offered earlier that morning to a broom seller: We protect and serve the community. We’re not immigration agents. We’re not in the business of deporting people. You don’t have to fear us.
Every day, Yañez and his colleagues in the Houston Police Department’s community policing units encounter such worries on their beats. Every day, they offer the same reassurance.
Despite such pleas, fear is rippling through Houston’s immigrant enclaves.
At the corner carnicerias, where regular customers no
longer come around. In neighborhood clinics, where waiting rooms sit empty. In schools, where teachers comfort parents who are nervous about enrolling their children, and children worry about returning home to find their parents gone.
“We don’t want people to hide in the shadows,” said Police Chief Art Acevedo.
And yet, evidence grows that the retreat is ongoing.
More than 30 immigrantowned businesses surveyed by the Chronicle say revenues have cratered by as much as 70 percent since January. Across the region, health officials have seen declines in clinic visits. At Magnolia’s Centro De Corazon, half of their pregnant patients who are living in the U.S. illegally didn’t return for checkups last month.
Houston police say crimes reported by Latinos have fallen by more than 40 percent in the first three months of 2017 compared with the previous year.
Across the Houston area, those who show up at crime prevention forums — day laborers and college students, business owners and construction workers, landscapers and mechanics, Central American immigrants and Vietnamese refugees, those living here legally and illegally — all pepper police officers with similar questions:
Is it worth the risk to report a robbery? Will I be stopped driving to work? Will you ask about my immigration status?
At the Home Depot, not long before Hurricane Harvey devastated wide swaths of his city, Yañez was confronting these questions and making little progress regaining the trust he had built over the years.
One of the men told Yañez about how assailants struck him in the head during a recent robbery. He didn’t believe police would solve the case. Yañez tried to appease him. “We’re here to serve the community …” he began.
Mendoza interrupted. Would police assume that he, a legal resident, was here illegally just because he was Latino? Would they treat all Latinos with respect or with suspicion? “Y los racistas?” he said. Yanez sighed and stared at the ground. A minute of silence passed, Mendoza’s words hanging in the air.
And what about the racists?
Rescue teams, composed of volunteers and local and federal authorities, scoured Houston streets that Harvey morphed into flowing rivers. They approached houses and apartments complexes where water was rising up to the knee, chest or higher.
Many families living here illegally were too afraid to call for help.
“As soon they saw some of the rescuers wearing Border Patrol uniforms, they didn’t want to come out,” said Cesar Espinosa, executive director of the immigration advocacy group FIEL.
Federal agencies and local officials offered assurances that a rescue would not be turned into an immigration roundup. Mayor Sylvester Turner even vowed to personally represent anyone threatened with deportation. Still, many families refused refuge in shelters and assistance at food banks.
“It was one rumor after another that spread and caused fear,” Espinosa said.
Last week, less than 30 days after Harvey hit the Texas Gulf Coast, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that it resumed immigration-related arrests in the Houston area, the only safe zones being food banks and shelters.
The notion that immigrants might not feel safe here stands in stark contrast to Houston’s reputation as one of the most diverse cities in the nation, a source of pride for many residents and city leaders.
“Houston is, and always has been, a welcoming city, where we value and appreciate diversity,” Turner said.
For decades, foreign-born newcomers felt welcome in Houston, a place long-celebrated as an immigrant magnet. Here, they found work, opportunity and acceptance.
Over the past 30 years, immigrants helped replenish the city, which saw a drop in the white population after the oil bust of the 1980s. First, the Vietnamese refugee influx, then a surge of immigrants from Latin America, Africa and Asia changed the demographics of the region.
One in four Harris County residents are foreign-born, and Houston is home to an estimated 575,000 who immigrated here illegally, the third-largest concentration in the country.
Immigrant workers pump in $116.5 billion through consumption and taxes and make up nearly one-third of the labor force. They raise families, become high school valedictorians, graduate from college and operate businesses. They are woven into the fabric of the city — regardless of immigration status.
Then Donald Trump, who made building a wall on the Mexican border a rallying cry during his campaign, became president.
Five days after his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order making immigration enforcement and deportation a priority. In the 100 days following the order, ICE arrested 41,318 people on charges of being in the country illegally, a 38 percent increase over the same period in 2016.
More recently, Trump ordered an end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, which allowed immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children to get an education and work permit without fear of deportation.
Meanwhile, the specter of Senate Bill 4, the Texas law that allows local police to question a detained person’s legal status, looms over immigrant communities.
While a judge has blocked some parts of the so-called sanctuary cities law, one of its most controversial aspects, allowing police to question a person’s immigration status, remains in effect. Should the law prevail in court, elected or appointed officials can be removed from office if they don’t cooperate with federal immigration agents. Local governments could face fines, and sheriffs, constables and police chiefs could be charged with a misdemeanor.
SB4 supporters say the law will protect Texans and ensure existing immigration laws are enforced.
“My top priority is public safety,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in May after signing the bill. “This bill furthers that objective by keeping dangerous criminals off our streets.”
Abbott is not alone in his support for tighter enforcement of immigration laws, and Trump’s policies enjoy support from some law enforcement agencies, as well as from Republican politicians and voters. In Texas, at least 18 sheriffs have agreed to help ICE identify immigrants in their custody who are in the country illegally.
Critics, however, worry that it will drive a community already living in the margins even deeper underground.
Acevedo has made it clear to his officers: You don’t have to ask people about their immigration status. That stance has been reiterated by Houston’s mayor.
“We are not going to start profiling people to determine whether they are here illegally,” Turner said. “It hasn’t happened under previous mayors, and it will not happen under my administration.” Just days before Hurricane Harvey began forming in the Atlantic, Yañez drove up to the Brookdale Village Apartments, worried a new rumor might be true.
Word on the street was that ICE agents had recently raided the complex in the Lawndale neighborhood on the east side of the city. Yañez feared a chilling effect.
“Hi there, how are you?” he hollered to a woman strolling by. She nodded nervously, then darted away when Yañez turned his back.
Inside the leasing office, manager Ester Salazar greeted him with a smile. A good sign.
Yañez has been paying such visits for most of his career, building up trust so residents can feel comfortable confiding in him. The practice helped when he worked on the Eastside gang unit for 19 years. For the past three years, he has made the visits part of his daily routine as a community policing officer.
The conversation with Salazar was going well. Then Yañez asked about the ICE rumor.
Yes, she whispered, head bent down. Agents came by and emptied four units. They were looking for a man. They didn’t find him. They took the rest.
“Puedo dar una vuelta?” Yañez said. With her permission he walked through the complex, hoping to assuage the fears of anyone he could find.
All of the tenants are Latino, according to Salazar, most working at the Walmart half a mile away, or the neighboring fast-food joints, motels and shops. Their low wages afforded them a cheap apartment with peeling paint and pockmarked brick exteriors.
“Hola compa,” Yañez shouted up at two men lounging in lawn chairs on a wooden balcony.
Without a word, the men stood up, folded their chairs and slammed the door behind them.
“All right then,” Yañez murmured.
He spotted a group of young men hanging out on outdoor stairs. “Good morning,” he said with a smile. “How are you?”
Only one teenager made eye contact with him. The rest muttered a greeting, then scattered.
Otoniel Choc stayed behind, leaning against an old pillar, his hand tucked into his jean pockets.
Yañez launched into his pitch. That police officers protect and serve the community. That police officers aren’t immigration agents.
Choc, who came to the U.S. at age 15 from Guatemala, barely spoke a word. He simply nodded.
After a few minutes, Yañez stepped closer, a hopeful gleam in his eye. He asked Choc if he would call the police if he were ever a victim of a crime.
The teenager looked at Yañez and answered in a strong, clear voice: “No.”
At his desk in the Eastside Division substation, officer Jesus Robles spoke bluntly about SB4.
This law is “something evil,” he said. It targets the vulnerable: the fruit vendor on the corner, the children too afraid to go to school, the fellow parishioners at his church. It will tear families apart and lead to racial profiling.
It will make his job harder, said Robles, a chaplain who wears a silver crucifix on his uniform pocket and a purple macrame rosary wrapped around his wrist.
“We are the first line of defense here,” he said. “So by making us the persecutors, you’ve lost that first line of defense. You’ve lost the integrity of the relationship with the department.”
As part of the Differential Response Team, HPD’s version of community-oriented policing, Robles and his partner, Jason Cisneroz, rely on tips from citizens. They need witnesses to come for-
ward. They need victims to report crimes.
More and more immigrants are simply afraid to risk any contact with police — with good reason, the officers said.
“I don’t see many white people being asked for their papers,” said Robles, a naturalized citizen who crossed the border from Mexico as an infant in his mother’s arms. It took nearly 20 years for his family to gain legal status.
“Or Irish or German immigrants,” interjected Cisneroz, who grew up in the predominantly Latino Northside.
Houston police officials first grasped the panic sweeping across immigrant communities in early May, just after Abbott signed SB4. Robles calls it “the day kids stopped going to school,” when dozens of parents, terrified of rumored ICE raids, kept their children home.
Since then, the Eastside DRT officers have been visiting schools, holding community forums, staging soccer games with teens. Anything they can do to quell the fears.
Both men joined the department because they wanted to work in community-oriented policing. They had no desire to join a SWAT team or unravel homicides. Robles even jokes that he could barely hold his hand steady the first time he shot a gun at a target range.
They also don’t want to enforce federal immigration law — something they say would require hours of paperwork, taking them off the streets and alienating them from the community they love serving.
Not all police officers feel the same. Several metro area police departments say they will comply with SB4 should it fully take effect, and some of Robles and Cisneroz’s HPD colleagues have no qualms asking about immigration status.
“If you want to enforce immigration laws, why don’t you join ICE?” Cisneroz tells those officers.
Then he sends them a link to an ICE job application.
The large McDonald’s coffee, loaded with seven creams and eight sugars, had long gone cold by the time Yañez hit the Ashway Apartments.
He still had three hours to go that early August day. He felt tired. The few sips of caffeine barely registered.
Some regulars on his route had greeted him as a friend, but there had been plenty of cold shoulders. He’s still adjusting.
Yañez grew up on the east side of Houston. At age 5, he and his family crossed the border, green cards to their names, to reunite with his father, a U.S. citizen. He learned English by watching “Sesame Street.” Majored in Mexican-American studies at the University of Houston. Got his citizenship two years before putting on the HPD uniform.
He never questioned his ability to earn the Latino community’s trust, his community’s trust. Until May. Until SB4.
At the Ashway Apartments, Yañez recognized some of the residents gathered behind a brick archway for a weekly food pantry giveaway. They shop at the taqueria next door, the one he guards during an off-duty gig.
“Que tal?” he said, tossing out a hello. He was greeted with silence.
In May, someone broke in to eight cars belonging to the complex’s residents and stole several valuables. Yañez knew who the witnesses were, as well as the victims. But when he retrieved some of the stolen goods and went to return them to their rightful owners, no doors opened.
In any other year, the culprit would be caught in days, he said. Yet, after months of meeting with management, stopping by both in and out of uniform, saying hello in chipper Spanish, the case remains open and unsolved.
As storm clouds swooped in overhead, Yañez chatted with Maria Guerra, a neighbor from across the street who recognized him as the taqueria guard.
So is the September thing really happening, Guerra asked, referring to SB4.
As far as we know, the officer said.
Are we OK if we report a crime? Yes, Yañez answered. Will officers really be asking about our status?
Our police chief has asked us not to, he replied.
Yañez returned to his car and buckled in. Guerra scurried over, boxes of strawberries from the food drive in hand. She slipped them through the car window.
“Oh gracias,” Yañez said. Finally, an opening.
He jotted his cellphone number on a scrap of paper and passed it over. Maybe Guerra would call. Maybe residents would come forward about the robbery.
As he drove off, several women, men and children appeared from behind the archway, watching cautiously as the patrol car rolled away.