A MATTER OF TRUST
Amid spike in deportations, some fear breakdown of relationship between police, migrants
Rosa Pastrana laces up her sneakers and loops her long ponytail through the back of her baseball cap. ¶ She steps out the front door, climbs into her tall red truck and begins a familiar route through her west Phoenix neighborhood. ¶ It’s a trip she makes every night. ¶ Every so often, Pastrana stops and takes a closer look at something that catches her eye. She pulls out her phone and snaps photos, noting the date and time. ¶ Neighbors peer out their windows as she continues her rounds. The sight of the petite 45-year-old woman conducting her detective work doesn’t concern them.
In most cases, she is crouching outside their homes because they called her there.
She doesn’t have a badge or a uniform. Just sturdy shoes and the cap she wears to cover her eyes when the sun sits low in the sky.
Pastrana is the president of the Osborn Block Watch in Maryvale. Her truck bears a sign in big letters: Phoenix Neighborhood Patrol.
Her presence is one residents have grown accustomed to — one they’ve come to rely on.
For the past six years, Pastrana has covered Maryvale, focusing on the area between 35th and 43rd avenues and Osborn and Indian School roads, doing regular patrols and responding to calls and text messages from neighbors about suspicious activity.
Once she gets to the location, she calls police and waits for officers to arrive, mediating a relationship between her mostly Spanish-speaking community and law enforcement.
She initially worked to inform her neighbors on how to report crime in an area once ridden with gang and drug activity. But case by case, it seemed a bridge had formed over the gap between the heavily immigrant neighborhood and the police assigned to the precinct, Pastrana says.
Now, she’s worried that the hard work will be wasted and crime will rise if deportations ramp up as the Trump administration brokers deals with local and state authorities to deputize them in federal immigration matters.
“The community has fear, a lot of fear,” Pastrana says. “Ever since Donald Trump won, that day people started to feel scared. And to this day, he still has us traumatized.”
If local agencies volunteer to become immigration enforcers, it will have a “disastrous” effect, Pastrana, local police and experts say. It will make communities less safe, they say, because individuals and whole neighborhoods will be reluctant to report crime and cooperate with police out of fear of deportation.
‘Those who are victims ... can come forward to speak’
The link between undocumented immigrants and police has long been delicate.
Police agencies and prosecutors in Arizona are working to keep lines of communication open even as fear grows. Representatives in metro Phoenix and Arizona’s border counties say they remain focused on local police responsibilities and have no interest in being deputized to assist with federal immigration matters.
Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone replaced Joe Arpaio, under whom the Sheriff’s Office was found to have illegally racially profiled Latinos. Penzone has created a Hispanic Advisory Committee to help his agency learn about issues and concerns, spokesman Mark Casey said.
“We’ve attended town halls and coffees and met with the community’s representative and members,” he said. “We want to assure those who are victims or witnesses of crimes that they can come forward to speak. They can do so without concern.”
“We’ll have to earn the trust through our actions,” Casey added. “It’s going to be our commitment to show that we are ethical and professional and that we’ll treat everyone with respect.”
Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams said in a statement that the department is committed to open communication and ensuring that victims and witnesses feel comfortable reporting crimes. “As your chief, I commit to you that racial profiling will not be tolerated,” she said.
The county’s chief prosecutor, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, also says victims and witnesses of crime shouldn’t worry about their immigration status when it comes to reporting criminal activity.
“Your cooperation ... with the investigation and the subsequent prosecution is necessary to hold offenders accountable,” he said. “Your immigration status does not matter.
“I will not tolerate a circumstance in Maricopa County where there is any group of individuals who think that because they might not have lawful immigration status, that’s it’s OK for them to be victimized.”
Steve Kilar, communications director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said he believes Arizona agencies learned lessons about immigration enforcement years ago. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office had its federal immigration authority taken away in 2012 by a federal judge, and the immigration-enforcement law Senate Bill 1070 faced multiple court challenges.
“They have no intentions of turning back,” Kilar said. “They understand the damages ... 1070 did to their reputations. They realize it made their jobs harder when people saw them as immigration officers.”
‘They can be taken advantage of more than ever now’
Lydia Guzman, a Phoenix immigration activist, agrees that local authorities understand the importance of community policing.
But there are an estimated 325,000 people living in the state without authorization — according to the most recent data from Pew Research Center — and she understands why they are afraid.
“We have a lot of good cops here in Arizona,” Guzman said. “But we’re seeing in the news every day that someone is getting wrapped up in the system when they follow the proper steps. They get detained when they show up to court or when they show up at a police station.”
In early February, a woman living in the country illegally was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents while at an El Paso courthouse, where she was seeking a protective order against a boyfriend she accused of domestic violence. The El Paso County Attorney’s Office said it believed the boyfriend tipped off immigration authorities.
In Phoenix, Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos was detained during a routine check-in at ICE. The Mesa mother, who has been living in Arizona for two decades, was deported the next day.
The same scenario played out for Juan Carlos Fomperosa Garcia, a single father who was detained on his son’s birthday, March 2.
“What does that say to the people?” Guzman said. “Shouldn’t they be afraid?”
“Right now, we’re in new waters. Both law enforcement and the community are at a loss for what they should be doing. I just hope law enforcement will show compassion above all,” she added.
Guzman described immigrants in the U.S. without authorization as the “perfect victims.”
“They can be taken advantage of more than ever now,” Guzman said to The Republic. “If a bad person knows someone’s status, they know they won’t speak up for themselves. They know they’re vulnerable.”
The fear seen in Maryvale plays out in other parts of the country.
In Denver, City Attorney Kristin Bronson said the fear of deportation caused prosecutors to drop four domestic-violence cases. She told reporters there that the victims in those cases feared running into officers at court who could deport them.
Police in central Wisconsin are working to ease deportation fears as anxiety levels among Hispanics have reached new heights. That fear has had ripple effects for the region’s law-enforcement agencies, which are reaching out to migrants to reassure them that police officers and county deputies are not acting as agents of ICE.
Migrants and crime: Two ways of looking at the same data
A central point of Trump’s orders and a mainstay of his immigration rhetoric is the view that people in the U.S. illegally present a significant threat to national security and public safety.
“Criminal aliens routinely victimize Americans and other legal residents,” states a memorandum from John Kelly, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Yet Trump’s claims about crimes committed by undocumented immigrants and American crime rates in general have been found to be largely inaccurate and exaggerated.
Study after study has indicated that immigrants, including those who are without authorization, commit violent crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans do.
Immigration and crime levels, in fact, have had inverse trajectories since the 1990s, according to U.S. census data. While immigration increased, crime decreased.
And so-called “sanctuary cities,” which Trump calls incubators of criminal activity, are generally safer than other cities, according to the Center for American Progress, a progressive public-policy organization.
“Look at the trends. They show the truth,” said Philip Wolgin, the managing director for immigration policy at the center. “What we are seeing from Trump’s administration is political opportunism.”
The Washington, D.C.-based group recently conducted a study that analyzed the effects of sanctuary policies on crime and economy. FBI crime rates for sanctuary counties — defined in the study as those not willing to accept ICE detainers — were compared with all crime rates for non-sanctuary counties. The research found that crime statistically is significantly lower in sanctuary counties.
In an interview with The Republic, Wolgin explained that the data specifically showed that the overall crime rate was about 15 percent lower in counties where local authorities refuse to perform federal immigration duties.
A typical sanctuary county in a large metropolitan area experiences 654 fewer crimes per 100,000 residents than the typical non-sanctuary county in a big metro area. The same result was found in smaller counties, as well as rural areas, Wolgin said.
To be sure, violent crimes are committed by undocumented immigrants. Grant Ronnebeck, 21, was killed in January 2015 while working at a QuikTrip store in Mesa. The man charged in the killing, Apolinar Altamirano, 29, was in the country illegally. He had been released from custody in 2013 by ICE after posting a bond, even though he had been convicted of a felony burglary. Altamirano’s case is still awaiting trial.
“Certainly no one is going to argue that we shouldn’t be stopping violent crimes and violent criminals. But the idea that ‘Well, the crime only happened because they were here, so we will be safer’ is a circular logic, because now we are no longer prioritizing (for deportation) those violent criminals,” Wolgin said. “The specter of the bogeyman is a way to crack down on immigration. It’s a falsehood. (Trump) is taking isolated incidents, terrible incidents, and painting immigrants with a broad brush, as if they are all criminals.”
Rather than make communities safer, Trump’s immigration orders will have the opposite effect on public safety, Wolgin said.
“Crime will go up,” he said. “If you have a population that isn’t willing to come forward and interact with police, you’ve got a disastrous problem on your hands ... not just for the undocumented communities, but for everyone.”
In the end, it’s a matter of trust
On a March evening, Pastrana pulls into the Burger King at 51st Avenue and McDowell Road. She climbs down from her truck and opens the back doors for her two passengers, 18-year-old Ruben Acevedo and 75-year-old Pedro Estevez.
The three get to work, grabbing large magnets from the back seat. They place one on each side of the vehicle and one on the back of the truck bed.
“Phoenix Neighborhood Patrol,” they read in large blue letters on a reflective yellow background.
They pile back into the truck, and Pastrana makes a left to start a leisurely route through a nearby neighborhood.
“This isn’t specifically my area, but I like to patrol here as well, because there seems to be more crime the farther west and south you go,” she says.
West Phoenix was terrorized last summer by a man whom Phoenix police dubbed the “serial street shooter” — a yet-to-be identified man believed to have killed seven people in 2016. Six of his victims were slain in the Maryvale area.
From a box, Pastrana pulls out a Silent Witness flier created for the investigation, which is ongoing. She had passed them out to residents living on the streets where the shootings had taken place, urging them to step forward if they had any information.
From the back seat, Acevedo and Estevez survey the area as Pastrana maneuvers down the poorly lit street.
“That’s no good,” she says, pointing out several darkened streetlights. “The darkness can breed crime. I’m making a note of that so I can report it to the city.”
Acevedo joined Pastrana’s patrols two years ago, after he had met her during a neighborhood meeting and “wanted to do his share.”
“Growing up here, I’ve seen it all,” Acevedo says. “I want to help my community be safe and help the people know it’s important to work together to keep violence down, especially at a time like this.”
Pastrana’s neighborhood watch is part of the Phoenix Police Neighborhood Patrol Program, which started in 1994 to train residents in civilian patrolling tactics and to provide tools to detect and report crime.
Because of her leadership in her community, she’s had multiple opportunities to speak directly with city leaders and authorities. While she is comforted by Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton’s reassurances that police won’t turn into a “mass deportation force” and by changes made at the Sheriff’s Office, she says she still has doubts.
In the meantime, she says she will continue the work in her community and advise her neighbors to have hope. “Neither Phoenix police nor (Penzone) has given us a sign that they will attack us, so we need to trust them,” she says. “If I see that they come to hurt us, that’s when my support for them will end.”
“If you have a population that isn’t willing to come forward and interact with police, you’ve got a disastrous problem on your hands.” PHILIP WOLGIN CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS