Hispanic contractors hear threats over their wall bids
They’ve received death threats and had profanities and rocks hurled at them. One company’s tractor was stolen.
For the few Hispanicowned construction firms daring to bid on building a piece of President Donald Trump’s border wall, this is the emotional price of doing business. Owners say they have been accused of betraying their community. Some say they have had to swallow their own qualms about Trump’s contentious immigration policies.
“A lot of people are saying, ‘You’re Latino. How can you build a wall to keep other Latinos out?’ We had to do a lot of soul-searching before we jumped into this because it’s obviously a very, very controversial topic,” said Michael Evangelista-Ysasaga, chief executive and owner of the Penna Group, a firm headquartered in Fort Worth.
Evangelista-Ysasaga, whose grandparents immigrated from Mexico, said he fielded five death threats one morning alone this week from “random people calling into the office and just screaming.”
Every sovereign nation has a duty to defend its borders, he told callers. Unfortunately, he said, a “certain segment” of American Latinos have cast supporters of the border wall as “racist.”
Work on the border wall has stirred such impassioned reactions that only a tiny fraction of the country’s nearly half-million Hispanic-owned construction firms are even considering profiting from Trump’s wall.
Of the approximately 200 companies that have responded to the federal government’s two requests for proposals for a solid concrete border wall and another wall design, at least 32 companies are Hispanic-owned, according to a Washington Post analysis of a federal database. The deadline for proposals has been extended to April 4.
Construction executives, in interviews with the Washington Post, said they weighed their misgivings about building the border wall against the benefits of providing jobs, growing their businesses, improving the local economy and having the ability to influence the construction of a safer, more humane wall.
“I try to be politically neutral in my decision-making process,” said Al Anderson, general manager of KWR Construction, a Hispanicowned firm based in Sierra Vista, Ariz., that helped build the border fence as well as related roads and lighting. “We want whatever jobs here along the border that we can get, and set aside our personal beliefs to support our employees.”
Border security work has always been contentious, Anderson said. He recounted Mexicans harassing his workers in profanity-laced Spanish and chucking rocks over a sliver of fencing as they installed lighting. One of his employees donned a bulletproof vest at work every day.
“It was a rough environment, and I expect it to be more charged now than it has been in the history of working along the border,” Anderson said. “Not only are Mexicans infuriated with the United States, but people in the United States are also infuriated.”
Anderson said that if his company is selected, he expects some of his construction workers to quit.
“We’ll have people who are conscientious objectors against this particular project,” he said. “They live in a small community and they don’t want to get threatening calls in the middle of the night.”
There are also economic risks. Some local and state governments are considering a boycott of companies involved in building the 30-foot-high wall.
“We want to do everything within our power to slow or stop the Trump agenda, especially the border wall that is built on hatred and fear,” said Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, a Democrat in the California Assembly. She introduced a bill that would require public-employee retirement funds to divest from firms that work on the wall.
In El Paso, where a fence separates the U.S. from Mexico, Julian Carrizal said he looks forward to the construction of a more robust wall to keep out what he considers unfair competition from Mexicans not authorized to work in the United States.
“When you have somebody come in with no liability insurance and no workman’s comp, they can practically do the job for nothing,” said Carriza of J Carrizal General Construction. “That hurts our ability to compete.”