THE MAN NAMED MELENDRES
Nine years after arrest, the namesake of the racial profiling case that redefined MCSO shares his story
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That lawsuit played out as the world around Ortega Melendres changed. Arpaio was ultimately held in contempt of a judge’s order and now faces a criminal contempt trial. Amid the rulings in the so-called Melendres case, Arpaio lost a re-election bid and is now days away from the end of his career as sheriff.
Though his name is famous, Ortega Melendres has kept to himself for nine years. He didn’t testify at trial. Until now, he has never spoken publicly about the incident that triggered the high-profile class-action lawsuit.
But Ortega Melendres still returns to visit Arizona from his home state of Sonora, in Mexico. On one of those visits, he considered the way the arrest had changed his life, and what message he had for the law-enforcement figure whose larger-than-life career had become intertwined with his own name.
Ortega Melendres, now 63, entered the United States with a tourist visa through the Nogales Port of Entry in August 2007.
A month later, he was in the back of a patrol car in Cave Creek, handcuffed, in pain and tormented by the thought that he may never again see his family.
“I’m not a criminal, and I’ve never been one,” said Ortega Melendres, recalling the day he sat inside the Grand Marquis cruiser, where his nine-hour arrest and detention began.
“I was thinking a thousand things, that the worst was about to happen. I had heard that the authorities in the United States were understanding, that they did not have a tendency to abuse their power. That day, they showed me the complete opposite of what I had heard. That’s when the fear began,” he said.
Ortega Melendres started the morning of Sept. 27, 2007, early. He had arranged to meet two friends at the Good Shepherd of the Hills Church in Cave Creek before dawn. There, they would help him catch a ride to “El Pedregal,” an area of towering boulder formations near Scottsdale Road.
That church in Cave Creek had an operating day-laborer center and was one of Arpaio’s first targets for his Triple I (Illegal Immigration Interdiction) Unit, according to the Rev. Glenn Jenks.
That day, Maricopa County deputies had a drill.
An undercover unit observed a white truck pick up Ortega Melendres and other Latino men at the church, according to court records.
The undercover unit radioed Deputy Louis DiPietro’s patrol to follow the truck driven by a white man with three Mexican passengers.
DiPietro’s task, according to the court’s findings of fact, was to find probable cause to stop the vehicle.
Three miles from the church, the pickup truck was driving 34 mph in a 25 mph zone. DiPietro pulled the vehicle over for speeding.
Within minutes, two immigration-enforcement-certified deputies, Sgt. Manuel Madrid and Deputy Carlos Rangel, arrived to question the immigration status of Ortega Melendres and the other passengers, according to court records.
“I felt afraid and I wondered what could happen. I had never been in these type of situations,” Ortega Melendres said in an interview.
But he had heard of Arpaio and his deputies.
“I heard they were fundamentally stopping brown-skinned people with the pretext of looking for criminals. Arpaio was doing these type of operations, but in a rush to look for criminals I think he wrongfully arrested everything, honest people and delinquent people,” he said. “That day, well, it was me who had to go through that.”
A deputy asked for Ortega Melendres’ immigration papers.
Ortega Melendres remembers giving him his passport with the tourist visa and a stamped permit that detailed his arrival and departure date.
He recalled the deputy saying, “No, these don’t work, these can’t work because there’s no reason for you being here.”
In court records, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office contended Ortega Melendres told the deputy he was working, in violation of his tourist visa.
Jenks, the church leader, told The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com that Ortega Melendres was a worker at his day-laborer center. Ortega Melendres said he was never a day laborer, but he went to Mass at the church and liked the people he met there.
Ortega Melendres said a deputy then forced his hands together and handcuffed him. He felt a tear in his wrist from an injury that never fully healed.
About 40 minutes after the stop, Ortega Melendres and the other passengers were taken to a holding cell in Cave Creek, he said.
After about two hours, he was handcuffed again and taken to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices in downtown Phoenix. He waited seven hours in an ICE cell. “Again my thoughts started to fly. What was going to happen? They’ll detain me for how many years? How am I going to notify my family? They didn’t tell us anything. An hour went by, and another and another. I lost track of time,” he said.
Finally, he sat for an interview with an ICE officer.
“How did you get into the U.S.?” he was asked.
“I came in with my visa and tourist permit.”
“Where are your documents?” “Good question,” he said. Ortega Melendres pointed to the deputies who drove him to Phoenix and said they had his papers.
The MCSO deputies sifted through a plastic bag filled with documents until they found his.
“You are Ortega Melendres?” the ICE officer asked. “Yes, sir.” The ICE officer turned to the MCSO deputies, according to Ortega Melendres’ recollection.
“Look, there’s no reason for this man to be here . ... This man is in the country legally.”
He then turned to Ortega Melendres and handed back his documents.
While Ortega Melendres was still trying to process what happened, Arpaio issued a press release touting the work of his “Triple I” unit in Cave Creek.
“Starting at 4:00 a.m. this morning, Sept. 27, 2007, sheriff’s deputies began cracking down on illegal immigration in Cave Creek resulting in the arrest of nine illegals which were transported directly to jail,” the release stated.
Nine years later, this experience and others like it would lead to detailed overhauls in training, collection and reporting of traffic-stop data and bias-free policing policies, among other court-mandated reforms within the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, with total costs surpassing $70 million.
In May 2013, the federal judge sided with the plaintiffs and concluded Arpaio’s office had discriminated against Latinos.
But it was later discovered that Arpaio ignored a 2011 order to stop enforcing immigration policies. This year, he was found guilty of civil contempt, resulting in yet-to-come restitution payments to victims, and bringing Arpaio alone to a criminal-contempt trial expected to begin in April.
The MCSO and Arpaio’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
After ICE cleared him from detention, Ortega Melendres declined a ride home. He stepped out of the building to a fall Phoenix afternoon, still startled.
“I was mortified. It shook my soul. I felt crushed and I thought, ‘What is going on with these people? Why did they treat me this way?’ ” he said. The experience changed him. He had been enjoying his first years of retirement and traveling after ending his elementary-school teaching career.
Ortega Melendres’ wife of 33 years, Jany Gonzalez, talks with joy about the musical talent of her husband.
“He’s very romantic,” she said in a phone interview.
They met in Ciudad Obregón, where both have lived most of their lives.
“He would walk in front of my house, and that’s when we fell in love. I liked his way of being, very noble, very sincere. He is a very normal person,” she said.
But the arrest in Cave Creek changed him in a lot of ways, she said.
When he returned to Mexico, “he became so nervous that he wouldn’t sleep, he wouldn’t eat. He became a very anxious person, he wasn’t like that,” she said.
Her husband started losing entire patches of his thick black hair.
“His look changed. He had sunken eyes,” she said. “We couldn’t just leave him like that . ... It was like it had happened to me, too.”
Their youngest son, now 22, also started getting nervous about going to school. He didn’t want to leave his dad. “We’re still not over that,” she said. The day after his arrest, Ortega Melendres returned to the church in Cave Creek. He wanted to speak with Jenks, who previously had practiced law and could refer him to a lawyer.
“He could see the injustice to what was going on,” Jenks said. “He had a sense that what happened was wrong.”
At that time in Maricopa County, Arpaio’s policies “were so widespread and unconstitutional there was a steady stream of potential plaintiffs,” according to Dan Pochoda, who joined the American Civil Liberties Union in Arizona as legal director in early 2007.
However, finding a law firm to front the costs and people willing to come forward wasn’t easy.
“People in the end didn’t want to go forward; this guy was an intimidating guy,” Pochoda said.
Ortega Melendres said he kept a low profile because was afraid of retaliation from Arpaio. But he said that the fear has passed and that he feels comfortable speaking because now, after nine years, he understands he did nothing wrong.
Arpaio’s defeat, according to Salvador Reza, an organizer with Barrio Defense Committees and Tonatierra and a vocal critic of Arpaio, is usually credited to lawsuits, lawyers, non-profits, and, more recently, to county voters.
But the community that fought against him can’t be overlooked, he said.
“In reality, those who fought Arpaio from the beginning were the day laborers. They were the foot soldiers,” said Reza. “They were the ones who suffered the casualties, the ones who were massively deported and who participated in protests directly against Arpaio. They didn’t have a choice, it was do or die for them.”
In Sonora, as a teacher, Ortega Melendres took his duty as a role model seriously. He hopes this lawsuit sets an example on respect, humbleness and justice for others, too.
“The only thing I wish, honestly, is for cases of this category to not continue arising. That was the intention. That this serves as an example for the authorities to stop committing abuses against the dignity of the human being. Before being brown-skinned, Latino, undocumented, tourists, we are all humans who deserve respect,” he said.