June 13, 2004 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
Thousands of Latin American teens fleeing gangs and poverty in
their home nations are being turned away from the United States.
And many of the youths sent back to their homes embark again on the dangerous journey.
Tecun Uman, Guatemala – Heat beats down on Jared Membreño as he
stands by railroad tracks, eyeing northbound boxcars at the
Guatemala-Mexico border. Deported from the United States to
Honduras at age 16, he again is trying to escape his bleak life
selling stolen bananas for $2 a day. Now 19, Membreño scavenges for
food and water, dodges police, and battles gangs that control the
rail route.
A whistle wails. He hears the creak of iron wheels, which have
killed and maimed many migrants. He spots an empty ladder on a
boxcar, runs, leaps.
“I don’t think, only pray I don’t fall, because if I fall …”
His fingers curl around a rung, muscles straining, feet flailing
for a foothold.
The U.S. government is deporting more and more teenagers like
Membreño who are fleeing poverty and lack of opportunity abroad.
Immigration records show deportations of teenagers increased by 38
percent, from 717 in 2001 to 990 last year.
Thousands more were turned back at the southern border without
hearings and handed over to Mexican authorities, U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Ernestine Fobbs said. The
government can’t give precise figures, she said.
Yet tens of thousands still come, mostly from Mexico and Central
America.
Many teens travel unaccompanied by adults. There are no estimates
for how many make it through to the United States.
What officials do know is that, when teens are turned away, about
40 percent return.
And there isn’t enough space in U.S. detention facilities to hold
more teens in custody.
U.S. officials are supposed to deport each teen according to a
“plan of return” that ensures they are safe, said Wade Horn,
assistant secretary of health and human services.
Immigration agents “are not supposed to be sending kids back to
their country of origin and just dump them off at the airport,”
Horn said. “I don’t think the United States has the resources or
even the obligation to ensure that every child in the world is
cared for well. But the kids we have contact with, we do have an
obligation to them.”
Trouble back home
Central American authorities, however, say teen deportees often
suffer.
They face “life in the streets, life with angry parents,
prostitution, drug addiction,” said Josefina Arellano, a
Guatemalan government lawyer charged with protecting children.
“When they are returned and don’t have a family, they find
gangs,” she said. “The gangs become their family. If they try to
leave the gangs, they are killed. If this family wants them to
steal, they must steal.”
Nobody has a solution.
Earlier this year, a Colorado case raised an outcry.
It involved Edgar Chocoy, a soccer-loving 16-year-old who fled gang violence in Guatemala City to join
his mother in the United States.
Then he was arrested with a gang. When U.S. authorities in Denver
moved to deport him, he begged for asylum, saying gangs would kill
him if he was sent home.
A judge deported him anyway. Back in Guatemala he was murdered,
shot in the back of the neck.
More often, hopes are crushed quietly.
On his eighth attempt to enter the United States, Franklin Herrera,
16, made it as far as the Rio Grande. His father is dead. His
mother in Honduras didn’t want him to go but couldn’t provide
food.
“I told her, ‘I want to help you,”‘ Herrera said. “And she said,
‘OK. Go try. God bless you.”‘
He was wading ankle-deep in the river on his way to Texas –
thinking of the house and little church he would build for his
mother, he said, when a border guard caught him.
“I could see Los Angeles, I think,” he said.
Membreño is one of those who did make it through.
Before he was deported, he earned $6.50 an hour taking care of
turkeys in Texas at a giant turkey farm – easy money compared with
selling bananas stolen from a U.S.-owned corporate plantation in
Honduras.
He sent home hundreds of dollars a month. It was all working out,
until police responded to a fight between his uncle and aunt – and
checked everybody’s immigration status.
He spent two months in a juvenile detention facility. Then a
magistrate ordered him deported, and he was moved to an adult
facility for two months.
“You find murderers, robbers. Mexicans were fighting against
Chicanos,” he said.
When he was flown back to Honduras, U.S. escorts handed him over to
local officials. That’s standard procedure in formal deportations.
The locals contacted Membreño’s family in their village near San
Pedro Sula and released him.
Money he sent home had helped buy land for a small patch of beans.
“But I saw my family suffering.”
His father earned $1.50 a day when he could find construction
work.
And the boy couldn’t find anything legal. Again, he was stuck.
“My father said, ‘If you want, go away.’ I didn’t think twice.”
Reforms unlikely to pass
Legislation in Congress, the Unaccompanied Alien Child Protection
Act, would improve conditions for migrant teens held in U.S.
custody. It would require legal representation, appropriate
facilities, appointment of guardians, and careful questioning of
detainees to determine whether they faced persecution. Pushed by
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., it is not expected to pass this
year.
But the broader international problem looms: what happens when
governments increasingly turn away teens without detaining them –
and yet more keep fleeing for help.
“We don’t want to do bad things. Our intent is to find a job and
make money,” said Jose Mendes, 16, deported from Texas to
Guatemala, waiting for a northbound train at Hidalgo, Mexico.
“We make such a long trip. We almost get there. We just have to
make another step. And they say, ‘No.’ They don’t know how we feel.
It’s so hard, because you didn’t reach what you wanted.”
If deportees stay home, they face helter-skelter streets and often
are worse off than when they first left.
In the stench of Guatemala City’s central dump, Carlos Giovanne,
15, who was turned back from the United States last year, now picks
through trash collecting cardboard, metal, anything that might be
resold.
Around him, street children scavenge for tortillas and chicken,
sniffing 75-cent bottles of solvent. Giovanne labors to pay off
$187 that his mother, Alma, borrowed to fund his failed journey.
“I lost all my money,” Giovanne said.
Some find protection with gangs branching out from U.S. cities.
Governments estimate that across Central America there are more
than 60,000 gang members. Authorities see them as potential allies
for narcotics traffickers and terrorists.
Teens fleeing to the United States sometimes “are trying to leave
the gangs. And they face threats” if turned back, said Marta
Altolaguirre, vice minister of foreign affairs in Guatemala’s newly
elected government.
U.S. authorities should “maybe make exceptions on the deportation
of these kids, at least until this government has a chance to
provide a secure environment for the kids to be taken care of
properly,” she said.
Warning cries went unheeded
Edgar Chocoy wanted to be an exception.
He was raised by his grandparents in the gang-plagued barrio Villa
Nueva, on the south side of Guatemala City. His father had
abandoned him, and his mother left him as an infant to work in Los
Angeles.
Chocoy loved playing goalie in sandlot soccer games, but sometimes
sniffed glue, said Virgilia Rodriguez, an aunt. He joined a gang at
age 12, court records show.
At 14, when he tried to leave the gang, members threatened him,
Chocoy testified later. He set out by bus to join his mother in Los
Angeles.
And with the gang there, he was caught with guns. Immigration
agents moved him to a lockdown center in Alamosa and pressed to
kick him out of the country.
Deport me, Chocoy told immigration Judge James Vandello in Denver,
and gang members will kill me.
Vandello rejected his case for asylum. On March 10, federal agents
escorted him on an evening flight to Guatemala City, where local
officials released him to the custody of an aunt, Hortencia Guzman,
54.
He stayed indoors, she said, and wore long-sleeve shirts to hide
the “18” on his forearms – a symbol for the 18th Street gang he’d
joined in Los Angeles, rivals of the Mara Salvatrucha gang active
in Villa Nueva. His grandmother died while he was there.
After 17 days, Chocoy asked permission to go out for a soft drink
and to watch Villa Nueva’s Holy Week parade.
While he was parked on his bicycle watching, a gunman approached,
witnesses told the family. Chocoy threw the bike at his feet,
saying, “Take it.” He turned and ran.
The gunman caught Chocoy by a soccer court and shot him in the back
of his neck, said mechanic Carlos Arriola, 27, who was working
across the street. The police never investigated.
An anonymous mound of dirt beyond an unofficial dump covered
Chocoy’s body.
A shelter amid horrors
Meanwhile, along Guatemala’s northern border with Mexico, the Rev.
Ademar Barilli is trying to prevent more deaths. Barilli runs the
80-bed Casa de Migrantes shelter. Thousands of teenagers a year
come through, typically hoping to join relatives illegally inside
the United States, Barilli said. The teens, he said, “are looking
for food, work, life.”
Tattooed thugs lurk outside the shelter along banks of the Suchiate
River between Guatemala and Mexico. Girls face rape if caught, or
are forced into prostitution.
Salvadoran maid Mirna Portillo, 18, said she considered
prostitution. Instead, on a recent night, she left the shelter,
silently crossing the Suchiate on a raft with her half brother
Santos Aragon, 34. Their mother in El Salvador was going blind,
unable to work, and the family needed help.
Then in Mexico, Portillo and Aragon crept toward the train tracks
in Hidalgo, trying to avoid Mexican police. They slept in tall
grass, anticipating a sunrise departure. Instead, dawn brought
thugs with knives and pistols.
Portillo and Aragon ran, escaping through a market, then back
across the river. They pounded on the blue metal doors at Barilli’s
shelter until someone let them in.
“I was thinking, ‘Maybe this is the end,”‘ Portillo said. “At
first I regretted leaving. But then, I think, I have a purpose
because there is nobody to help us there in El Salvador. The only
ones who could help our family are my brother and me.”
For deportees trying to head north again, days are devoted to
begging for food and money on dusty market streets and at bus
stations.
“People see me on the street, and I am humiliated,” said Jayson
Hernandez, 19, deported last year by airplane to Tegucigalpa,
Honduras.
Denver was among the cities where Hernandez said he worked. He
recalled sleeping near the central bus station, where a police
officer told him he was too young to smoke. Now in Tecun Uman, he
was preparing “to take the train to Tijuana” and hitch to Denver
again.
“In 20 days, I will be at the border of the United States. I don’t
care about sleeping; I don’t care about hunger,” he said. “I have
friends in Denver. The United States is a good country to work in.
We must take advantage of it.”
“You want to cry”
The worst, migrants say, is getting caught.
Elmer Rodriguez, 15, left La Cruz Morazan, Honduras, sleeping out,
enduring mosquitoes, washing in rivers, climbing aboard trains,
raiding farm fields for mangos.
After weeks, authorities caught up with him near Tapachula, Mexico,
and tossed him into a concrete-floor holding facility.
“You want to cry. You will never reach your dreams. It’s so hard
to get so far, and then get caught,” Rodriguez said.
Slumped beside him, Ever Deras, 15, told of his work on a farm near
Copan, Honduras. The owner’s granddaughters passed him once and
were “happy, friendly. They used to tell me hello. I was nice with
them. Then the people who were in charge of me said, ‘Go work,’ and
they made me work until 9 o’clock. I felt very tired to be working
so late for a miserable wage.”
“We never had anybody help us. I feel that nobody knows me.”
In that detention center, there are no beds, let alone books. And
some children wait for days while authorities try to locate
relatives.
Parents inside the United States illegally, who call for their
children to come north, are largely to blame, said Gabriela
Coutiño, spokeswoman for the Mexican immigration agency. Then
again, those parents often can’t support their children at home,
she said.
And “there isn’t even a conversation” between governments about
how to deal with the growing numbers of teens in transit.
Some, such as Guatemalan villager Mauricio Martinez, 17, are maimed
by the wheels of trains.
Martinez fell while trying to catch a train in January. The wheels
severed his legs.
Now he sits on a bed in a red soccer jersey with other amputee
migrants at a house run by a nun in Chiapas, Mexico.
In a notepad, he sketches a woman.
“I want to go on,” he said, “but I can’t.”
…
Clinging to the ladder as his boxcar rolls north from the
Guatemala-
Mexico border, Membreño figures he has as good a chance as any to
make it back into Texas.
He’d eluded U.S. authorities before, hiking through arid
borderlands, and the trek seemed less daunting this time around.
He knew the risks. His cousin Danny had fallen from the top of a
boxcar and was “killed in four pieces” on his first trip north,
Membreño says. “I cried.”
Now the challenge is dealing with thugs. He and fellow migrants
describe themselves as a family, bonded by the dream of returning
to the United States. They had fought off one group of toughs by
throwing rocks. They would acquire machetes if necessary, Membreño
says.
He tightens his grip and holds on.
Staff writer Bruce Finley can be reached at 303.954.1700 or
bfinley@denverpost.com.
February 4, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
SAN JULIAN, Mexico – Outside the house, the annual fiestas
reverberated, three weeks of dancing, weddings, family reunions,
polished pickup trucks parading through town.
Inside, Maria del Carmen, 49, sat silently at her kitchen
table holding a photo of a man in a cowboy hat standing by his
beloved red horse.
The man should have been here with all the other husbands,
sons, brothers and fathers reveling in their hometown before
returning to work in the United States.
But 16 months ago, Denver police stormed the wrong house at
the wrong time. They killed him, the wrong man, in a botched drug
raid.
The man was her husband, Ismael Mena. To make amends, Denver
taxpayers paid $400,000. That money bought this house at the edge
of San Julian for Maria and her nine children – more convenient
than living on Mena’s hardscrabble farm southeast of here.
The kitchen is fancier than Maria ever imagined, with running
water, a stove, a 4-foot-tall refrigerator, tile floor, even a
microwave. In addition, monthly $1,600 checks are scheduled to
arrive for two decades.
Still, every check “makes me more sad, because I remember
what happened to my husband,” Maria del Carmen said. “I’m
thinking, it was much nicer when he was here in Mexico with us.”
And while the legal business is officially over, the Mena
case festers, raising questions of justice that have many
Coloradans, and Mexicans, furious.
Last month, Denver leaders let officer Joseph Bini, whose
faulty no-knock warrant triggered the raid, resume police work
after a three-month suspension. Last week, City Council members
agreed to pay $1.2 million – three times as much – to a Denver
teenager paralyzed when police shot him running from a burglary
with a gun.
“Disgusting,” Mexican Consul General Carlos Barros said in
Denver.
Here in Mexico, people shake their heads, saying this just
cements the hypocrisy of a nation that relies on Mexican labor as
never before while openly discounting Mexican lives.
Yet Maria’s message to you in Denver is measured: “We thank
everyone who is helping us, supporting us,” she said. “I feel sad
when I think of what happened to my husband. I take consolation
that I’m with my children.”
For Bini, she voiced compassion. “I’m very sad about what
happened to my husband,” she said. “But him, he needs his work. He
has a family, too.”
New house means end
of life on the land
Big changes in the Mena survivors’ lives began six months ago
when they used some settlement money to buy the two-story,
three-bedroom house in this farming town of about 20,000 people.
It cost $70,000.
Living here’s easier, though not as free, as on the farm
where the Menas struggled before. Ismael Mena was exceptionally
devoted to traditional farming on his 14 acres. He kept his family
in a three-room adobe house. He invested in livestock despite
scarce water and globalization’s side effects: collapsing beef and
milk prices.
Mexico’s entry into the world economy means more competition
for small farmers and new factory opportunities for workers,
raising expectations – and shaking traditions Mena loved.
Now, his survivors’ house is fairly typical.
San Julian is filled with modern, bright two- and three-story
homes painted pink, turquoise and yellow, some adorned with
intricate round observatory towers and giant rooftop satellite
dishes. That’s because an estimated 90 percent of men here work in
the United States. They earn up to $20 an hour (about $41,600 a
year, not counting overtime), enabling an ever-more comfortable,
family-oriented lifestyle.
They are among 300,000 or more Mexicans who go north, legally
or illegally, to work in U.S. cities such as Denver. Mexicans
working in the United States last year sent home an estimated $7
billion. Meanwhile, poverty in Mexico is increasing, with 15
million people living on less than $1 a day. Ismael Mena worked in
the United States for years, with an official work permit at
times. In Denver, Coca-Cola accepted his papers and gave him a
$300-a-week night-shift job lifting red plastic crates.
Today in Mexico, the Menas are more or less middle class. Few
people know they receive money from Denver. The $1,600 monthly
checks, which started arriving in August, cover basic expenses.
Maria said groceries for 10 – including 2-year-old grandson Miguel
– cost about $1,000. Medicine costs about $100. Ismael Jr., 18, is
diabetic. Twin 21-year-old daughters Rosaelia and Rosalilia suffer
from headaches and underwent medical tests.
“They are traumatized,” Dr. Ismael Macias said in his
diagnosis. “It will take time.”
Other monthly expenses include $80 for telephone service, $20
for electricity, $20 for cable television (39 channels) and $8 for
water. Maria and her daughters make most of their own clothes.
They walk to church and shops, though eldest son Heriberto, 22,
recently paid $8,000 for a used Chevy truck. Filling it with gas
costs about $50 – too much.
The main difference now: less work. Running water – “hot
here, cold here, and we even have hot water upstairs,” Maria noted
proudly – means she needn’t hike out to pumps or ponds and lug
buckets back every time she washes dishes or clothes.
The gas stove frees her from having to find, cut and haul
wood before meals.
The refrigerator enables a more diverse diet. Maria still
prepares corn tortillas and beans in the blackened ceramic pot she
used before. Now she also serves beef and fresh vegetables.
At last the children are regularly in school. At sunrise, as
roosters crow, Juanita, 13, and Irene, 15, their backpacks stuffed
with books and notepads, set out down Calle Reforma toward the
high school with 17 rooms and 700 students. Soon after, Alejandro,
12, who loves soccer, and Carmen, 9, who loves coloring books,
walk through a pasture to a primary school.
Ismael Jr., makes furniture at a small local factory. Wages
are less than $10 a day. But he’s proud, learning new skills. “Six
days a week,” he said, smiling, sanding a sheet of pine for
shelves that are sold here in San Julian.
Family keeps memories of hard-working patriarch
Mena’s family keeps a suitcase full of his work clothes to help
them remember him – very strong, hardworking, a loving man who
brought them toys from the United States, a horseman who could
also ride bulls.
“When you hold the clothes, it makes you content,
remembering,” Rosaelia said.
Yet memories also torment them, arriving unexpectedly,
sister Rosalilia added.
“Not exactly every hour, but at various times all the day.
Always when we see something he liked. Or when we see a red horse
– like his. It’s sad, thinking. …”
The twins plan to work at small household sewing centers in
the future if their headaches pass. Maria taught them to sew on a
white Kenmore that Ismael brought from the United States.
For now, they work at home, mopping the tiled floor daily.
They hang clothes to dry on the patio. The children help water red
flowers growing in silver coffee cans and clay pots. They’re not
allowed to play in the living room with immaculate new furniture.
One recent night, the Mena children walked through San Julian
to a carnival, part of the annual Candelaria fiestas. Originally
religious, the fiestas are adapted to a family-centered migratory
culture. The Menas passed bumper cars, a roller coaster and dart
games where visiting fathers hovered over other children smiling
happily.
It’s a source of great sadness for Maria that her eldest son,
Heriberto, plans to move north again in the migration that
consumed his father.
Heriberto, 22, first left at 16. That’s what local heroes do.
He excelled in the United States, essentially running one
restaurant, waiting tables at another. He graduated from high
school and had begun college computer courses when his father was
killed.
He never visited home for fear his lack of legal immigration
papers would make it difficult for him to get back to work. He
missed his father’s funeral for this reason. In December, he went
home because the settlement made his family’s situation less
precarious.
He loved it. He went out every night, circling up and down
Avenida Hidalgo, letting friends drive his blue truck. A photo of
his father in his wallet, and long-awaited braces on his teeth,
Heriberto exchanged greetings, shook hands, savored every glance
at the beautiful women. He danced late into one starry night with
a girl in a pink top and tight black pants as Julio Preciado and
his band performed.
“But one month is enough,” he said. There’s no work here that
appeals to him, he said. Farming offers no future.
Looking at Heriberto chatting over tequila at a wedding as
the bride and groom danced, he seemed “like the happiest guy in
the world,” said Juan Herrera, 33, a close friend who stood nearby.
But Heriberto’s head is turning inside, Herrera said. “Maybe
after five years, this family will begin to feel better.” Denver’s
wrongful death money “is part of” the healing, Herrera said. “But
it’s not everything. Because in Mexico the family is so strong, it
is harder here. It’s going to take time.”
No formal apology from Denver ever arrived here, the Menas say.
One recent morning, Heriberto drove half an hour east to the
cemetery where his father is buried.
Caretaker Pedro Losano was hauling weeds in a wheelbarrow.
Heriberto found the white tomb. He faced it silently for
nearly two minutes. He cried quietly.
He went to Losano and asked what the family must pay to keep
the bones in the tomb after five years.
Then Heriberto drove west, kicking up contrails of dust, on
the road to the family farm by an old church and a few houses that
together are known as San Felipe Jesus de las Casas Blancas.
He stopped at the church. Old men were fixing it up slowly
for a fiesta today. Heriberto entered through the side. He
crossed himself and sat in the front pew where the family used to
sit together.
Outside, Sara and Francisco Cabrera, selling sodas to passing
pilgrims, told Heriberto it’s not right that police responsible
for killing his father continue to work.
Heriberto drove on to the family farm where his grandmother
Dona Julia, 81, putters alone with her mutt and caged dove. She
refuses to leave the crumbling old house with dirt floors: “mi
casa.”
She padlocks herself into her room every night, where candles
burn by the carved statues of saints on her shelves.
Heriberto sat with her, and reluctantly gave her $100 for
food. He gave her money before and she promptly donated it to the
church in memory of her son.
An old friend, Santiago Torres, approached on his burro,
asking if anybody had seen three stray cows.
He told how he knew Ismael Mena when Heriberto was a toddler,
helped him build the gray adobe house and work the cornfield.
Torres knew Ismael “better than I,” Heriberto recalled sadly, for
his father worked in the United States during much of his childhood.
His grandmother returned to her stitching and watering her
plants. She said Ismael’s ghost visits her on the farm. “I still
cry for my littlest boy,” she said tearfully.
“I had a dream. My son was calling. “Mama! Mama!’ I woke up.
I went to console him, my poor little boy. But he wasn’t there.”
THE CASE OF ISMAEL MENA
Sept. 29, 1999
Denver police kill Mexican migrant Ismael Mena in a botched
no-knock drug raid on High Street in Denver. SWAT officers went to
the wrong house because of a mistake in a search warrant prepared
by officer Joseph Bini. Mena had been sleeping after his night
shift at the Coca-Cola bottling plant.
Dec. 15, 1999
The FBI launches as investigation of possible criminal civil
rights violations after Mexican officials raise concerns in
Washington, D.C.
Feb. 4, 2000
Special prosecutor appointed by Denver District Attorney Bill
Ritter charges Bini with perjury. Bini allegedly lied to the judge
who signed the warrant, claiming he knew the address in the
warrant was correct because he saw his informant enter and leave
the house.
Feb. 8, 2000
Denver Police Chief Tom Sanchez returns from Hawaii after being
called back by Denver Mayor Wellington Webb. That evening, Webb
fires Sanchez as chief.
Feb. 23, 2000
Webb names Division Chief Gerry Whitman interim police chief.
Feb. 24, 2000
Webb announces a proposed overhaul of Police Department
policies, including reducing the number of no-knock raids and
giving the public access to discipline records.
March 23, 2000
Mena family settles with the city of Denver for $400,000.
May 19, 2000
Gov. Bill Owens signs Senate Bill 208, which tightens
requirements for approval of no-knock warrants. A prosecutor’s
signature now is required before a judge is asked to approve a
warrant.
July 7, 2000
Whitman becomes police chief.
July 18, 2000
Denver police alter ride-along rules after revelations that
then-Colorado Rockie player Mike Lansing accompanied police during
the Mena raid.
Sept. 1, 2000
A Denver judge limits evidence that can be presented against
Bini. Mention of Mena’s death during next month’s trial is
forbidden.
Dec. 1, 2000
Denver District Judge Shelly Gilman sentences Bini to 12 months
probation and 150 hours of community service after he pleads
tearfuly for mercy. Bini pleaded guilty to first-degree
misconduct, a misdemeanor.
Jan. 15, 2001
Denver Manager of Safety Ari Zavaras and Whitman concur: Bini
can go back to work. They announce he received a three-month
suspension without pay.
Jan. 29, 2001
Denver City Council members approve a $1.2 million settlement
for a Denver teenager shot at the scene of a burglary by Denver
police officer Keith Cowgill. The teen was left paralyzed. Police
emphasized he had a gun. The $1.2 million is three times what
Denver paid Mena’s family.
January 14, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Migration
Russian migrants left homes, families to follow a dream
At night in a gym south of Denver, a dozen Russian Cossack
dancers rehearse.
Sweat beads streak their faces as they clash swords. They
whirl around fiercely and, from squatting positions, snap-kick
their legs.
“Hey!”
They’re giving their all after taking a big risk: snubbing
their Russian government sponsors on a U.S. tour 13 months ago,
and leaving their children back in Russia – on a hunch that the
people in materially rich America will accept them.
“To this day, I think we made a good decision,” Stanislava
Perets, 26, said confidently.
But their future is uncertain as they defy the norm for
immigrants in Colorado, where the foreign-born population is
growing faster than in any other state.
Most immigrants do cleaning work, drive cabs, haul boxes in
warehouses, cook in restaurants or sell products – basic wage
services the state economy devours. Few enter immediately into the
professional careers that many of them trained for abroad. That
causes frustration, especially among Colorado’s well-educated
20,000 or more Russian speakers.
Depression and family strife result, social workers say.
In contrast, the Cossacks see performing as their only way
into America.
This band broke away from an elite Russian troupe that
traveled the world demonstrating traditional soldierly skills in
skits and dances, accompanied by the three-stringed balalaika. It
is superpatriotic artistry. Russian nationalists revere the
Cossack culture that evolved among boisterous peasant soldiers on
Russia’s southern frontiers.
The problem: On government salaries of about $40 a month in
Russia, these Cossack dancers barely got by.
On Dec. 3, 1999, they were sitting in a Florida hotel the day
after their 84-member troupe completed a multicity U.S. tour.
They were taking stock, comparing America’s material comfort
and respect for law and order with hardship in Russia. Andrei
Perets, 30, was typical. He worked three jobs in Russia – as
performer, teacher and night security watchman. He hardly slept.
He hardly saw his daughter.
Five Cossacks initially announced they intended to stay in
the United States. Others followed. Supervisors bristled. Reports
of a mutiny made headlines in Moscow and Rostov, the troupe’s home
base on the Don River near the Black Sea.
Historically, ancestors of these Cossacks often defied
government control.
Peasant soldiers enslaved under the czars, Cossacks revolted
frequently and at times were enlisted to defend against the Turks.
“Cossack” means “free person.” On Russia’s southern frontiers,
Cossacks honed their skills riding horses, sword-fighting,
shooting and swilling vodka.
“We didn’t want to spend our lives as slaves,” Perets said.
From Florida, the breakaway, modern-day Cossacks called
Sergey Shadioun, 43, a former Red Army performer they knew who’d
emigrated to Denver. They begged Shadioun to contact lawyers and
explore how the performers could emigrate legally. Shadioun
obliged, and eventually agreed to be president and chief
choreographer for the group. He found apartments they share in
Glendale. He rounded up equipment, including costumes and swords
that had to be ordered from Russia.
Many in Denver’s Russian-speaking community are impressed,
and hope the group will succeed here. “It would be nice to have a
group of wonderful performers,” said Anna Tsesarsky of Jewish
Family Services resettlement agency.
Yet cracking mainstream Colorado as a Cossack is hard.
By day, the once-celebrated dancers are strangers driving
around in newly purchased used cars. They struggle with English.
They decline to talk about “little work” they may do to supplement
what they earn performing. Basic needs are met. Each performer now
lives on about $1,000 a month, Shadioun said.
Nearly every night, they gather at the Universal Gymnastics
gym in an office park south of Denver. Shadioun arranged to rent
the place after 9 p.m. The Cossacks train nightly for two intense
hours in a warm yellow light, leaping around, thumping on the
wooden floor, while a tape deck plays folk tunes that move them.
Veronika Alimova, 21, darted away now and then last week to
check on her baby, Cristina, almost 4 months old. “This is just
the beginning,” she said, cradling Cristina. “We hope to perform
on big stages here in the future. I want to spend all my life
dancing. I trained for so many years.”
In embroidered costumes, black boots and blue soldier caps,
chanting “Hey,” they ignited an otherwise silent suburban
nightscape of neon-lit car lots, warehouses, satellite dishes and
exits.
They miss home.
Stanislava Perets said she regularly phones her 7-year-old
daughter, Anastasia, – left with grandparents – asking about
school, promising they’ll be together soon if immigration
applications are approved.
Yuriy Abramenko, 39, yearning for his wife, clings to a
conviction that, among nations, “America is best. Beautiful. Every
citizen respects the law. This is a country of immigrants.” All
these Cossacks need “is a chance to show people our spirit.”
Nearby, blue TV light blinked inside airy pastel homes of
the Coloradans the Cossacks hope to reach. The group performed 13
times in December, but in small venues.
Now, Russian Cafe owner Eugene Valershteyn has discovered the
dancers. He hired them to perform Saturday nights at his
red-walled Russian Cafe at Orchard Road and University Boulevard.
Well-heeled Americans are his main clientele. At a recent
performance, they watched raptly, clapping, some standing on
chairs. Russian emigres Olga and Michael Novikov sat in the cafe
that night. They marveled as the Cossacks danced, nearly kicking
tables with their boots. Olga had seen them years ago in a large
Moscow theater. She cringed to think how they must feel to perform
in a tiny restaurant.
When she saw their passionate faces, she understood. “They
can’t live without dancing,” she said. “It is love.”
January 5, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Migration
Restaurant leads Ethiopian to better life
Restaurant owner Haime Asfaw, 40, fled Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,
during a civil war in 1982. She resettled in Los Angeles, where
she supported herself and her son by working in a bank. She
attended college, too.
But when her son, Michael, grew into a teenager, she worried
about his safety in Los Angeles. “We didn’t have gangs in our
country. That was the reason I moved to Colorado – to give him a
better life.”
Starting in 1992, Asfaw worked in a Denver typewriter shop,
then a bank, then as an accountant at Denver International
Airport. Gradually she settled into a city that felt cosmopolitan
yet relaxed, with a diverse population and good weather. In 1997,
she rented an old shop and began selling Ethiopian spices to other
immigrants. A year later, she renovated that shop at 3504 E.
Colfax Avenue and turned it into the Arada Ethiopian Restaurant.
Newspaper reviewers rate her food highly.
Michael, 22, now studies at Metropolitan State College. Asfaw
misses Ethiopia – her relatives and culture – and visits when
possible.
But more and more customers are demanding the spicy meats and
vegetables she prepares according to ancient traditions her mother
taught her in Africa. “My mother deserves all the credit,” Asfaw
said Thursday at work.
January 5, 2001 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Migration
Population growth fastest in U.S.
Colorado’s foreign-born population nearly tripled this past
decade and is growing faster than any other state’s, according to
an analysis of new U.S. Census Bureau data.
In 1990, 142,000 Coloradans, or 4.3 percent, were born
abroad. Last year, 413,000, or nearly 10 percent, were born
abroad.
The newcomers arrived from all over, with the greatest
numbers from Mexico, East Asia, Europe and Africa. They’re
changing the face of almost every street: a hockey-loving Denver
bus driver from Mexico, an Ethiopian woman who cooks spicy meats
on East Colfax, a cancer researcher from Russia who also runs a
newspaper.
The influx over the past decade was far more pronounced than
in traditionally international states such as New York and
California.
And considering the rapidly increasing foreign migration into
other interior states such as Nevada, Kentucky, Iowa and Arizona,
experts at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C.,
think tank analyzing Census Bureau data, see the makings of a
major demographic shift.
“The places that are attracting a lot of immigrants that are
nontraditional places generally have the characteristics of
Colorado: good labor market and a relatively low cost of living,”
said Steven Camarota, research director at the center. “And
Colorado has reached a critical mass in terms of networks of
immigrants. Immigrants are drawn in by the economy and by the
networks. Middle America now is experiencing a lot more immigration.”
Colorado ranked 13th among states on number of foreign-born
residents. California had the most, followed by New York, Florida
and Texas.
The new numbers come from a population survey conducted last
year by the Census Bureau – separate from the bureau’s
once-a-decade population count.
The figures were broken down state-by-state and analyzed this
month at the Center for Immigration Studies. The bureau plans to
release more data on the foreign-born population over the next two
years.
It might seem as if Colorado’s fast-growing foreign-born
population is a factor in the state’s overall population growth
last decade by 31 percent to 4.3 million. More than 1 million new
residents gave Colorado the third-fastest-growing population
behind Nevada and Arizona.
Actually, foreign migration into Colorado – including births
to immigrants – accounts for about one-third of population growth
here, Camarota said. Nationally, foreign migration plus births
play a larger role, accounting for about two-thirds of U.S.
population growth.
For The Denver Post, the Center for Immigration Studies
conducted some additional analysis of foreign-born population
survey data obtained from the Census Bureau. Among the findings:
About 223,000, or 54 percent, of the foreign-born population
resides in the Denver area.
Poverty and education levels of newcomers vary widely.
African, European and South American-born Coloradans over 21
generally had completed at least high school, but 62 percent of
Mexican-born Coloradans had not completed high school. About a
third of African-born Coloradans lived below the official poverty
line, as did 24 percent of Mexican-born Coloradans. Three percent
of European-born Coloradans lived in poverty.
Of the 413,000 foreign-born Coloradans, 234,000, or 57
percent, moved here during the 1990s, often after settling in
other states.
Colorado stands out nationally with a higher-than-average
share of Mexican-born and African-born residents. About 43 percent
of foreign-born Coloradans came from Mexico – compared with 28
percent nationally. About 6.5 percent of foreign-born Coloradans
came from Africa – compared with 2 percent nationally. East
Asian-born Coloradans made up 12 percent of the foreign-born
population – compared with 18 percent nationwide.
June 15, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
But “non-immigrant’ visas not a cure-all
Broadmoor hotel manager Bob Keesler relies on foreign-born
workers to fill 35 percent of the jobs at his complex in Colorado
Springs.
He’s still posting 190 openings, which he says U.S. citizens
ignore. His $8-an-hour maids from abroad each already work an
average of 500 overtime hours a year. He wants to hire people from
Honduras, India, Pakistan – anywhere.
Keesler and thousands of other U.S. employers are counting on
a new class of work visa proposed by a Colorado immigration lawyer
that would allow this move to happen. The proposal has developed
into a national Essential Worker Initiative to fill tens of
thousands of jobs by bringing unskilled and semi-skilled workers
from abroad.
Advocates plan to unveil the concept today at the American
Immigration Lawyers Association annual conference in Chicago.
Panelists will discuss the initiative Friday, then circulate draft
legislation in Congress.
This would be the latest in an alphabet soup of so-called
“non-immigrant” worker programs approved by Congress in recent
years to keep the economy growing without extending citizenship to
newcomers.
Rather than full-fledged immigration – a high-stakes issue
that presidential candidates have avoided – U.S. leaders
increasingly have focused on temporary non-immigrant programs
tailored to meet business needs. High-tech industry lobbyists say
they need 300,000 new white-collar workers; the federal Bureau of
Labor Statistics projects a shortage of 10 million workers within
the next decade.
First up in Congress this summer is a proposed increase in
“H1B” visas, which bring college-educated workers from abroad.
Support is strong from Silicon Valley to the White House for
raising the limit from 115,000 to about 200,000 visas a year. H1B
workers stay for up to six years.
The support comes despite charges the program is riddled with
abuse. The Denver Post has learned that federal labor officials
essentially rubber-stamp H1Bs with little scrutiny of the effects
on U.S. workers. And the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service violated the existing H1B cap by letting in 21,888 too
many H1B workers last year. INS spokeswoman Eileen Schmidt said
the “overage” was because of a counting mistake.
Other legislation in Congress would streamline the H2A visa
program that brings agricultural workers from abroad.
Various proposals to give amnesty to some or all of the
estimated 6 million undocumented workers also are at play in a
packaging and repackaging designed to marshal congressional votes.
AFL-CIO labor union leaders support a broad amnesty for current
undocumented workers, which could increase union membership.
It all reflects a sea change in the immigration landscape.
Four years ago, Congress focused on deportation. Some
politicians worried that a new wave of immigration, the greatest
since the turn of the 20th century, would threaten national unity.
But in July, Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan warned
labor shortages threatened the national economy. Greenspan said
increased immigration could ease labor shortages and reduce
inflationary pressure.
Ever since, coalitions pushing for more foreign-born
non-immigrants have been gaining momentum. The population of
non-immigrants residing in the United States tops 3 million, based
on INS figures. That’s in addition to an annual flow of more than
900,000 immigrants (660,000 legal and 250,000 undocumented).
“What we are doing now is we are building up a huge reservoir
of temporary, non-immigrant residents in this country who are
trying to fit through a bottleneck of limited green cards,” said
Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration
Reform, which opposes the efforts.
The influx, Stein said, “is killing the American worker’s
ability to get any kind of wage increase.”
The Essential Worker proposal that will circulate today in
Chicago is designed to help employers such as nursing homes,
hotels and motels, restaurants and construction companies.
An existing H2B program for temporary unskilled workers fails
to meet employer needs, said Donna Lipinski, the Denver-based
lawyer and AILA board member who proposed the essential worker
visa two years ago.
This year, AILA leaders resolved to back an essential-worker
initiative. They mobilized a coalition of 21 business groups.
Coalition leaders are considering coupling their proposal to
create essential-worker visas with proposals to grant amnesty for
undocumented workers.
Leaders are weighing whether to call for a specific number
of visas or tie the program to a national unemployment figure
above which essential workers would be sent home, advocacy
director Judy Golub said.
Even without specifics, the initiative has won some political
support.
U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., backs efforts to ease labor
shortages, said his spokesman, Sean Conway. “He’ll consider any
legislation.”
Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush supports
H1B and H2A legislation, but hasn’t taken a position on essential
workers. Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic candidate,
supports H1B visa increases, too, though he wants to attach
amnesty provisions for some undocumented workers. Gore backs H2A
reforms in principle. He hasn’t decided on essential workers.
Labor unions strongly oppose allowing any more workers from
abroad. “The reason employers can’t fill their jobs here is they
don’t pay enough money,” said Bob Greene, president of the
Colorado AFL-CIO. Employers want non-immigrant temps, Greene says,
because “they can not only pay them low wages, they can also force
them to do anything they want them to do.”
In the meantime, the agencies administering current
non-immigrant programs are strained. The needs of a soaring U.S.
economy, domestic workers and a global workforce hungry for
American jobs are colliding:
U.S. Department of Labor officials, traditionally charged
with watching U.S. worker interests, is focusing on easing
shortages for business. Congress required labor officials to
essentially rubber stamp 300,000 H1B certifications for 1 million
jobs, senior U.S. labor administrator John Fraser in Washington,
D.C, told The Post.
Yet, Fraser said, 19 percent of H1B workers are underpaid
in violation of those certifications. And government
investigations – 194 completed with 80 percent showing violations
– can only be done when H1B workers complain. Few do that, he
said. “We’ve tried to point this out over and over again, that
these workers are beholden to their employers.”
A pool of money set up to counter H1B effects on U.S. workers
is largely unspent. Job-training grants worth $12.4 million were
given this year. At least $40 million more is unspent, labor
officials said.
The INS – its enforcement budget has tripled since 1993 to
$4.3 billion a year – may go unpunished after violating the H1B
visa cap. H1B legislation contains “forgiveness clauses,” INS
spokeswoman Schmidt said. “The legislation contains language that
allows INS – it basically just forgives the overage.”
Foreign-born workers themselves are strained by the notion
that, in the future, the United States would use them temporarily,
legally, yet with no possibility of becoming U.S. citizens.
At the Burnsley Hotel in central Denver, maid Gabriela
Flores, 28, of Mexico, says she vacuums, wipes toilets and
polishes chandeliers because of a dream. She, her parents and nine
siblings migrated north hoping to become U.S. citizens who can
work into better jobs, vote and build a better life.
To work at unskilled jobs and perhaps be sent home if the
economy falters would make her feel “sick,” she said. “I want to
go to college. I want to be a kindergarten teacher.”
At the Broadmoor, Keesler would prefer “a long-term steady
workforce that’s local.” Any essential-worker legislation ought to
include provisions to send foreign-born workers home if the
economy slumps, he said.
But with few U.S. workers responding to his postings for
$6-an-hour-plus-tips and $8-an-hour jobs just getting permission
to hire foreigners is urgent.
Keesler tries to bolster spirits by giving out awards. He
sets an example by working long hours himself, and only ducking
out for fast food.
But when he approached a nearby Arby’s last month, Keesler
was dismayed. A note was posted on the drive-thru window. “Only
two people working today,” it said. “Drive-thru closed.”
March 26, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Migration
While snow pelted Denver, aspiring Russian bards huddled
recently in a borrowed conference room, where visiting folksinger
Vladimir Berezhkov serenaded them with tales of life in the shadow
of the Kremlin.
Similarly, 6-year-old Maria Valershteyn hunkered over
Russian language texts this past year to supplement her Denver
Public Schools studies.
And every Saturday morning, Russian-speaking parents hustle
children to the Glendale Community Center for lessons in
traditional dancing.
“We want to keep our culture,” says Lyuda Zatureuskaya, who
supervises the lessons. “We are from a rich culture.”
That preoccupation eclipses today’s election in Russia for
many of the estimated 25,000 Russian-speaking people in Denver.
They form one of the fastest-growing and, by many accounts, most
prosperous communities of recent immigrants from the former Soviet
Union. The United States has admitted more than 450,000 since
communism’s collapse.
Their accents suggest they might well be engrossed in the
fate of President Vladimir Putin as voting begins across Russia
this morning. Yet Putin – a hard-liner who took charge when Boris
Yeltsin resigned New Year’s Eve – draws lukewarm attention at best.
“For me, American politics is a lot more important,” said
Yuliya Fridman, 24, a US West employee whose family moved from
Minsk in 1991. “This is where I live. This is where I plan to have
my family. I do care about what’s going on in Russia. But I’m
planning to make my life here.”
Rather, Russian-speaking immigrants focus on establishing
cultural institutions in Denver.
They’ve set up two Russian schools that teach children
traditions from music to chess.
An association of 11 clubs draws hundreds of adults for
discussions, concerts, fitness activities and poetry.
Grocery stores such as Dmitri Gershengorin’s European Mart on
Leetsdale Drive supply Russian sausages, pastries, smoked fish,
salads – and Russian videos for rent.
The Denver-based Moscow String Quartet plays classical music
that many immigrants love.
A Russian Orthodox Church at South Colorado Boulevard and
East Iliff Avenue is one of several where Russian-speaking
immigrants worship.
Their cultivation of Russian-ness while sinking roots here
stands out at a time when other immigrants use the United States
simply as a money-making center for building a better life
elsewhere.
Russian poetry in Denver trumps politics in Russia in the
view of Moscow-born Will Kaufman, 35, a member of the Russian Bard
club here and a successful computer programmer. “I am very cynical
about Russia, very cynical about this war in Chechnya.” Kaufman
called today’s elections “a travesty” masking control of Russia by
wealthy oligarchs.
Many Russians here won’t vote for lack of interest, said
Leonid Reznikov, a researcher at the University of Colorado Health
Sciences Center who also edits the Russian newspaper Horizon.
Reznikov presented election information in Horizon. He also
advised Russian consular officials who plan to supervise absentee
voting today at the Glendale Public Library. About 200 Russian
immigrants with passports voted in Russia’s parliamentary election
last fall.
“I believe some people may come to support Grigory Yavlinsky
(one of 11 candidates challenging Putin),” Reznikov said. “But
there is no real choice. Putin will win anyway. Hopefully he will
not bring a real dictatorship to Russia. It may be a soft
dictatorship. We already have some signs that censorship is
starting in the Russian press.”
In Denver, the Russian-speaking community emerged in the late
1970s with the arrival of a few Jewish dissidents. It took off
around 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed.
Nationwide, at least 454,628 immigrants have arrived from
former Soviet countries since 1990, according to federal
statistics. Of those, about 372,335 entered as refugees. The
United States gives special priority to Jews and evangelical
Christians in ex-Soviet countries who claim they face persecution.
Thousands more migrated to the United States for economic
opportunities or as spouses of previous immigrants. And the
454,628 figure doesn’t include a growing number of
Russian-speaking temporary workers.
The emphasis on sinking roots in America, rather than
investing earnings back home, reflects that “things have not gone
as smoothly as they might have in the countries they came from,”
said Terry Rusch, director of refugee admissions for the U.S.
Department of State. “Overall, it’s been a very positive
experience. They’ve come, they’ve enriched this country.”
Economically, Russian speakers in Denver say they are getting
ahead. The elderly rely heavily on public support. But working-age
immigrants find their solid education in Russia pays off here.
More than 44 businesses run by Russian-speaking immigrants
advertise in the Denver-based newspapers Horizon and Vestnik.
Businesses here include a crew of carpenters, Vartan
Tonoian’s jazz club “Vartan’s” in Downtown Denver, the Astoria
restaurant serving borscht, chicken Kiev, plove (a rice and meat
dish from central Asia) and more, a pharmacy in Cherry Creek
North, two Russian bookstores, and Little Russian Cafes.
Russian speakers in Denver often say they are lonely. They
say they need to cultivate a distinct identity in America.
Parents lament that their children, who tend to hang out with
other Russian-speaking children, converse predominantly in
English.
“People miss the closeness they had in Russia – closeness
with friends sitting at the kitchen table drinking vodka talking
about anything at all,” Kaufman said while handling a computer job
last week. “Here their relations with Americans at work and with
neighbors are very superficial. “How’s work? How’s the weather?’
Their soul yearns for some sort of really close contact.”
The main challenge now is just finding some place to meet.
Community leaders talk of raising money for a Russian Cultural
Center.
Until now, Russian speakers have borrowed rooms for club
gatherings. The Glendale Public Library, with Russian-speaking
staffers, serves as an unofficial center.
Occasionally, Jewish Community Center auditoriums are
available.
“We need it,” school director Zatureuskaya said of the
proposed cultural center. Enrollment at her Science, Art and Sport
Center for Children has doubled over the past three years to 150
students. They range from 6-year-old girls in ballet attire to a
sheepish 15-year-old boy who wasn’t inclined to give his name
after practicing for a recent dance performance. “Half of it, my
parents make me come,” he said. “Half of it is fun.”
Former actress Inna Valershteyn is passionate about ensuring
that her 6-year-old daughter, Maria, studies Russian in addition
to Denver Public Schools classes. In the family Volvo, she drives
Maria to private classes with Olga Sventuh at a rented facility.
“I don’t want to lose this language,” Valershteyn said. “If a
child has more than one language, it makes life richer.”
Political freedom here enables activity that once proved
risky in Russia. For example, free-thinking bards raised
suspicions during Soviet times. The Russian bard tradition
involves composing poems, then singing them while playing guitar –
a bit like Bob Dylan. The bards gather in forests to do this.
Last summer, club leaders booked space for 40 at a campground west
of Denver. More than 70 aspiring bards arrived, setting up tents
beneath pine trees, tuning guitars, sipping wine. They sang out
their poetry until dawn. Coordinating all these cultural
gatherings on top of fast-paced U.S. work schedules is a difficult
job. But the Russian-speaking community found a solution: Mikhail
Timashpolsky, 76, president of the Denver Russian Community
Cultural Center, who once ran government cultural “palaces” in
Russia. A pensioner with time to make phone calls, Timashpolsky
devotes most of his waking hours to keeping his countrymen together.
“In the former Soviet Union, people were going for community,
rather than individuality,” he said. “That’s why, when
Russian-speaking people come here, they still have this desire to
be in a community. Many feel they have no outlet for their
creativity. These people, they want to preserve their culture and
knowledge.”
March 24, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
Webb steps in to broker deal in fatal no-knock raid
Denver Mayor Wellington Webb brokered a $400,000 settlement
Thursday with the family of Ismael Mena, the Mexican migrant
worker Denver police killed in a botched no-knock drug raid last
fall.
The deal sets a monetary record for Denver in wrongful-death
cases involving police. City attorneys say the previous high
payment was $260,000.
It begins to resolve a major fiasco. The fatal raid on Sept.
29 prompted Mexican government officials to raise concerns in
Washington. The FBI launched an investigation into possible
criminal civil-rights violations.
Denver’s mistake – police hit the wrong house – was a factor
in Police Chief Tom Sanchez’s resignation. And it sparked scrutiny
of how hundreds of no-knock search warrants are issued.
A key legal factor in the settlement was Mena’s immigration
status. He had entered the United States without proper documents.
To work, he showed employers fake papers, family attorney Robert
Maes said.
Mediator Jim Carrigan “kept telling us the ultimate value
of this case was between $200,000 and $500,000,” Maes said. A
former federal judge, Carrigan “reminded us several times that he
was really a potential felon by illegally living in the country,”
Maes said.
Lead city attorney Ted Halaby confirmed that this factor “was
considered.”
The $400,000 falls far short of the $5.5 million Maes
initially sought for Mena’s family in Mexico. Denver initially
offered $150,000. A migrant worker for much of his life,
45-year-old Mena was working here to support his wife and seven of
their children, ages 8 to 20, on his farm near San Julian in the
central Mexican state of Jalisco. Two sons work in Los Angeles.
Mena’s widow, Maria del Carmen, was forced to sell his
animals. She traveled to Denver to attend negotiations last week
and, according to Maes, grasped the implications of a protracted
court battle. Then she returned to Jalisco. Mena’s eldest son,
Heriberto, 21, a restaurant worker, stayed in Denver to represent
the family.
“I don’t know if that’s good,” Heriberto said of the
$400,000, “but this is the best for my family.”
Mexico’s representative in Denver, Consul Carlos Barros,
immediately praised the deal. The money “is going to be good
enough to guarantee that Mena’s children get an education, which
is a main concern,” Barros said. “I’m very happy the whole case is
solved. It was always a deep concern to have this family with no
means of survival. … Now we can do some more productive work.”
Webb said: “What we tried to do was come up with what was
fair. … I frankly don’t think you can put a price on a person’s
life.”
Thursday afternoon, Webb intervened when both sides were
deadlocked in arbitration in a Lower Downtown conference room.
Attorneys agreed only on calling out for Quizno’s at lunch.
At 2 p.m., Maes said, the city was offering $275,000 while he
was asking for $600,000.
That’s when Webb went to the room. “I thought I might be able
to get it solved,” Webb said later.
Webb listened for the better part of an hour, Halaby said.
Then he gave the go-ahead for a compromise offer of $400,000.
Today, Mena family attorneys are structuring an annuity that
will pay the family $1,700 a month for 20 years, plus $100,000 up
front for a house in the town of San Julian. Maes said he and his
legal team will take 25 percent of the settlement money.
The move to San Julian will improve the lives of Mena’s
children, he said. There’s a school there, and running water.
Mena’s two oldest sons plan to keep working in the United
States.
Mena preferred life on the farm, which he struggled to
maintain from afar. The settlement, Mexican Consul Barros
suggested, amounts to “a transformation of his dream.”
Heriberto Mena said Thursday that he’s considering moving
from Los Angeles to Denver if possible. “I like it a lot here.
Good people here.”
Legal experts said the settlement was low compared with what
other cities have paid in wrongful-death suits. Denver “maintains
its reputation for never capitulating on these kinds of cases,”
lawyer Craig Silverman concluded.
But the city’s lawyers “should be commended for
stepping up to the plate when there’s a reason to do it,” lawyer
Scott Robinson added. Happy over settlement
Denver Police Union President Kirk Miller declined to comment
on the settlement except to say police need better training.
And lawyer David Bruno, representing Denver police officer
Joseph Bini, who faces perjury charges in the no-knock raid, said
he’s happy the city and family have settled. “Any time you can
settle a case you’re better off.”
Yet the settlement left sadness and rage. “I want to cry a
little,” Maes confided after a city hall news conference. “I wish
I could have got them $2 million.”
Mena’s illegal immigration didn’t keep him from working for
dozens of U.S. employers for years – earning more than $10,000 in
1998, Maes pointed out. He worked most recently at the Coca-Cola
bottling plant in north Denver.
Beyond Mena’s death, the tragedy exposed “an unspoken”
agreement between Mexico and the United States that is wrong, Maes
said.
“He had a green card, and it was a false green card,” he said.
“We let ’em in so long as they don’t create waves. We’re not going
to enforce on the employers. I know who pays the price: It’s the
people who come north looking for an opportunity. And their
families pay a price, too. … We’re not only complicit, we are
hypocritical. Our corporate culture takes advantage of this labor
pool.”
Webb declined to comment on that broader situation.
He said the settlement concerned only this case.
“This doesn’t mean if there are future cases we would do them
the same way,” Webb said.
Denver Post staff writers Peter G. Chronis and Mike McPhee
contributed to this report.
MAJOR POLICE SETTLEMENTS IN DENVER
December 1999 – Antonio Reyes-Rojas received a $30,000
settlement after he was shot by Denver police officer Kenneth
Chavez.
November 1998 – Relatives of Jeffery Truax accepted a $250,000
settlement with the Denver Police Department for the March 1996
shooting death of Truax outside a Denver nightclub by Chavez and
officer Andrew Clarry. A jury had awarded the Truax family $500,000.
June 1998 – Mauricea Gant received an undisclosed settlement for
the September 1992 killing of her father, Steven Gant, by Denver
police officer Michael Blake.
May 1998 – A jury awarded the family of teenager William “Bill’
Abeyta $400,000. Abeyta was shot to death in January 1995 as he
allegedly drove a stolen Jeep at police. The Denver City
Attorney’s Office, however, says a payment that high was never made.
October 1993 – A federal jury awarded $330,000 to the family of
Leonard Zuchel for the 1985 fatal shooting of Zuchel by Denver
police officer Frederick Spinharney.
ELSEWHERE IN THE STATE
April 1996 – Juan Pablo Rocha-Gallegos was awarded a $225,000
settlement against the city of Greeley after being shot seven
times by a police officer during a massive drug raid in Eaton in
1993.
July 1988 – Derek Scott Powell, 25, was killed by a Boulder
County sheriff’s deputy after Powell allegedly pointed a rifle at
the officer. A federal jury awarded $1 million to Powell’s family.
A federal judge threw out the verdict, but the family settled with
the county and the deputy.
March 16, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
Talks start today in no-knock death
SAN FELIPE JESUS DE LAS CASAS BLANCAS, Mexico – Ismael Mena’s three-room adobe house gives shelter from hot wind.
Nine children once chattered by flowers in the courtyard
where, today, their 80-year-old grandmother putters alone.
An adjoining stable Mena built for his beloved red horse sits
empty; the saddle gathers dust. His cornfield fights weeds.
The 14-acre farm here was Mena’s dream.
To keep it alive – traditional lifestyles are dwindling as
Mexico goes modern – Mena had to toil in the United States for
much of his life. Most recently, he worked the night shift for
Coca-Cola in a graffiti-splotched north Denver neighborhood where
drug deals are done. He fixed wooden pallets. He lifted hundreds
of red plastic crates, each packed with eight 2-liter plastic
bottles of Coke, and hoisted them into red trucks.
The money he sent home sustained his wife and seven children
on the farm. Two older sons had moved to work in Los Angeles.
Now Mena’s dead. Denver police shot the 45-year-old migrant
mistakenly in a botched no-knock drug raid last fall; they went to
the wrong house. Once a policeman in Mexico, Mena had been
sleeping off his night shift.
Five months later, Mena’s family is torn. Without him
working, Maria del Carmen saw fit to sell his 10 cows, one mule
and the horse. She has moved the children in with her parents 5
miles closer to the nearby town of San Julian and the doctor her
diabetic son needs.
“We are wondering how we will live,” she said.
Today, negotiations for wrongful-death compensation begin in
Denver, where Maria, eldest son Heriberto, and attorney Robert
Maes, referred by the Mexican government, square off against
Denver’s legal team.
The city’s offer – $150,000 – falls short of the $5.5 million
Maes seeks for the family. Former federal Judge James Carrigan is
to guide arbitration today.
The only reason Maria didn’t sell her husband’s land, too, is
that Mena’s mother, Dona Julia, absolutely refuses to leave it.
While water trickled from a tap into buckets, Julia conjured
images of Ismael talking to his cows as he milked them.
“Why did they have to kill my son? I loved him so,” she said,
drawing a black shawl across her wrinkled face. If she left the
farm, Dona Julia said, “everything would be over. It would all
fall down. That’s why I don’t want to go.”
Meantime, Ismael’s 20-year-old daughter, Rosalilia, is in
charge of the children surviving here on beans and tortillas,
cooked over a wood fire in an adobe house with no bathroom. Ismael
Jr., 17, injects himself each morning with insulin. Rosalilia’s
twin, Rosaelia, cradles Mena’s 1-year-old grandson, also named
after him, whom he never saw.
Little Maria del Carmen, 8, and Alejandro, 11, attend a small
rural school; no secondary school is reachable for Juanita, 11,
Irene, 14, and the others. The younger children grasped that their
father was dead when they saw his body at the funeral. Now they
treasure his clothes.
“We try not to talk about it too much,” Rosalilia said.
“Thinking about their father makes them feel very bad.”
The pastoral lifestyle Mena preferred to modern city life is
also a dream for thousands of other migrant workers in the United
States. For lack of money as Mexico modernizes, they travel north,
sometimes at great risk, to fill proliferating U.S. jobs that pay
$8 an hour or less. Our humming economy depends on their labor.
U.S. big business is lobbying Congress to allow more migrant
workers, especially those with basic skills, lest labor shortages
force up wages.
Yet rather than settle in the United States, many like Mena
work solely to build up what’s theirs back in Mexico, using their
savings to expand rural houses and herds. Here in rugged
6,000-feet-high eastern Jalisco, electricity lines installed
around 1993 and telephones more recently raise the possibility of
comfortable rural living.
For one fleeting moment in 1997, Maria del Carmen said, she
felt Mena had achieved his Mexican dream. Water holes were full.
Green maize shoots poked up from the field. Mena strode proudly
from the adobe house to the field. “I was walking with him. We
were walking with all the children too.”
She wanted that togetherness every day.
“I’d tell him: “Come back and live with your brother and
sisters and horses,'” Maria del Carmen said. “He’d say he’d come
back when he got some more money.”
His mother Julia said she regularly reminded him: “Save the
money. Send it to Mexico. Or bring it. So that you can stay here
and not have to leave so much.”
Mena was born during hard times. His father moved from the
town of San Miguel across what is called “El Canon” to a mesa.
Drought soon drove the family away again to the current farm near
the stone church and a dozen or so homes that together are known
as San Felipe Jesus de las Casas Blancas.
They sold a little maize.
Mena loved horses, his brother Salvador, 58, said in the
dirt-floor house where he lives nearby. “Charro” horsemen are
local heros to this day.
School for Mena lasted only a few years. Work beckoned. At 18,
he left Mexico, crossing to Arizona, where he drove a tractor.
Back from that first stint abroad, he was playing soccer one
day when Maria del Carmen and friends stopped to watch. He
remembered her. A few weeks later at a fiesta nearby in Jalpa, he
approached. “He said: “I want you to be my girlfriend,'” Maria del
Carmen recalled. “I said: “Yes.'”
They married. “He wanted a family.”
To that end, Mena moved north again – the migration that would
repeat itself again and again over nearly three decades. In the
United States he worked as a meatpacker, cook, busboy while she
raised their babies. Family photos show Mena working at one
restaurant in California. He wore a clean white shirt with black
bow tie and cap. He tended bar, washed dishes in the kitchen,
wiped tables and, after closing time, swept the floors.
When he returned to Mexico, his children said, he brought them
presents: bicycles, dolls, a tape deck. Once he brought a
television. The kids spend hours watching a wide commercial world
from the countryside here.
The children especially remember his way with horses. “He
could make one lie down, and then he’d motion and it would get
up,” Rosalilia said.
Ismael Jr. recalled: “He would say “Never hit an animal. Talk
with them, chat. Feed them well. And stroke them.'”
He also worked on roads. Once, his brother Salvador said, he
cracked a rib trying to pry loose a rock. For days he wheezed.
Unable to work on his farm, he arranged to serve as policeman
in the sleepy town of San Diego de Alejandria. A family photo
shows Mena standing with a pistol tucked into the waist of his
trousers. Six months later, he turned in the pistol and the
bullets. “He thought police work might be dangerous,” Salvador
said. “He wanted to get back to the ranch.”
Yet to buy animals, Mena had to migrate, carrying a crinkled
Virgen de Guadalupe prayer card in his wallet.
Mena left last in August 1997. He worked for a beef company in
Idaho, earning more than $18,000 in 1998, according to records
attorney Maes collected.
Last year he moved to Colorado, staying first with cousins in
Fort Lupton, cleaning apartments and landscaping.
He moved into Denver as pressure mounted back home: Ismael Jr.
had collapsed. Maria del Carmen and her parents hauled him to San
Julian. “He was almost in a coma,” said Dr. Ismael Macias, who
gave basic treatment and then sent the boy to a hospital in
Guadalajara. He lay for 15 days on intravenous fluid. The final
diagnosis is that “his pancreas does not work at all,” Macias
said. He needs insulin daily.
Mena began building up savings when he landed what his son
Heriberto described as a $300-a-week job at the Coca-Cola bottling
plant.
Heriberto recalled their last telephone conversation: “It was
difficult for him to sleep at day. But he was happy with this
work,” said Heriberto, a restaurant worker in Los Angeles.
Mena also “asked about the family. He said he was going back
to Mexico this year.”
Coca-Cola managers said they were preparing Mena to drive
forklifts.
At daybreak, Mena would walk two blocks past public housing
and an alley where dealers and junkies would hang out. He’d climb
the 15 stairs in the house at 3738 High St. where he rented an
8-by-8-foot room. The window looked out on the Coca-Cola plant and
a round brick smokestack in the distance. And he’d sleep.
Penciled Xs still mark the spot where bullets pierced walls
in Mena’s room during the midday raid on Sept. 29. A
Spanish-speaking little girl from another family now sleeps there.
Mena was sleeping when police burst in.
They’d been paying an informant who once used drugs to make
undercover purchases in the area. Based on his information, they
secured a no-knock warrant for the two-story house where Mena
lived. The informant apparently got mixed up.
Police said they shouted “Police!” and “Policia!” as they
entered. They pinned down Antonio Hernandez in the room next to
Mena’s.
Earlier in September, police apparently had confiscated a gun
Mena was carrying illegally. They say he had another one on Sept.
29, a Burgo .22 – untraceable so far – and that, despite their
warnings, he fired three shots.
Police fired too. Eight bullets tore into Mena’s face, chest
and arms. He died at the scene. Here in Mexico, his sister Maria
de Jesus figured he had the gun “for his protection” in a
dangerous big city.
The shooting was “a violation of basic human rights,” Dr.
Macias contends.
“Police shouldn’t be able to do things like this,” Mena’s
brother Salvador said.
“Who fired first?” nephew Sergio, 26, wanted to know.
Sergio feels the “indignity” acutely. When he was headed to
the United States for work in 1992, his mother Maria de Jesus told
him to go with her brother. The men crossed near Tijuana. Though
Mena knew the way well, he hired a “coyote” guide for $800, Sergio
said. “He wanted to be more sure we’d make it because of me.” In
tense moments crossing, Sergio recalled, Mena encouraged him.
“He said: “We’re going to go work … We’ll go and earn a
whole lot.'”
Today the farming lifestyle Mena loved is generally
threatened. His relatives hanging on here still contend “nothing’s
better.”
At night, cattle low amid nopal cactuses, dogs howl, and
constellations light the sky: Virgen de San Juan in the north,
Ojos de Santa Lucia overhead, and the Cruz de Mayo to the south.
But shoe factories run by transnational companies are the
focus of economic action in the region. Small farming in Mexico
“doesn’t work economically,” said Dr. Macias The land is too poor
and there’s not enough water, he said. “It doesn’t pay. Fertilizer
costs. Seeds cost.”
Dr. Macias worries that Mena’s children still are “suffering
a lot.” He and others advise Maria del Carmen to move into San
Julian so her children can salvage some education. Then they could
work in small business.
Maria del Carmen has a sewing machine. With money from Denver,
she said, she might afford a house. Living in San Julian would
cost about $1,000 a month, she figured. Rosalilia says she’s
interested in designing clothes. She wants to make up the school
she’s missed over the last eight years.
“I’d say it would be justice to help my brothers and sisters
with their studies. Because my father can’t help us. We don’t have
any help.”
The decision to sell off the animals was painful, Maria del
Carmen said, and if immigration papers were available she’d
consider leaving Mexico altogether and moving to the United States.
“It’s over,” she said of the farm. Yet nobody’s ready to
really accept that, least of all Dona Julia.
In Mena’s empty stable, she tried to fix his bridles and
lassos. She nailed a stirrup on the wall above a crucifix and
broken television.
She envisions everybody back in the house. “Como antes,” she
said. “Like before.”
Money from Denver might help at least fix up the farm,
“starting with Ismael’s room,” she suggested. She envisions white
paint on the walls, a tiled floor “not cement,” a new door, with a
tractor and little cow outside.
The last time she spoke with Ismael, “he told me, “You know, I
love you too much.’ I cried,” she said, crying again.
“He told me: “Don’t cry. When you think about me, just make a quick prayer. Nothing more.'”
March 1, 2000 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Migration
Ruling affects criminals whose native countries won’t allow them back home
Federal appeals court judges in Denver on Tuesday backed the
government’s power to detain indefinitely immigrant criminals
whose countries won’t take them back.
Weighing into a national dilemma, their 10th Circuit Court of
Appeals ruling asserts that this growing class of deportable
immigrant criminals has lost basic rights under the U.S.
Constitution.
The ruling upholds a 1996 law requiring deportation of
immigrants convicted of crimes and detention of those who can’t be
deported. Under the law, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service is holding 4,566 immigrant criminals, filling up a fourth
of INS detention center beds.
The appeals court case concerned two Vietnamese men detained
at a 340-bed regional INS detention facility east of Denver.
Now they and other detainees – including a Laotian named Sia
Vang who appeared in a separate federal court case Tuesday –
depend more than ever on INS discretion if they ever are to rejoin
their families.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock delayed a decision on
Vang, who was sentenced to 24 years of probation in 1996 for
sexual assault on two preteen girls.
In addressing the constitutional concerns, the appeals court
judges declined to interfere with the law Congress passed in 1996,
which set no time limit for detention.
“This court will not substitute its judgment for that of
Congress by reading into the statute a time limit that is not
included in the plain language of the statute,” Appellate Judge
Michael Murphy, a Clinton appointee, wrote in the 33-page ruling.
Releasing the two Vietnamese detainees who sought freedom
under the Constitution would amount to awarding them “the very
right denied them as a result of the final (deportation) orders,
the right to be at large in the United States,” the judges
reasoned. “The relief they seek is indistinguishable from a
request to be readmitted to this country.” But these and other
immigrant criminals whose countries won’t take them back are
indisputably here, critics emphasized after the ruling. The cost
to U.S. taxpayers tops $100 million a year.
Appellate Judge Wade Brorby, a Reagan appointee, issued a
sharp dissent to the ruling: “Governmental conduct that so reduces
an individual to a “non person’ to permit such imprisonment most
assuredly shocks my conscience,” he wrote.
The ruling immediately drew calls for reconsideration from
immigrants’ rights advocates nationwide.
“We’re going to continue fighting,” said Judy Rabinovitz, a New
York-based senior lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union,
who argued the case with local lawyer Jim Salvator last July.
Immigrants convicted of crimes “are human beings,” Rabinovitz
said, “and our Constitution protects all persons from deprivation
of life, liberty and property. The two-judge majority
fundamentally misconstrued the constitutional issues presented in
this case.”
A former INS legal chief joined in the outcry.
“Anybody in the United States subject to government power is
entitled to the protection of the Constitution,” said Alex
Aleinikoff, chief INS counsel from 1994 to ’97 and now a professor
at Georgetown University Law Center.
“The conclusion that there are people in this country who can
be arbitrarily detained indefinitely, on the theory that they have
no rights is inconsistent with developments in due process law
over the last century.”
And University of California law professor Charles
Weisselberg, a veteran immigration lawyer, suggested that U.S.
moral authority will suffer. “This makes it harder for us to hold
other countries accountable (for jailing people indefinitely) when
we give people in our country the back of the hand.”
The decision in Denver begins to firm up an uncertain
landscape for detention of immigrants. It’s the second appellate
court ruling supporting the 1996 immigration law that has led to
hundreds of cases in federal district courts nationwide. The Fifth
Circuit Court, covering Texas and Louisiana, ruled last August.
The Ninth Circuit Court in California is expected to rule soon
after hearing arguments earlier this month. Circuit court
decisions are binding in their areas for federal judges ruling on
similar cases.
Federal district judges have been divided, and rulings for
and against the law are mulitiplying.
INS officials took Tuesday’s ruling as less than a green
light for future detentions. They’re reluctant to use their powers
too frequently in part because they don’t have room for many more
long-term detainees.
“The fact that you’ve got two circuit courts that have
basically upheld that the law is constitutional is certainly
significant,” INS spokesman Russ Bergeron said. “But it does not
resolve, finally resolve, the issue. And it may be that ultimately
you will need a Supreme Court decision given the varying district
court rulings.”
The burden of housing growing numbers of immigrant criminals
has forced INS leaders to ask to transfer some to regular federal
prisons. And INS officials say they want their $4.4 billion annual
budget increased this year to afford more beds. INS agents in some
parts of the country who catch illegal immigrants are forced to
release them simply for lack of space.
“Detention is a crucial component of our overall enforcement
effort,” Bergeron said. “The greater our capacity to detain, the
greater our ability to return credibility to the nation’s
immigration laws.”
In Colorado, INS District Director Joe Greene awaits further
instructions from the appellate court.
But Greene said he doesn’t plan on changing his approach to
Vang and other detainees or the reviews and voluntary releases
that the INS began a year ago aimed at easing constitutional
concerns.
At least 1,000 immigrant criminals, convicted of crimes from
manslaughter to misdemeanor drug offenses, were released into U.S.
cities this past year.
All this is bad news for Vang, because Green still considers
him a threat to public safety. “I have to wait,” Vang concluded
glumly Tuesday morning.
The good news for the INS, Greene said, “is that the circuit
has spoken. At least the law for my region has been settled –
until the Supreme Court chooses to decide. That means a little
less litigation, doesn’t it?”
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A journalist and lawyer, Bruce Finley has investigated local, national and international issues with on-site reporting in more than 40 countries. In his position as a staff writer for the Denver Post, he is focusing on environment-related news including water challenges, the oil and gas boom and wildfire.
