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Updated: 2:22 pm | Monday, May 15, 2006
Raids fill Hispanics with fear
Legal or not, many stay at home
BY RYAN CLARK AND KAREN GUTIÉRREZ | ENQUIRER STAFF WRITERS
FLORENCE - Yolanda Wysocki spent part of last week begging Hispanic parents to send their children back to Collins Elementary School.

But the parents were afraid. On Tuesday, 76 allegedly undocumented immigrants had been arrested in Florence. Could the same happen to them or their children?

The roundup has drawn attention to Florence's Hispanic residents, less than 4 percent of the population.

Theirs is a world in which some are now staying locked inside their homes, fearful of police. Others have proper documentation, yet are met with suspicious glances. Still others - resigned to the risk of deportation - continue to openly look for work.

Collins Elementary School has 80 students in a special program for English language learners. The day of the arrests, 10 were absent.

One mother kept her children at home because her husband had been taken away by authorities that day.

Another was afraid to put her children on the bus because she thought she might never see them again, said Wysocki, an assistant teacher in the English-language program and a native of Mexico.

"Some of the little ones are scared the police will come and take them away," she said. "These are my people, so yes, it makes me sad to see them this way.

"These people work hard to have a better life, and as a whole, they want to succeed," Wysocki said.

Later in the week, children began returning to the program, so that by Friday, only two were still absent, Wysocki said.

'I DO NOT FEEL SAFE'

In an anonymous letter printed this week in La Jornada Latina, a Spanish-language newspaper that circulates in Northern Kentucky, a resident expressed the new fear.

"Everybody is saying that we can't even be safe in our houses, because they can enter. This radically changes our lives, and we don't know for how long," the person wrote in Spanish. "Now when I see a police car, I do not feel safe, because we all know the police and immigration are working together."

Not all immigrants are so worried, however.

Sergio Valenciano and his cousin, Guadelupe Valenciano, of Erlanger, are still visiting construction sites, asking if anyone needs workers.

They said the roundup should not have surprised anyone, because the U.S. government had been sending signals that crackdowns were coming.

"We're worried a little, but we knew it had to happen," Sergio Valenciano said in Spanish. "It's the law."

The men said this week's arrests have been most troubling to immigrants who are here with their entire families and hope to remain. They're the ones with the most to lose, they said.

But they don't necessarily represent the majority of undocumented workers, the cousins said. Many are single men who accept that they may have to return to their home countries if work dries up or they are caught without documentation.

Sergio Valenciano, 30, has been working in the United States off and on for about 13 years. He generally flies into the country on a tourist visa, he said, and returns to Mexico periodically.

If he has to leave the United States again soon, so be it.

"I say, many thanks to them," Sergio said of his Northern Kentucky employers. "I've built houses in Mexico. I have cars there. I have worked a lot."

NOT EASY TO BECOME LEGAL

It's important to remember that many Hispanics in Northern Kentucky have proper documentation, and not all are from Mexico, said Iversy Velez, a Puerto Rican lawyer with a practice in Florence.

For several years, the Kenton County library has helped assemble a booklet of personal histories written by local Hispanics. The writers have represented not just Mexico but also Colombia, El Salvador, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Venezuela.

Their journeys have been widely varied. One man wrote that he paid $6,000 to a guide who led him and others across the desert. Another described how she came to visit her sister, a student at Xavier University, and never left.

For those who do enter the country illegally, earning permanent, legal residency is nearly impossible.

Some people have the notion that illegal immigrants can solve their problems by marrying U.S. citizens. But that's not true, said Marilyn Zayas-Davis, an immigration lawyer in Cincinnati.

Legal changes in 1997 barred illegal immigrants from earning residency through marriage. If the immigrants leave the country for any reason, they are not allowed to return legally for 10 years.

'LAY LOW AND PRAY'

"My advice for them is to lay low and pray for the laws to change," Zayas-Davis said

For Wysocki, all she can do is hope that the immigrants - legal and illegal - bring their children back to school.

"This is a culture that really wishes for their next generation to study," Wysocki said. "They tell their children, 'You're my only hope. I don't want you cleaning floors like I do.' "

E-mail kgutierrez@nky.com, rclark@nky.com