Thread: Raid on an Immigrant Household Deepens Anger and Mistrust

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April 10, 2007
U.S. Raid on an Immigrant Household Deepens Anger and Mistrust
By NINA BERNSTEIN
EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — Awakened by banging on the front door and the shouts of strangers inside her family’s sprawling suburban home, Erica Leon, 12, thought at first that the house was on fire.

Then her bedroom door burst open, she said, and armed men in blue bulletproof vests pushed in, demanding to know if she was hiding someone. They pressed on to the room where 4-year-old Carson was asleep with their mother, and pulled off the covers.

“They started screaming at my mom real bad,” Erica said. “I wasn’t crying, but I was, like, terrified. Like, who are you guys?”

They were federal immigration agents hunting for an illegal immigrant — Erica’s long-absent father, Patrizio Wilson Garcia, who was ordered deported after his 2003 divorce from Erica’s mother, Adriana, and has not lived in the house since. But they had entered a three-generation immigrant household where everyone was an American citizen by naturalization or birth.

To the Leon family, Hispanics who have owned their house here on Copeces Lane for seven years, the early-morning raid on Feb. 20 seemed like the ultimate indignity in a history of hostile scrutiny. But to some residents, it was an overdue response by federal authorities to long-simmering concerns about illegal immigration on Long Island’s East End.

Since 2000, neighbors’ complaints about the family’s volleyball games, their many cars, their living arrangements, even the fallen tree limbs in their yard, have prompted more than 18 inspections by town code enforcers and repeated surveillance by the town police, records show. Often officials found nothing to cite; occasionally they issued notices of violations that ended in court fines. Typically, the Leons complied with official demands, only to face fresh complaints.

Federal immigration officials would not say what had prompted the raid, which swept into four other East Hampton houses and rounded up three dozen illegal immigrants. But the operation had nothing to do with town code enforcement, the officials said, or with Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive, who has won national attention by vowing to move against illegal immigrants the federal government ignores.

They also said Erica’s grandmother let them in, providing consent for a search that others in the household could not legally stop.

Residents on both sides see the raid — the first in recent memory in this wealthy beachfront community — as the latest escalation in a wave of crackdowns driven by complaints against immigrants at every level of government. And it points to a sense of frustration in both camps that is making Suffolk County one of the hotbeds of the nation’s immigration debate.

“People here are fed up,” said Richard Herrlin, a neighbor of the Leons’ who welcomed the raid and described himself as a builder of $20 million mansions. “It’s possible the feds showed up because the town officials have done nothing for years, because the town is terrified of being accused of racial insensitivity.”

For him and some others in the neighborhood, where large wooded lots and winding roads bring to mind rural New England, irritation over what they described as the Leons’ noise, trash and traffic has fed on deeper anger over an influx of Hispanic illegal immigrants on the East End. There are festering grievances about taxes, schools crowded with Spanish speakers and homes turned into rooming houses.

For the Leons and other immigrant families, meanwhile, confusion over what civil rights, if any, apply in such raids heightens new feelings of vulnerability.

“Your house is supposed to be where you’re safe, right?” said Andres Leon, 22, Erica’s uncle. “When you see police, you’re supposed to feel protected. But the way they acted, we don’t feel protected; we feel violated.”

Ms. Leon, now remarried, had even obtained an order of protection against Mr. Garcia before their divorce ended his temporary legal status and led to the deportation order.

In a strange twist, that became the legal basis for a Fugitive Operations team of seven agents to bang on the Leons’ door at 5 a.m.

Like the family’s American life, the house, on 3.8 acres in a middle-class section, is still a work in progress. But it is now valued at about $1 million, nearly four times what the Leons paid for it in 2000, before they added 70 percent more finished space, step by step, with earnings from housecleaning, carpentry and a home beauty salon.

The first to arrive in the United States, more than 25 years ago, was Ramon Leon, who works as a cabinetmaker for Central Kitchen Corporation in Southampton. It took him years to win permanent residency under the 1986 immigration amnesty, and years more to bring his wife, Elena, and three children — Adriana, Jazmin and Andres — to join him legally. Erica and her little sister had to be left behind in Ecuador for seven years and joined their mother only three years ago. The household now comprises six adults and five children.

By the spring of 2002, neighbors were complaining that two volleyball courts built by the Leons had become the site of large, sometimes raucous sporting events that drew dozens of people.

All over East Hampton, such games were a flashpoint between longtime residents and Latino immigrants, whose numbers were soaring. And the clashes fueled resentments that helped elect local politicians who promised to crack down on illegal immigrants or “quality of life” violations.

Despite complaints and petitions, officials were unable to shut down the games. At the Leons’, for example, the East Hampton police reported no violations after surveillance over a three-day weekend in 2002 found 15 to 40 people, most of them playing volleyball; 20 vehicles “all registered and legally parked”; and “very little noise.”

But the games had stopped by 2004, after Adriana, 30, married Norman Aguilar, who took over his father-in-law’s share of the mortgage. “I don’t want any problems,” said Mr. Aguilar, who was born in Costa Rica and is a manager at a newspaper distribution company, as well as an agent for a financial services company, Primerica. “I just want to live in peace.”

By then, however, neighborhood complaints seemed to have a life of their own. When Jazmin Leon opened her one-chair home beauty salon — allowed under the residential code — neighbors tried to shut it down over the scissors sign seen through the picture window. When Mr. Aguilar painted a rock white, a neighbor produced town surveys to show that it jutted over his property line by three or four inches.

“My wife wanted to sell the house,” Mr. Aguilar said. “I told her no, anywhere you go, you’ll have the same problems. I feel like for us it’s, like, getting harder in this town. The laws that they’re putting on us, it’s, like, against Hispanic people.”

Some residents say the town does not enforce codes the same way against city people in time shares, or houses crowded with Irish summer workers.

“Profiling is not about who you raid, it’s who you don’t raid — who gets the winks and who gets the handcuffs,” said Amado Ortiz, 60, an American-born architect who joined the board of OLA, a Latino immigrant advocacy group, after being “radicalized,” he said, by an increasingly anti-Hispanic climate.

William E. McGintee, the town supervisor, dismissed such complaints of bias as “nonsense.”

“We don’t have a large influx of illegal immigrants from Russia,” he said. “We have Ecuadoreans, we have Peruvians, we have Mexicans. We don’t know who is living in those houses; we get complaints, and it’s complaint-driven.”

But the limited effect of such complaints only heightens the frustration of residents like Lucinda Murphy, a registered nurse who volunteered that she and her husband, Sean, a television news producer, had often called the police about cars parked at the Leons’.

Ms. Murphy, who has three children, voiced larger misgivings about illegal immigrants with children in the local school. She called them “freeloaders.”

“I’m paying taxes, they’re not,” she said. “Yet their kids still get to go to school with the privileges of my kids. I resent it.”

City dwellers with weekend houses on Copeces Lane have also complained about the Leons, upset that property values could be hurt by the less-upscale Latinos, said Richard Dunn, 65, an East Hampton teacher.

“This is a town that’s driven by money and real estate,” he said. “People who are so concerned about Latinos feel they’re being driven out.”

His own house is cleaned by Adriana Leon and her mother. “I have nothing but good feelings for them,” he said.

On the morning of the raid, Mr. Aguilar, 40, had already left for work. He returned to find the shaken family reading the Bible together in the kitchen.

For a time, the house became a gathering place for immigrants rounded up at other houses that morning, who were mostly released with notices to appear at deportation proceedings. Their accounts of the raids galvanized a group of local clergy, Hispanic activists and even a religious organization based in Costa Rica that flew in counselors.

“It would appear that in the war against terrorism, agents of our nation are now acting in the role of terrorizers,” the group of local clergy, East End Clergy Concerned, wrote their congressman in a letter asking for an investigation.

Mr. Aguilar tried to file a complaint about the raid with the town police but was rebuffed. “We don’t conduct investigations on another law enforcement agency,” Todd Sarris, the chief of police, explained.

Nor was the raid a mistake, said Christopher Shanahan, director of deportation and removal for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the New York region.

“We would like to find fugitive aliens at 100 percent of the locations we go to, but it’s not an exact science,” he said.

No records are kept to show how often the teams find the fugitives they are seeking. And the rules for the searches are murky.

Unlike a criminal search warrant, which requires a judge to review the evidence and find probable cause for a search, the “administrative warrant” used by immigration agents is approved only by the team’s supervisor — and is valid only with the consent of the occupants, Mr. Shanahan said.

But in what he described as standard practice, that consent bears little resemblance to what laymen or constitutional scholars expect. Once Erica’s grandmother let agents over the threshold, Mr. Shanahan said, there was no turning back.

“Due to officer safety needs, they can look into other areas, to clear rooms,” he said. But he added: “If officers did something to humiliate people, I want to know about it. We are very adamant that we want our officers to be professional.”

On a recent afternoon, back from a seventh-grade civics lesson on the separation of powers, Erica spoke about what had changed since the raid.

“My mom wanted me to sleep in her room so I wouldn’t be scared,” she said. “Sometimes, we have heard, they take parents away from the children, or they take children from the parents.”

When the agents left, she remembered, “they said they might come back.”



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All this can be avoided if people listen to the law. If you are ordered to court or ordered to leave the country, you should listen to the law.

The immigration anarchy is just creating chaos across America.

Awakened by banging on the front door and the shouts of strangers inside her family’s sprawling suburban home, Erica Leon, 12, thought at first that the house was on fire.

To the Leon family, Hispanics who have owned their house here on Copeces Lane for seven years, the early-morning raid on Feb. 20 seemed like the ultimate indignity in a history of hostile scrutiny.


I can certainly understand the fear of a 12 year old. I have a 12 year old and I see the concern and uncertainty on HIS face too when he watches the news and sees illegals pouring over the border, hears reports of guns and drugs and gang violence. It is also an indignity in the history of my sons home (America) to have it raped and pilaged on a daily bases by invaders from another country. I see him struggle to understand why he can't safely go to his home town school anymore. I see him try and make sense of a town where he can no longer understand the language spoken in town, at restaurants and at town events. I see his resentment when we have to avoid community activities such as carnivals because of gang violence. So yes, I understand the fear of a 12 year old. What a shame they have all been put in such a position.

I have my own deepening anger and mistrust and it doesn't have anything to do with immgration agents knocking on MY DOOR.

It has to do with gangs, drug dealers, cheating tax volators, anchor babies, double crossing government officials, vehicular manslaughter, the invasion of my country's cities, and paying exhorbitant $$ to support a mass of invading nationals who shouldn't have been here in the first place!

On the morning of the raid, Mr. Aguilar, 40, had already left for work. He returned to find the shaken family reading the Bible together in the kitchen.

Using the Bible was a nice touch in this SOB story. I guess the author of the article felt that something stronger than children was needed to draw more Christians in.

Question, how come I don't see more SOB stories from American citizens? I see several a week, sometimes one daily, from the criminal alien perspective, but very few from Americans that are suffering at the hands of criminal aliens.

Originally Posted by MW

Question, how come I don't see more SOB stories from American citizens?

Oh that is easy MW.
The American media is a self promoting self agrandizing group of elites who beleive that Americans are spoiled, rich, hateful, racist, indifferent, over-consumers who are over paid and over educated. Americans have built our empire on stolen land and have uesd the conqured to build it. We are lazy and selfish and care nothing for the plight of the oppressed.

How could a good thoughtful reporter ever see it any other way? To research a story and give it equal spin they would have to look deeper then they are willing to do, either out of fear or laziness. It is easier to pick out a bad guy and a good guy, pick an agenda and run with it.

We are the oppressor. They are the opppressed. That is the mind-set.
It is dishhonest journalism at its best. I believe that many reporters are driven by some kind of self hate and guilt for having achieved some kind of notariety which they know deep in their hearts that they do not deserve. So they project their self hate and guilt onto the rest of us and expect us to eat it and shut up.

Except, it isn't working anymore. And the reporters seem even more desperate to make their points then ever. So they up the anti to get more reaction. They appeal to the heart and not the mind. They appeal to the sense of guilt and not the sense of rightousness. They are fakes. And they don't fool me a bit.

Funny how the Illegals in these stories are always, Angelic, Christian, God fearing, perfect families. What are they the Walton's? Give me a break.

Originally Posted by MW

Question, how come I don't see more SOB stories from American citizens? I see several a week, sometimes one daily, from the criminal alien perspective, but very few from Americans that are suffering at the hands of criminal aliens.

Same point I have been making for some time. I just keep emailing the media outlets with that question. At least O'Reilly is doing something now. Hopefully he will keep on it.

Originally Posted by MW

On the morning of the raid, Mr. Aguilar, 40, had already left for work. He returned to find the shaken family reading the Bible together in the kitchen.

Using the Bible was a nice touch in this SOB story. I guess the author of the article felt that something stronger than children was needed to draw more Christians in.

MW, There's something odd about this story, I'm thinking it is a fairy tale, I don't believe Ice works in this manner! of course alot of people would like to paint them so. Sympathy you know!