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Raid rumors spark Hispanic worker walk-offs

Updated: 3:31 PM, Apr. 25, 2006

By Barney Lerten, KTVZ.com

Rumors - strongly denied by federal officials - of local immigration checkpoints and roundups amid heightened focus on the issue of illegal aliens combined to keep hundreds if not thousands of Hispanic workers off the job Monday in Central Oregon, where they play a crucial role in the red-hot housing market.
Some immigration-rights groups have called for a nationwide work boycott next Monday, May 1, but it was hard to tell if any of the hgh absentee rate may have been tied to any mistaken understanding of which Monday was the "day of action."

Though there was no easy way to quantify how many workers stayed home, media outlets including NewsChannel 21 received several calls from people who heard reports that federal immigration agents had created some sort of checkpoint and were rounding up Mexican construction workers in the Madras area. Madras police and Jefferson County sheriff's deputies said they were unaware of any such activities.

On Tuesday, the regional spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Laguna Niguel, Calif., strongly denied any such widespread actions were under way, but noted that rumors were flying all over the country.

"The rumors are unfounded," said Virginia Kice. "There's nothing to it, and I don't know who's sort of fanning the flames."

Brian Bergler, marketing director for Pahlisch Homes, said roughly 30 to 40 percent of the company's Central Oregon workforce was off the job Monday, but returned to work Tuesday. It "did have a significant effect," he added.

The unsubstantiated reports have spread so far and wide that ICE, as the agency is known, prepared a statement Tuesday that said, "ICE agents conduct operations every day in locations around the country as part of their efforts to protect the nation and uphold public safety."

"These operations are not random sweeps, but carefully planned enforcement actions that result from investigative leads and intelligence," the ICE statement said.

Kice underscored that stance.

"I think there's always speculation," she said, fueled in recent days by a nine-state enforcement action last week. "We make arrests every day, and to say we aren't making arrests isn't accurate. We don't routinely go to parking lots, Home Depots, homes, churches."

"We don't do checkpoints," she said. "It's just baloney. Whoever's spreading those rumors is irresponsible. People who are in the country illegally are certainly subject to arrest. We don't go out arbitrarily."

Whatever the reason for the workers' absence, "It's shut down a lot of the big construction companies in Bend," said contractor D.L. Larsen, who said he'd heard raids were occurring Monday that picked up "illegals, even some legal guys."

"They're good people, and they're very important to our country," Larsen said. "There are no white people to do the work in construction in this town. The kids won't do it." And he said such raids "would pretty much shut it down."

A Bend woman whose husband has a drywall business, but who declined to be identified, said it was not any raids or roundups, from what she'd heard, but that a Spanish-language radio station "broadcast on the radio this morning, ‘Walk off the job today.'"

She said the sharp drop in workers Monday was evident in the Lava Ridges subdivision where she and her husband live, one of the areas being built by Pahlisch Homes. "Today, I drove down the street and there were 15 white guys working, and that's it. I went through our neighborhood and it's like a ghost town."

The woman said her husband went to pick up supplies from a local company and was told "none of their crew showed up, because most of them are Hispanic."

She said her husband highly prizes his Mexican workers - who she stressed are legal - because of their strong work ethic.

"My husband's crew shows up every time and they do a great job, unlike a lot of other people," she said. "My husband won't even hire white guys - he won't. I know, it's racist. But they won't complain. He pays them just as much as if they were a white crew. ... They're as nice as can be. These guys have a right to walk off the job. This will hurt Bend, if this continues - one day has an impact."

Juan Zendejas, program director at KRDM in Redmond, which recently became a Spanish-language station under new owners, said they had broadcast reports of plans for the national day of action a week from Monday, but added, "I'm not telling them not to go to work, or go to work. ... We're just telling them what we hear on the news, read on the Internet."

"We heard a rumor - a few people called today saying INS (now called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) was in the area. That may be why some people didn't go to work," he said, even hearing wilder rumors of shoppers being picked up at Wal-Mart or Safeway stores.

"We got a call from one of the mills in Prineville, and they said a lot of folks didn't go to work today," Zendejas said. "If a lot of people missed work today, that just tells us the economy in Central Oregon could be really hurt if there's raids like this."

Nanette Bittler, owner of the Bend McDonald's Restaurants, was among many employers in Central Oregon trying to separate rumor from reality for many anxious employees.

"This is 100 percent rumor," Bittler said. "Everything we've found says it seems to be completely unfounded. Today (Tuesday) we have all of our workers. We've been really actively involved in trying to get information." They, too, heard about the Wal-Mart and Safeway rumors, "and we contacted the store managers, they said it was nothing and we immediately passed it on."

Government statistics show one of every four workers in construction is an immigrant, The Dallas Morning News reported Sunday. And the Associated Builders and Contractors, representing 23,000 construction firms, warns that construction would screech to a halt without the immigrant workforce.

Hundreds of illegal workers were rounded up by ICE agents in nine states, including Oregon, last week. Agency officials denied the raids had anything to do with the recent spotlight on the immigration issue, but organizers of pro-immigration demonstrations told the Houston Chronicle that the raids had caused many to question whether the protests should continue. Phoenix immigration-rights organizers claimed checkpoints had been set up around the city and motorists were being screened.

Deschutes County District Attorney Mike Dugan hadn't heard about any immigration raids in the area, but the longtime Democrat said: "It's corporate America, and it's greed" that have led to the immigration controversy.

"Builders in Central Oregon are making a big profit, and they're not sharing that profit with family-wage jobs," Dugan said. "They're hiring illegal immigrants, even ‘green card' guys. They're willing to do the work for much less money. Sometimes they live in mobile homes, families with five, six, seven workers in them. They are under the radar."

"What we see (at the DA's office) is just the tip of the iceberg, those active in criminal behavior, transporting drugs over and the border and that stuff," Dugan said.


Tune in for more details to NewsChannel 21 at Five, Six and Eleven.