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Fear of the law


Stories by Joe Johnson | | Story updated at 3:08 AM on Sunday, July 2, 2006
They spend their days working in the putrefied air of poultry processing plants, toiling in carpet mills and restaurant kitchens, and competing for jobs at day-laborer gathering sites.

In the evening many choose to stay at home, in the security of neighborhoods where relatives and acquaintances from their Mexican hometowns live. On weekends, young people hang out close to home with friends - mostly for harmless fun and companionship, but sometimes to make trouble - while others seek out clubs that pulsate with salsa music but are far removed from downtown Athens' vibrant night scene.

Maria, a 27-year-old Mexican, chooses to keep a low profile by staying home.

"What if there is a roadblock and they find out we don't have papers and they deport us?" she said. "Right now, life is difficult because all I do is stay at home because I am afraid. I feel like I am locked up."

Rosa is a 31-year-old mother of two young children who's both concerned and confused about new immigration laws that go into effect in Georgia next July and ones being debated in Congress.

She risked her life by paying a coyote $3,000 to lead her over the mountains into Texas, a trek seeking a better future for her children.

"I am very afraid," she said of tough new immigrant laws. "If I have to bring my children to the hospital, I am afraid I could be deported, and if one parent is deported the family is destroyed."

Angel doesn't have a driver's license, yet he drives each day to a local restaurant, where he got a job using a fake Social Security card.

He also didn't have a clue his dream of rejoining his wife and children in Acapulco to open his own business could vanish if he's stopped for a traffic violation.

Beginning July 1, 2007, the Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act, one of the toughest laws in the nation, will, among other things, give immigration enforcement powers to local police. Jailers will have to check the immigration status of prisoners they book and notify federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement about anyone in the country illegally.

"I'm finding out right now," Angel said of the new law, two months after it was signed by Gov. Sonny Perdue.

Now that he knows, the 37-year-old Mexican said he will try to stay under the radar.

"If I see someone breaking into my neighbor's house, I would not call the police," he said. "I don't want to get involved. All I want to do is go to work and return to my family. I would just lock the door and go back to watching TV."

Learning to trust

Georgia's tough immigration reform legislation is a setback for law enforcement officials who had been making progress in improving relations with the immigrant community.

For example, abused women had learned they could turn to the police without fear they or their abuser would be deported, according to Sister Margarita Martin of Oasis Catolico Santa Rafaela, a Catholic ministry in the predominantly Mexican Pinewood Estates North trailer park in northern Clarke County.

Now, because of the new state law, she said, those same women may revert to the stoic punching bags they once were for fear their breadwinners will be deported.

"They were learning to stand up on their own and learn how to take care of themselves and protect their dignity as human beings and call the police." Sister Martin said. "Right now, I don't think they will do that any more."

To build trust, the Athens-Clarke County Police Department has recruited more Spanish-speaking officers. Judges routinely allot money for indigent defendants to hire translators and Spanish-speaking investigators. At least one prosecutor is fluent in Spanish. State-certified interpreters have become a common courtroom fixture during trials. The local public defender's office sets aside one day a week for clients to meet with attorneys and interpreters. The Clarke County Jail contracts with a telephone translation service so that non-Spanish-speaking attorneys can talk to their clients.

Only a decade ago, judges would allow family members and even friends to translate in court for Spanish-speaking defendants.

Though the people who work to protect and mete out justice were fitting immigrants into the justice system, they still had a long way to go. Their trek has just gotten longer.

Divisive new law

There are now competing versions of immigration reform legislation in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. President Bush has sided with the Senate's comprehensive version, which would create a guest worker program that could lead to citizenship. The House version does not have a guest worker provision and would make it a felony for someone to be in the country without documentation.

According to the U.S. Census, 1,491 Hispanic people lived in Clarke County in 1990. A decade later, that number grew by 331 percent, to 6,436, or 6.3 percent of the population.

The number has more than doubled since, especially when taking into account undocumented migrants who live mostly unseen in outlying trailer parks and subdivisions, according to Doug Bachtel, a demographer with the University of Georgia.

Migrants came out of the shadows in a big way on May 1, however, when an estimated 1,500 people took to the downtown streets that normally are the domain of UGA students, suited professionals and a mostly white crowd of shoppers and diners.

They joined tens of thousands more marching that day in cities throughout the country calling for legalization of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States, and protesting tougher state and federal laws that would deny their U.S.-born children Medicare and make their presence in the country a felony punishable by immediate deportation.

The fear of deportation may already be hindering police as they try to bring Hispanics to justice for committing crimes against their own.

On the evening of April 7, a young Hispanic man walked into El Manantial restaurant in the nearby city of Winder and open fire, killing a man and wounding a bystander.

Although several diners witnessed the murder and a suspect was identified soon after, police said many of the people who investigators interviewed didn't want to get involved, and those who did help provided information that led to dead ends.

"We had an untold number of eyewitnesses, just feet from where this guy murdered a man and shot an innocent bystander," Winder police Sgt. Wayne Samples said. "Many jumped into their vehicles and left, but fortunately some remained on the scene and cooperated with us. We got some leads, but they didn't pan out because we didn't get a lot of cooperation" following those leads.

"I think the new law will play a part, if not in this case, certainly in other cases down the road because Hispanics aren't going to want to cooperate with the police out of fear of the law," Samples said. "I'm not saying no one's helping us, because some are being very cooperative, but others are avoiding us at all cost. It's a fact a lot of Hispanics are illegals, and they certainly don't want to talk to the police."

No place for justice

Even before the new state law, attorneys said Hispanic witnesses to crimes were reluctant to tell police what they saw or would refuse to testify in court for fear they would be deported.

Worse than that, defendants had no reason to trust they'd be tried by an unbiased jury.

After a Mexican was convicted of murder by a jury in Athens last year, for example, a reader wrote the local newspaper asking, "Who makes up most of the gang-related incidents? Immigrants! Who are our major drug sellers? Immigrants!"

"The question from the get-go is, 'Is the jury pool unbiased?' " said Stephanie Bohon, an assistant professor of sociology at UGA whose specialty is studying Hispanic immigration to the United States.

"If you happen to be Latino in Georgia, the assumption for a lot of people is you're an immigrant, and probably here illegally," Bohon said. "Then there's the assumption that if you're here illegally, then you must be up to something no good."

And immigrants who are afforded court translators are reluctant to testify on their own behalf because juries won't hear the words from their own mouths.

One such defendant was 26-year-old Miguel Hidalgo-Lopez, who chose not to testify when tried last year for violating Georgia's anti-gang law by participating in a drive-by shooting that targeted rival gang members.

His wife, Gabriella Martinez, admits her husband once banded with Los Primos, a local set of the Sur 13 street gang, but she said it was more for fellowship than anything else.

Born in 1979 in the small farming village of Tuzantla, in the Mexican state of Michoacan, Hidalgo-Lopez illegally crossed the border when he was 15. Less than a year later he headed east to join his brothers in Athens, where he got work at a poultry-processing plant.

Being new to this country, Martinez said, it was only natural her husband associated with other men who shared his background when he settled in a predominantly Mexican neighborhood.

But Hidalgo-Lopez quit the gang several years before the January 2004 drive-by, she said, and prosecutors used questionable witnesses who may have had their own agendas to help convict Hidalgo-Lopez and send him to prison for 30 years.

Martinez said her husband decided not to testify because the jurors wouldn't hear directly from him.

"He can explain himself pretty good in Spanish, but if he would have been able to speak English, the jury would've been able to hear from his own mouth what happened and everything about him," Martinez said. "I really think he would have changed their minds if he testified. He didn't because I think he was a little scared or nervous. It made a difference to him to have to go through a translator."

Rafael Barcenas, a Mexican awaiting trial on child molestation charges, said he also fears a language barrier will work against him in court.

"I am afraid that because I do not speak English, they will treat me differently," he said through the Clarke County Jail's telephone translation service. "I don't know how big the consequences are for what they say I did, and I really do not know how to express myself."

ODDS STACKED IN COURT

Roberta Fernandez thought she could bring a unique perspective when deliberating the fate of a Hispanic defendant. But when she was called for jury duty in just such a case, she was not picked. But a white man who admitted he thinks Hispanics commit a large portion of crimes was seated. The recent cases of two Hispanics, including Miguel Hidalgo-Lopez, illustrate the hurdles immigrants face in the courtroom. Stories on Pages A4,5