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 News from Around the Americas | June 2006 
Jailed Immigrants: Our Families Suffering
 Jacques Billeaud - Associated Press
| | Juan Carlos Gutierez, 34, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, talks about being arrested in Maricopa County, Ariz., for conspiracy and being incarcerated at the Maricopa County jail, Tuesday, June 20, 2006, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Will Powers) |
The five men knew their two-day walk across the Arizona desert could end with the Border Patrol swiftly returning them to Mexico.
But they never thought they would spend three months in a county jail under a novel interpretation of an Arizona immigrant smuggling law that calls for charging customers of human traffickers as conspirators to the crime.
In exclusive jailhouse interviews conducted in Spanish, the men said their plan to earn a better living by working construction and landscaping jobs in the United States had backfired, and that their incarceration has caused their families to suffer financially.
"We didn't come to conspire," said Juan Carlos Gutierrez, who wanted to earn enough money to open a boot-making business back in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato. "We came to work."
The five, among the first 48 people charged as conspirators under the new law, told The Associated Press that they knew they weren't supposed to sneak across the border, but that people shouldn't blame them for trying to help their families.
Of the more than 250 people arrested in Maricopa County under the 10-month-old law, most are illegal immigrants who are accused of paying smugglers to bring them across the border. A fraction of those arrested were accused of smuggling.
The charges were brought under an interpretation of the law by the top prosecutor in Maricopa County. Immigration analysts said it's rare for local police agencies to jail immigrants for crossing the border illegally.
Critics said the approach was overreaching, potentially expensive and that the law was never intended for that use. The law's authors have said they intended it to be used to prosecute smugglers, not the immigrants being smuggled.
Maricopa County is the only county in Arizona where the law is being applied in this way.
"I don't even want to hear that there's not room (to jail them)," said Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who sought the prosecutor's opinion on the legality of arresting the smuggler's customers. "That's a cop-out. That's a way to ease out of this. That's what the federal government is saying."
Before the first 48 immigrants were arrested in early March, they crossed into the country near the western Arizona border city of San Luis, carrying jugs of water.
They came from places throughout Mexico and intended to find work or join family members already living in the U.S. Most were headed to California, though a few were going to Oregon, Utah, South Carolina and Wisconsin.
Several said they were piled like sacks into two vans that picked them up for the second leg of their trip. Even after they were pulled over by a sheriff's deputy about 50 miles west of Phoenix, they figured it wouldn't be long until they were allowed to return home.
"I thought the sheriff was going to turn us over to the Border Patrol," said Jorge Saavedra, a construction worker who planned to meet his wife and two U.S.-born children in California.
Mexicans caught trying to cross the border frequently bypass formal deportation proceedings and are returned to their country within a day or two.
Immigrant advocates said the 48 might have fared better had they been picked up by federal authorities, because they probably would have stood less chance of being charged.
"For the most part, people who make it across the border are home free, but that doesn't mean if the law is enforced that it's unfair," said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors limiting immigration.
Mehlman said he was unmoved by the argument that immigrants are only trying to help their families financially. "The motivation for most crimes is economic," he said.
On the Net: Maricopa County sheriff's office: http://www.mcso.org |
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