Flushing Them Out

Her husband, a welder, leaves for work before dawn. She never knows if he'll come home.

Daniela has very few friends — there's no one she can trust not to report her, especially now that the county sheriff has an illegal immigration hotline.

She can't leave her house to buy groceries; she's heard that the sheriff stations deputies at Food City.

Daniela lives down the street from a drug dealer, not a safe environment for a young family. She knows the guy's name, his address and she's seen him do business. But she can't call the police — they might take her away.

She's learned how to walk quietly, to stay in the shadows. The only place Daniela allows herself to go is her children's elementary school. She volunteers there six hours a day. She says it's her responsibility to be active in her children's education. But when she walks to school (she won't drive, ever) she makes sure to go with one of her few friend or her kids.

"You can't walk alone because if you are walking alone and you get taken, who is going to tell your family you are gone?" she says. "When you walk, you walk fast and you walk quiet. You don't talk to nobody. If someone is speaking to you, you don't say anything."

Daniela's children can't sleep through the night. They have nightmares about their parents getting caught and deported.

"We are the only support for my children. If we get arrested, we don't have another person to take care of my children," say says, starting to cry. "When they ask, 'What's going to happen to us, Mom, if you get arrested?' I lie to them. I say, 'We have a plan my love, my sweetie. Someone will take care of you and your brothers. Nothing is going to happen to you.' But it's a lie."

Daniela also wakes up at night, crying. In her dreams, she relives her border crossing. She came to America to meet up with her husband when she was 17, their 8-month-old baby in tow. In the border town of Agua Prieta, she was assaulted by a "coyote," slang for a person who smuggles immigrants across the border. The coyote stole her money, her identification, and tried to steal her baby.

"They tell me they will take my baby," she says in her slow, practiced English, from inside a classroom at her children's elementary school. That was 13 years ago, but from the look on her face, it could have been yesterday. "They say, 'You will never see your baby again.'"

To save her young son, Carlos, she made a decision that haunts her to this day: She paid a strange woman $600 to drive him safely to Phoenix. It was a painful gamble, but one that paid off. Carlos survived.

If Daniela were caught trying to save his life this way in Maricopa County, she'd be charged with human smuggling, the same as the coyote who haunts her nightmares. Today, victims of smuggling are treated the same as the perpetrators, thanks to an interpretation of the law that assigns the same level of responsibility to the criminals who smuggle and the people they sneak across the border.

There's good reason to be afraid. The situation for undocumented immigrants in Maricopa County is arguably the worst in the country, thanks to two men: County Attorney Andrew Thomas and Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Roberto Reveles, the former president of immigrant rights group Somos America (We Are America), says there is no place in the country worse than Maricopa County.

"It's worse because here there is a statewide effort. The state Legislature is involved, the executive branch — the governor — is complicit, and at the local level, the worst in the country has to be the Maricopa County sheriff and county attorney, who are abusing their power to harass, intimidate, and create fear in the hearts of dark-skinned people," he says.

In October, when the owners of this newspaper were arrested for releasing information about a grand jury subpoena, no group in Maricopa County watched more closely than the undocumented immigrant community, says Antonio Bustamante, a Phoenix defense lawyer litigating a class-action suit against Arpaio and Thomas.

"It was a despicable, cowardly, gutless lack of character thing to do to any human being," he says. "And if they would do that to prominent members of the community — if you're a 'wetback' — you've got no chance."

Undocumented immigrants know better than anyone what it's like to be arrested in the middle of the night, to walk around as moving targets, to sit in jail.

In the past year, the fight against immigrants has gotten particularly nasty as violence against immigrants has escalated.

But this is a fight that began back in November 2004, when a conservative lawyer named Andrew Thomas ran for office on a get-tough immigration platform. The pundits scoffed, noting that the county attorney technically has very little to do with illegal immigration, a federal issue. But Thomas has delivered on his campaign promises. In doing so, he's become a national spokesman for the anti-immigration movement.

From his attack on the judiciary, to his promise to aggressively enforce a new employer-sanctions law aimed at businesses who hire undocumented workers, to his intense lobbying for a ballot measure that denies bail to illegal immigrants accused of committing felonies, to his campaign against identity theft, almost every political move Thomas makes has anti-immigrant rhetoric at its root.

And these days, Arpaio is right by his side.

Together, they've succeeded in terrorizing the undocumented residents of Maricopa County. Consider:

• Thomas' controversial interpretation of Arizona's anti-smuggling statute. The county attorney accuses all people who are smuggled into the state of conspiring to smuggle themselves, a class 4 felony.

• Maricopa County is the only place in the country where victims of human smuggling are treated as criminals.

• The law has drawn the attention of national human rights groups like the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law on the grounds that the statute is preempted by the federal government's constitutional right to regulate immigration.

• A crackdown by Arpaio's deputies on law-abiding immigrants — including food vendors, college students, and day laborers — has left the community so frightened that many immigrants will not even leave their homes to visit the grocery store or go to church. Even American citizens of Hispanic descent say they are nervous. One citizen New Times spoke with carries his United States passport around to prove he's a citizen.

• A push toward making local law enforcement into immigration officers has had a chilling effect on the undocumented population. In February, 160 county deputies were granted immigration authority. Recently, Phoenix and Mesa have considered allowing police officers to question immigration status (previously, they had to call ICE to verify status). Though Arpaio has arrested only about 1,300 illegal immigrants — a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated 300,000 living in Maricopa County — the effort has been felt throughout the undocumented population.

• An increase in immigrant-on-immigrant violence has come, experts say, as a result of the population's inability to call the police in time of need. The fear within the immigrant community of all police has given violent criminals the upper hand — they know their victims can't, or won't, call for help.

Because of the sheriff's reputation for retaliation, all undocumented immigrants New Times interviewed for this story chose to use only their real first names in order to avoid capture and possible deportation. Some even refused to meet with a reporter in person out of fear of being turned over to the police.

Both Arpaio and Thomas' offices declined interview requests for this story. Phoenix lawyer Daniel Ortega, legal counsel to Somos America, says county policies have dangerous ramifications.

"It is our position that Joe Arpaio and Andrew Thomas are doing exactly what the Constitution of the United States prohibits, and that is the enforcement of immigration laws at a local level," Ortega says. "Why? Because they want to get re-elected. They don't even have to tell the truth. It doesn't matter as long as it gets a headline."

The issue is not unique to Maricopa County. Nationally, the topic has become such a political onus that in October Mexican President Philipe Calderón issued a statement begging American politicians to stop using migrants as the "thematic hostages of their speeches and strategies."