Seeking stability : Family believes raid was act of ‘selective enforcement’
Posted on Sunday, January 13, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/bcdr/News/57611/
ROGERS — Serafina Reyes
still sheds tears when she
recounts the day she told her grandchildren their parents had been arrested. Dec. 10, 2007, started as a quiet day at the Reyes home at 2706 Creekside Drive. Quickly, it turned into chaos and confusion.
The change started with a dull thud — the sound of law-enforcement officers breaking through the door of the family’s home in a surprise raid, then ended with the petite matriarch holding her four eldest grandchildren as they returned home from school to find the floor of the home strewn with papers and clothing.
“ They said ‘ Mama ! Papa !’” she said through an interpreter.
In a near-simultaneous raid of multiple locations of the family’s Acambaro Restaurant chain, Garcia’s Distribution Center and the home, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers and local police arrested Reyes ’ son, Arturo Reyes Jr., 35, his wife, Silvia Reyes, 36, and Lucila Huaracha, 33, all of Rogers; and Armando Reyes, 33, of Lowell, on charges of harboring or shielding aliens for material gain.
The raids also yielded the arrest of 19 illegal immigrants working in the restaurants.
The arrests were made as part of the first large-scale action taken after formation of a regional immigrations task force operating under the federal 287 (g ) guidelines. The program gives local law enforcement the authority to detain suspected illegal immigrants, then check their citizenship status by accessing a federal immigration database. A total of 19 officers from the Springdale and Rogers police departments and Benton and Washington county sheriff’s offices are authorized for the program.
Arturo Reyes Jr. remains jailed awaiting a trial date. He was not released because he was judged to have the potential to flee to his family’s home in Mexico.
Silvia, who is three months pregnant and a mother of five, is out of jail on $ 25, 000 bond. She is under home arrest, with a monitoring unit strapped to her ankle.
Silvia and Arturo Jr. have worked in the United States as illegal immigrants for 14 years. Arturo’s parents are legal residents. The couple never sought legal status because the process of acquiring citizenship is cumbersome and the family’s children — all natural-born U. S. citizens — are not fluent in Spanish and would be uncomfortable living in an unfamiliar culture in Guanajuato, Mexico, where they would have to live during the process, she said. Memories of the raid
The monitoring bracelet on Silvia’s ankle alerts police if she leaves her home. She follows a handwritten list of times she’s allowed to leave the house to pick up her children from school and attend church. She clears doctor’s appointments related to her pregnancy in advance with police.
The raid has shaken up her children, she said. It’s difficult to be at home with so much uncertainty while her husband remains detained, Silvia said, but she knows it’s what Arturo wants her to do.
Daughter Josselyne, 3, who was present during the raid, now sleeps with the lights on.
Jessica, 14, wrote her mother a letter detailing her fears of ICE and her bad memories. The letter included a hand-drawn map showing where her parents, grandparents and siblings could sleep in one of the family’s other homes in Rogers. The move would help to avoid memories triggered by living where the raid happened, she wrote.
Serafina, 66, can still reenact every footstep of that morning. She was upstairs, giving her husband his heart medication, when she heard a loud sound like a gunshot at the front door. She walked into the atrium to find officers with weapons drawn. They had broken out a panel of the front door and forced entry into the home, she said.
Silvia, who wasn’t visibly pregnant at the time, remembers lying on the floor with Josselyne, covering her eyes to keep her from being afraid. ICE had already arrested Silvia’s husband at one of the restaurants, though she didn’t know it at the time.
The family doesn’t understand why force was used.
“ It would have taken one officer to arrest me, ” Silvia said.
Since the raids, rumors have also surfaced about inappropriate behavior by local police officers on the scene. Employees present at the raided restaurants claim officers mocked the seriousness of the event, putting on aprons and sombreros and dancing around, she said.
Sgt. Shane Pegram, public information officer for the Springdale Police Department, would not comment on the behavior of specific officers, citing the federal nature of the investigation.
Neither would Steve Helms, chief of the Rogers Police Department.
“ Any officer obviously is trained in etiquette and procedures, but I can’t speak directly to it, ” he said. “ We want our officers to act professionally, as any agency would. ”
A Homeland Security officer was present, supervising the process when the search warrant was executed at the residence, Helms said. Selective enforcement ?
Serafina, Silvia and Silvia’s brother, Isais Morales, 43, who works at the restaurants, agree that the raids were what some members of the twocounty Hispanic community have called selective enforcement.
Outside a recent court hearing, a group of several high-profile Hispanic business and community leaders distributed a document outlining plans to establish a fund for legal defense of local Hispanic business owners and diversity training for local officers involved in immigration enforcement.
Helms said the department already incorporates several forms of diversity training into basic training.
“ It’s basically preaching the Golden Rule: treat others as you would treat yourself, ” he said.
Pegram said the Springdale department hadn’t yet determined whether it would take part in training provided through the group’s fund.
“ It’s hard to say because we don’t know what that training would consist of, ” he said.
The Hispanic community group’s statement said officers “ unduly targeted the Reyes family for exceedingly harsh scrutiny and punishment. ”
“ Out of the thousands of businesses in NWA so far, ICE officials have targeted Hispanic-owned enterprises in their quest to rid NWA of ‘ undesirables, ’” said the statement, which was endorsed by Jim Miranda, a Hispanic activist, and Ana Hart, executive director of Just Communities of Northwest Arkansas.
Silvia agreed.
Officers could go into the kitchen of any northwest Arkansas restaurant, she said, and they would likely find illegal immigrants employed under the guise of false documents. The same could be said for large corporations, she said.
She denied knowingly employing illegal immigrants. Small businesses are not given the proper tools or training to determine that documents are authentic, she said.
Silvia said that when she first became involved with the business she had a soft approach toward documentation, because of her own lack of documentation. As the family learned more about the legal process, they took a more aggressive approach to investigating documents.
Under the more aggressive approach, when the company received notification of a questionable Social Security number from the Internal Revenue Service, managers would confront the employee. If the document was false, the employee would simply leave, she said.
In October, the family closed the restaurants for a few days when a group of employees — suspicious of people in what they believed were unmarked law-enforcement vehicles — refused to come to work out of fear of a raid. Many left the state, Silvia said. She said supervisors were unaware of the employees’ illegal status.
Of the 19 workers arrested in December, seven have been deported to Mexico and El Salvador, Morales said. Many of them left children behind, he said.
Federal authorities froze the restaurant chain’s bank accounts and seek to seize $ 3. 5 million worth of property allegedly purchased with money made from employing illegal immigrants — including the family’s four homes, five restaurants and a warehouse.
A federal complaint details suspicious financial activity at the businesses as an incentive for investigation, citing large cash deposits as evidence of potential wrongdoing.
Cash transactions are quite common in the Hispanic community, Morales said.
“ Am I supposed to tell a customer, ‘ No, you can’t pay me in cash’ ? ” he said through an interpreter.
Morales opened a vinyl bank bag, fanning out stacks of prepared deposits from Tuesday’s business at three of the restaurants. The records showed a total of $ 3, 179 in cash and $ 3, 075. 71 in creditcard or debit-card transactions. On Mondays, the chain would deposit a full weekend’s worth of cash from all of its restaurants, frequently a large sum, he said. A federal investigation
Morales said area immigration enforcement has been presented as a tool to rein in criminal activity. He doesn’t understand why his family, all involved in the business community, was the target of the first large-scale raid.
“ The police came here to take innocent people, ” he said.
Helms denies that the Reyes investigation was a misuse of local immigrationenforcement efforts. The investigation of the family originated with the Department of Homeland Security before local agencies secured 287 (g ) agreements, and before the task force was formed, he said.
“ The officers that were trained were brought in to finish that up, ” he said.
Bob Balfe, U. S. attorney for the Western District of Arkansas, would not speak on the specifics of the Reyes investigation. He denied accusations of targeting Hispanic business owners. Investigations are based on credible tips.
The Acambaro investigation has been ongoing since 2006, he said.
“ I strongly disagree with that characterization, ” Balfe said. “ We did not take out a Hispanic business directory and begin with the A’s. ”
Local officers were acting within the goals of the northwest Arkansas Immigration Criminal Apprehension Task Force, he said. The organization works with ICE to establish priority cases. The task force’s top priority is pursuing immigrants involved in violent crime. It next targets groups involved in other types of criminal activity such as document fraud and drug trafficking.
Because the first two goals involve reactive enforcement, which occurs once crimes are discovered, officers spend the remainder of their time focusing on larger investigations targeting the task force’s third goal — halting the hiring of illegal immigrants, Balfe said.
The region’s high job-creation rate draws the majority of illegal immigrants to northwest Arkansas. Employers frequently abuse illegal workers, denying benefits and pushing high overtime hours with substandard wages, Balfe said.
“ Until we hold these employers accountable, illegal immigrants are going to continue to be preyed upon, ” he said, speaking generally. “ We’re not focused on the race of the employers; we’re focusing on the criminality of the employer. ” The future of Acambaro
The future for the family and the restaurant chain remains uncertain, Morales said.
With a shortage of employees necessary to reopen all of the restaurants, the family has opened four of the seven locations. Even if the family is cleared of charges, Morales is convinced the attention from the legal proceedings may have a negative impact on the business.
The family, who has catered community events and fundraisers for years, has seen a swell of support from the community. Church congregations are praying for them, and patrons are returning to the restaurants. A white Bentonville couple, loyal customers for years, offered to attend a court hearing with the family, he said.
“ The first time they came back to the restaurant, they jumped up and down and said, ‘ I’m so glad you’re open !’” Morales said.
Francisco Ayala, managing editor of Noticias Libres, interpreted for this story and contributed to it.
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