The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

by Matt Taibbi

  The vegetation near the river disappeared into the background. Soon it was all desert. “After an hour we made it to the first fence,” he says. “It was ten or twelve feet high. What could we do? We climbed over.”

  An hour or so later they made it to a second fence. But there was a problem. One of the travelers, a young man, was too weak to go on. “He couldn’t walk anymore,” Alvaro says. “So it was decided that he would walk toward the road and give himself up. We sent him one way, and the rest of us broke up into groups. The hope was that we would get some kind of head start. But within an hour, we saw the helicopter overhead.”

  Alvaro’s group by that point consisted of twenty-three people. When the helicopter came, they split into two groups and ran. When they found each other again, the two groups numbered seventeen and four.

  “Two children were missing,” Alvaro says, pausing. “The coyotes were communicating with each other by cell phone, and they were scrambling to find the missing kids. But they couldn’t. They were gone.”

  Alvaro pauses while telling this part of the story, reliving this dilemma. It’s clear he still hasn’t quite sorted it all out in his head.

  “We had no choice,” he says finally. “We had to keep walking.”

  Alvaro and the group ended up walking for two more days. Eventually they met up with more coyotes and were driven by pickup truck to a mobile home outside San Antonio. The interior of the mobile home had recently been set on fire, so while it looked fine from the outside and drove well enough, the inside was almost completely charred. There were two men, a woman, and two grown children living inside this charred mobile home. All twenty-one of the remaining travelers piled into the blackened vehicle with them.

  Once there, they were given an ultimatum. “The deal on the Mexico side had been one thousand dollars to get us to Houston,” says Alvaro. “But we got in the RV, and suddenly the price was twelve hundred dollars. I refused to pay and so did the others. So now we were kidnapped again. They took our shoes at night and gave us only minimal food and water.”

  Alvaro says the situation got so desperate inside the RV that the group started going through the burned cabinets in the kitchen. The charred cabinet doors literally fell apart as they opened them up.

  “Amazingly,” Alvaro says, “we found some bread in there. It was a little black on the outside, but it was edible. We all split it and ate it. I couldn’t believe I had been reduced to this.”

  Finally, Alvaro’s family wired enough money to satisfy the coyotes. He hitched a ride with one of the other captives to Mississippi, and from there his nephew drove and picked him up to bring him back to Gainesville.

  The whole adventure had taken about a month.

  I ask Alvaro if he still drives to work.

  He shrugs. “I have to,” he says.

  Not long after Alvaro returned to Gainesville, the city’s local business leaders gathered together to discuss a problem. Nobody particularly minded that we were express-mailing human beings into the hands of kidnappers on the other side of the border, but the deportations were bad for business. Turnover at the local chicken plants was at an all-time high. Good, dependable cleaning ladies were being disappeared. The instability of the workforce was becoming a problem for the local white folks.

  So in February 2011 some of those leaders marched on down to Atlanta to complain. Speaking before the state senate’s Special Committee on Immigration and Georgia’s Economy, Tom Hensley, president of a chicken processing firm called Fieldale Farms that is a big presence in the Gainesville area, stood up and complained about 287(g).

  “We were 67 percent Hispanic in 2004. Our turnover was 25 percent. Our workers [compensation] cost was $50,000 a month. Our health care cost for the whole year was $8 million. It was about that time that the federal, state and local governments let it be known that these folks are not welcome,” Hensley told the committee.

  “Fast forward to 2010, we’re about 33 percent Hispanic now. Our turnover is 75 percent. Workers comp costs are $150,000 a month. Our health care last year was $20 million. Those are staggering numbers, but that’s the economic reality.”

  Hensley closed by begging the committee to ease back on the profiling and no-license statutes. “I implore you,” he said. “Don’t pass any more laws.”

  The plea by local business leaders, not just in Georgia but all over America, had a result. Instead of automatically snatching up every undocumented immigrant in sight and tossing them into the 287(g) grinder, local police were now allowed a little leeway to be merciful.

  The leeway was in part provided by John Morton, chief of ICE and Barack Obama’s top immigration official. Responding to a hail of criticism from around the country over the sharp increase in deportations and 287(g) actions, and perhaps thinking ahead to a 2012 election where the Hispanic vote might prove important, the Obama administration decided, through Morton, to offer America’s 12 million undocumented aliens an olive branch.

  On June 17, 2011, Morton issued a letter outlining a kinder, gentler immigration policy. The notorious “Morton Memo,” as it would come to be known, essentially said that ICE officials and their partners in local law enforcement did not necessarily have to deport every last undocumented alien who came within eyeshot of a police officer.

  “Agency employees,” Morton wrote, “may exercise prosecutorial discretion and what factors should be considered.” It went on to say that certain mitigating circumstances may be considered in immigration cases, like the individual’s pursuit of education, his or her service in the U.S. Armed Forces, and so on.

  Furthermore, special enforcement emphasis was to be placed on people who posed a “clear risk to national security,” like for instance “serious felons” and “known gang members.”

  These, of course, were exactly the people whom 287(g) was originally supposed to target. The Morton Memo was essentially an admission that ICE had gone beyond its stated objectives and had unfairly swept up hardworking noncriminals like Ella and Alvaro. Now, however, the administration’s new promise was to focus more on real criminals.

  So what did that mean? Did it mean the dragnet would be relaxed? Fewer patrols and roadblocks?

  Nope. In Gainesville, at least, what it meant was just as many arrests and just as many no-license tickets, if not more. Only the number of deportations relaxed. In the first five months of 2012, deportations dropped nationwide by about 10 percent. But in places like Gainesville, immigrants remained a constant target for those five-hundred-dollar and thousand-dollar tickets. This seemed to represent the ultimate white-folks win-win: local chicken-plant owners got to keep their cheap labor, while local police still got to milk the immigrant community for any money they made working at those plants.

  “They need us here to work,” one of the Fiesta passengers explained to me. “But they also want our money. We’re between the rock and the hard place.”

  In 2012 and 2013, local officials began a new policy: they were still catching, ticketing, and deporting as many undocumented aliens as they could, but in many cases they were allowed to avoid incarceration in the meantime. “The people are still getting deported, but now they get to wait at home for their departure date,” says Corso. “It’s not that families aren’t still being destroyed by bad immigration policy. Just that the cost for local detention is going down.”

  The lessened detention regime caused a blip in CCA’s business. The new facility in Gainesville began to empty. Finally, in late 2013, the company announced that it was closing the facility. The city, which had issued bonds to pay for the construction of the facility, was left hanging. Employees of the facility would be laid off and there would be that much less revenue to pay off the bonds. “It’s a blow,” said Gainesville mayor pro tem Bob Hamrick. He was asked by local media how the city would pay off the bonds. “Obviously,” Hamrick answered, “that will be a hot topic for us to discuss in the next several days.”

  This series of maneuvers demonstrates the evolution of the a
nti-immigrant police state. Even after the Morton Memo, it is bigger than ever. In fact, ICE in early 2012 shifted into emergency mode, pulling workers off desk jobs to go out into the field hunting more undocumented aliens. The stated purpose was to catch more of those elusive “real” criminals, but in practice the increased manpower has mostly led to ordinary, noncriminal immigrants having to negotiate an ever-heavier blanket of constant legal scrutiny.

  It turns out that it’s a waste of absolute political power to simply throw undocumented aliens over the border. When you have a group of people who have no rights at all, the more inspired corporate solution is to extract as much value from them as possible. That can be money, that can be property, and if they don’t have either of those things left, you take their time and labor.

  On the other side of the country, in California, I saw the squeeze in action.

  I reached the Boyle Heights address early, parked my car, and took a long look around. The East L.A. neighborhood looks like a lot of American public housing projects, which is to say you can mistake it for a prison or a concentration camp if you’re not looking too closely. There are crisscrossed blocks of long concrete buildings painted drab yellow, bars covering literally every single window in sight, addresses sprayed on the apartments in an institutional font.

  Since I don’t speak Spanish, I had brought a translator, who happened to be from this neighborhood. “The gang situation around here used to be really bad,” the young woman, Zacil Pech, explained. “Really bad.”

  We knocked on the door of a first-floor apartment in one of the yellow cell-block-type buildings. A short, stout Latina in a yellow T-shirt, with a tired but friendly expression, answered and asked us inside. This was Natividad Felix, a native of Sinaloa, Mexico, who had a story to tell. Her front room had no rugs, nothing on the walls, and in fact was bare of anything but a plain brown couch on a plain wooden floor. Natividad signaled for us to sit down on the couch, and we sat. Faces peered in and out of doors and stairways at the visitors. Natividad has six children, two of them twins, the oldest being a seventeen-year-old son, a tall, lithe young man who stared in at us from time to time. I would learn later that Jairo is a musical talent like his father and that his mother has nicknamed him “the Musician.”

  I was here to talk to Natividad about her experiences as a three-time veteran of one of the craziest and most draconian law enforcement practices in America. But we agreed that she would start at the beginning.

  “I came to America when I was fifteen,” she says. “I had just gotten married.”

  That’s young to be married, I commented.

  “Not in Mexico,” she says. “I was really young and naïve. I didn’t really know how to make decisions on my own. He told me to come over here with him in search of a better life, and I agreed because I was in love with him.”

  In Sinaloa, she lived with her extended family on a farm and worked in the fields, even as a little girl. Today she remembers those days fondly. “Life when I was a girl was beautiful,” she says. “Living out in the country, surrounded by all my family, mother and father, sisters and brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles, all of whom I took for granted. It wasn’t until I came here that I realized how important family truly is in a person’s life.”

  She shakes her head. “I remember wishing I was back there with all of them, worry free and happy. The sense of freedom I got being out in the fields with my brothers and sisters is still, to this day, incomparable to any sense of ‘freedom’ I’ve felt living here.”

  Nonetheless her husband, Gabriel, convinced his young wife to come to America. She was in love with the soft-spoken man, a teenager like her who played guitar in the evenings. “He serenaded me,” she recalls, laughing. He convinced her that there was more opportunity in the north, and they left Sinaloa.

  Neither of them was prepared for how hard the trip would be. “We crossed through a border town called San Isidro,” she says. “We walked for a whole night through the desert. I could hear the coyotes howl, and all these thoughts raced through my head—I was terrified.

  “It was the first time I was actually away from my family. I was overwhelmed with sadness and loneliness. I was only fifteen years old, without my mother or father, or the option of going to visit them.”

  The couple made their way to Los Angeles, where they found a tiny apartment on San Pedro and Forty-Third Street. Nati was in that apartment for less than a year when Jairo was born. Gabriel, who was handy and a skilled gardener, began to get work mainly by hanging around outside Home Depot. “He did everything, carpentry, gardening, construction,” she says. When I ask her what the hardest job was, she laughs.

  “Which one was the hardest? All of them,” she says. “When you have no papers, they take advantage of you. You work long hours. You get low pay. He came home at night very late, always.”

  As the years went on, the couple had more children. A year after Jairo there was Maria, funny but also the mature child in the family—“we got the best of both worlds with her.” Two years later came Jose, whom they called “the Prankster.” Henry, now eleven, came three years later. An aspiring dancer, he was called “Mr. Hollywood” by the couple. Lastly there were the twins, Angel and Adan, two boys. They had just turned eight when I first met Natividad.

  They had a big family and were getting by, but things were not all perfect. The neighborhood had a serious problem with gangs, in particular a group called the Hazards. The gang was named after a street in East L.A. where it used to run before it moved to the Ramona Gardens area near Nati’s house. They were mostly young kids who wore tats and had shaved heads.

  “None of the children were allowed to sleep on the first floor,” explains Nati. “There were too many shootings. It wasn’t safe.”

  The couple developed a problem. Gabriel, who by then had been doing mostly gardening work, had taken to shaving his head. “It was cleaner and cooler,” Nati explains. “It was to keep the bugs and dirt out of his hair.”

  But their next-door neighbor was in the Hazards and took Gabriel’s shaved head as a provocation. “This gang member—he thought Gabriel, despite the fact that he was much older and a working man, was in some kind of rival gang,” says Nati. “Every day, when he came home, this gang member would yell and shout at Gabriel. Sometimes he would threaten him. Sometimes he would threaten us. It was becoming a problem.”

  Then one day Gabriel came home, got harassed as usual, and blew up. He attacked the gang member and hit him with a hammer. The police arrived. Nati was away with the kids at the time and came home to find that her husband had been taken away. She couldn’t go to the police station because she had no papers and couldn’t risk arrest. She didn’t know it, but she had already spoken to her husband face to face for the last time.

  In jail, Gabriel was presented with the same stip order that both Ella and Alvaro had seen. Not understanding the paper at all, he signed it. It wouldn’t have mattered, because he was convicted of the assault anyway.

  The courtroom was the last place Natividad saw Gabriel. They could not speak to each other there. Neither before conviction nor afterward would the authorities allow him a moment to say good-bye. He was taken away and deported.

  This was 2006. When I ask Natividad if she thought she’d ever see her husband again, she shook her head.

  “Probably not,” she said impassively.

  Later she would add: “We don’t keep in touch much anymore. The distance proved to be too much for us. I can’t go to visit him, and he can’t come here.”

  Gabriel’s arrest left Natividad in a serious bind. She had no money coming in, no way to pay the rent, and six children. The landlord looked the other way for a month and a half or so, and then he finally told her she was going to have to move out.

  Also, the gang member was still living on her street, which made her feel unsafe. Either way, she had to leave. But how?

  As the days wound down toward the moment she would lose the apartment, she felt terror
building. She had no options. She had no family in the area. She tried to get the family into a shelter, but there was a waiting list. The most optimistic guess was that she and her kids could get shelter beds within three months. Finally the day of her eviction came, and the only solution she’d come up with was not even a solution; it was a half solution.

  With the landlord standing in the outside corridor with his arms folded, the family filed out of the apartment with their belongings and jumped into a used Aerostar van that had been given to her by a little old man in her neighborhood. (“A good Samaritan,” she recalls. “He had no idea he was giving me a future home.”)

  As she got behind the wheel, Natividad was conscious of how desperate the situation was. She had never before gotten into a car for any reason other than to go somewhere. Now the realization that she was in the driver’s seat with nowhere to go was overwhelming. She was homeless.

  She drove off to … where? This was the first of many times she would have to answer this question.

  “I would search for a good location to park the van so we could spend the night there,” she says now. “All seven of us would be crammed into that Aerostar. We didn’t have a bathroom, didn’t have a kitchen to cook in, didn’t have enough money for food.”

  Her entire life suddenly boiled down to two huge daily challenges. Finding a safe parking space was the first, but the second was keeping the children fed. The family ate once a day through a meal services cafeteria in downtown L.A.

  “For a whole month I went to the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services and fought with them,” she says. “But they didn’t want to give us food stamps or any kind of help.”

  She pauses, anticipating the next question. “Obviously they didn’t have to help me. I just wanted them to help my children, who were citizens of this country, yet they were hungry because we couldn’t get any help. I couldn’t find a job, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have had anyone to watch them.