Arturo Hernandez Garcia came to the U.S. illegally and for more than a decade hid in plain sight, doing his best to stay on the right side of the law, paying taxes for himself and his contracting business, setting up bank accounts and raising a family. But living in the shadows carries a price. A traffic infraction, a minor brush with the law, even a neighbor’s spite, can lead to deportation.
That was nearly the case for Garcia, who spent months living in a church basement to avoid deportation. His story, from the day he left Mexico with his wife and new baby to the day he emerged from the church, offers a glimpse into the existence of those who come to the United States illegally where their lives are often indistinguishable from those of actual citizens.
In fiscal year 2014, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 315,943 people who were in the country without legal permission.
“You are always thinking about that in the back of your mind,” Garcia said.
when ICE became aware of him after an altercation on a job site.
The Obama administration has said that people like Garcia, who are productive and law-abiding, aren’t a priority for deportation.
Instead, guidelines call for targeting felons and those who commit serious misdemeanors.
While removals of noncriminals living in the country illegally have fallen from 77,000 in fiscal year 2009 to 17,000 in 2013, minor crimes (traffic and immigration offenses) and noncriminals still accounted for 39 percent of all nonborder deportations in the last year studied, according to a 2014 report by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
In July, Garcia where he had lived for nine months to avoid deportation, after receiving word that ICE no longer considers him a priority.
Garcia’s deportation struggle comes at a time when U.S. law governing immigration has been condemned by a range of critics — from advocates for those here illegally to those who favor mass deportation.
At opposite poles of the debate there is occasionally some agreement on two things: Immigration policy is broken, and it would be more easily changed if business interests didn’t hunger for cheap labor.
“Politically, it is business that drives this,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors strict limits on immigration. “The idea that we are short of people (for jobs) is only something that you hear from businesses that want to keep their wages down. It is just a special pleading by business lobbyists.”
Present immigration policy benefits big business and consumers by keeping wages and prices down, said Jennifer Piper, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s Colorado Immigrants Rights Program.
The country needs a more flexible visa system that allows workers to bring their families and adjust their status to permanent resident and citizenship if they choose, or renew visas as long as they and their employer want, she said.
Krikorian may agree with Piper on the part business plays in fostering an environment that attracts those who are here illegally, but that is where the agreement ends.
There is no reason that someone like Garcia should be exempt from enforcement action, Krikorian said.
Always worried
Since Garcia and his wife, Ana Sauzameda, 41, arrived in the country in 1999, he has known others who were swept from the streets or taken from their homes and job sites.
Raids like the 2006 immigration enforcement action that removed 273 workers from the Greeley headquarters of Swift & Co., and more from company meatpacking plants in five other states, sent a chill through a community of an estimated 180,000 people who are in Colorado illegally.
Once, at an apartment complex where Garcia was working, an entire painting crew failed to show up for work. Later, he found out that immigration authorities had rounded them up.
There were times he stayed home from work after hearing that someone threatened to report others who were working at his job site.
When pulled over for a traffic stop, Garcia would hand the officer the license he attained legally, and hope for the best.
“I was always a little worried, but that is just a part of life. Anytime you get stopped, it is a reason to be afraid, but you get used to living with that fear,” Garcia, who understands English but has some difficulty speaking it, said through an interpreter.
Between 2003 and 2013, 91 percent of people ICE removed from the Unites States came from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras, according to the MPI report.
Had authorities forgone removal for all cases not falling into the designated enforcement priorities during that period, there would have been about 191,000 fewer deportations, the report said.
Garcia, 42, and his wife left Mexico three months after their first child, Mariana, now 16, was born.
Before leaving Mexico, Garcia was earning the equivalent of $300 a month working as a building manager, in a country where food, gas, clothing and other commodities are expensive relative to wages, he said.
As a nurse, Ana earned a similar wage.
Once Mariana was born, he realized they couldn’t earn enough to provide for her future — or assure her safety.
In the Mexican state of Chihuahua, on the U.S. border, violence is common as gangs fight for control of drug routes. “After we left Mexico, a cousin of Ana’s was murdered,” Garcia said.
In Sauzameda’s mind, it was to be a temporary visit; she had no desire to learn a new language, cultivate new friends and try to fit into a culture far different from her own.
But Garcia wanted to build a life in the United States.
Sauzameda’s parents lived in Thornton. Her father is a citizen, and her mother has legal permanent resident status.
He told her “let’s come for six months and see how it is,” Garcia said. “My plan was to stay here.”
So the couple came to the country on tourist visas, and stayed when they expired.
Once here, they moved to a trailer park in Thornton, and Garcia went to work for Sauzameda’s brother, who was here legally and had a business installing tile.
As a citizen, Sauzameda’s father could petition for green cards for the family, giving them legal permanent status.
He did, and the petition is still pending.
Between 60 and 70 percent of those who migrate to the U.S. come after a family member petitions for their entry, but the wait is long.
According to the U.S. Department of State’s Visa Bulletin for September 2015, visas are now becoming available for some Mexican residents whose family members petitioned as long ago as Nov. 15, 1994.
With the long wait times now faced by those relying on family ties, Garcia said, no one in Mexico believes they will be able to immigrate legally.
Krikorian would more narrowly define the resident family members allowed to petition for a relative’s entry.
He would allow only husbands, wives and children of U.S. citizens to come on family-based preference visas, he said.
Now, if “you marry someone from Venezuela, her brothers and sisters come in and then their spouses and kids, and it just goes on forever.”
When Garcia arrived in Colorado, it was still legal for someone with the type of temporary visa that he held to get a driver’s license in Colorado, and he did so.
That regulation changed in 2000, curtailing the availability of licenses to those with similar visas, said Colin Waters, Division of Motor Vehicles spokesman.
The change was the result of a federal law passed in 1998 that required a Social Security number to get a license. It went into effect in 2000.
But once he had the license, Garcia was able to renew it in succeeding years.
That document, coupled with the fact that his wife had family in the area, made life easier for Garcia than it is for many of his countrymen who come here with neither, he said.
“People come without any of that, and when they go to work, they’re exploited,” he said.
Garcia didn’t have a Social Security number. Without that number, it can be hard to get work or pay income taxes. Employers are required to get the name and Social Security numbers of those they hire and enter them on a W-2 form that reports the employee’s annual wages and taxes paid.
The system is open to abuse. Many undocumented workers buy false Social Security numbers and other identification on the black market. They can also make up a number or steal or borrow someone else’s. But the government needs a way to identify non-citizens who earn money in the U.S. in order to collect taxes.
Garcia was intent on following the law to the best of his ability, and that meant paying taxes. “We have it in our heads that any little problem could create a bigger problem for us,” he said.
The same government that has sought to deport him made it possible for him to work while being here illegally. The IRS provides an “individual tax identification number” for noncitizens who don’t have Social Security numbers but must pay taxes.
Once he applied and received that number, he could file taxes, and he used it to apply for, and receive, an “employer identification number” from the IRS.
With that number, he became an independent contractor, so while working for his brother he was acting as a subcontractor. “I never had to use a Social Security number, because I was working as my own company.”
Critics who favor tougher immigration regulations say the tax numbers give those here illegally a backdoor to life in the United States. “The ITIN is an ersatz Social Security number,” Krikorian said.
By employing independent contractors, businesses can avoid paying some taxes, benefits and other employee obligations, said Muzaffar Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes migration policies.
“Clearly, it saves business money, and a lot of lawmakers are tied to those businesses,” he added.
His own business
Garcia sees hypocrisy in fierce calls from some quarters for deportation of immigrants here illegally, a number the Department of Homeland Security estimates is 11.4 million. “A lot of the people who say bad things about immigrants are sitting in houses made by immigrants and eating food picked by immigrants. Their offices are spotless because immigrants are cleaning them all night.”
In 2004, when work began to dry up for his brother-in-law, Garcia decided to form his own business.
Already an independent contractor, Garcia registered A and P Flooring with the state and began hiring. Some were here legally, others weren’t.
He quickly lined up a string of good contracts, he said.
In 2005, his daughter, Andrea, now 10, was born. “I felt like we were more completely a family, that now Mariana had a sister she could share life with,” he said.
Things were going well. The business he started with two or three employees had grown, and by 2010 he had nine employees.
The bubble burst when his employees told another contractor not to walk on tile they had just put down.
The man bridled, spouting racial slurs, and approached Garcia, who thought he was going to punch him. Garcia pushed him away, and the man accused him of pulling a knife.
Garcia was arrested and later acquitted. But an immigration judge ordered his deportation.
Garcia wasn’t about to return quietly to Mexico.
In January, he took sanctuary at the First Unitarian Society of Denver, where he for nine months.
Now back at home with his family, Garcia said the agency’s stated disinterest doesn’t calm his fear of deportation.
He still faces a deportation order, which his lawyers are working to have lifted.
If anything, concern that ICE could sweep into his life unexpectedly is greater now than it was before his arrest.
“Before, I felt safer because I wasn’t in the system. Now, I am in the system, and they can come here at any time and detain me. They have that power.”
“Now, I’m under a microscope. Before, I wasn’t.”
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671, tmcghee@denverpost.com or twitter.com/dpmcghee
