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Date Posted: 17:39:47 12/23/07 Sun
Author: JMR
Subject: Illegals going underground


Illegal immigrants going underground as enforcement increases
James Osborne
December 22, 2007 - 10:11PM
PROGRESO — Angela wouldn’t think twice about walking a mile up the road for a quart of milk when she first moved to one of the colonias west of Progreso three years ago.

Then U.S. Border Patrol agents picked up three men from the neighborhood outside the local convenience store and deported them. Nowadays, Angela barely leaves the neighborhood, forgoing everything from grocery shopping to doctor visits.

“We never used to see Border Patrol,” Angela, a 32-year-old illegal immigrant from Matamoros, said in Spanish. “Now they drive through the neighborhood. When they come by I just stay inside the house and hope they don’t come to the door.”

As the U.S. government continues its crackdown on illegal immigration, those immigrants living in the Rio Grande Valley without paperwork are increasingly shying away from public life, social workers and Mexican officials said. They fear recent successes in getting illegal immigrants to seek healthcare and other services are being undone and pushing people back underground.

“A lot of people won’t even come to the Mexican Consulate because they think they could be detained by Border Patrol,” said Luis López-Moreno, the former Mexican consul to McAllen, before leaving his post earlier this month. “We have a special arrangement, but they don’t know that. They’re scared right now.”

Since 2002, the number of deportations in the United States has almost doubled, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Perhaps nowhere is that trend more evident than in the Valley. The number of fugitive illegal immigrants arrested here in 2007 was up eightfold from the previous year, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Around Progreso, which is situated right on the U.S. border with Mexico, Border Patrol agents are a regular sight. Their trucks can be spotted driving down the main street, outside the dollar store; sometimes, they even park in front of a local social services office, said Angie Camarena, associate director of Migrant Health Promotion, a nonprofit health education and advocacy agency that serves migrant and seasonal farmworkers.

“I see them out there at least a couple times a week,” Camarena said. “Someone on staff, not me, told them there was no reason for them to be out there.”

But local Border Patrol spokesman Oscar Saldaña said agents operate under a policy of not staking out facilities that offer aid to immigrants.

“That would be considered interior enforcement and that’s not our mission,” he said. “We do have a lot more people out and about. People might think we’re doing something else, but we’re just patrolling the border.”

The actual extent to which immigrants are staying away from health clinics or not setting up bank accounts is almost impossible to gauge, as the institutions involved maintain a policy of not inquiring about their clients’ immigration status.

Grace Lawson, the executive director of El Milagro Clinic in McAllen — which provides healthcare to both documented and undocumented immigrants — said she hadn’t seen a drop in patients, though.

“Most of our patients are McAllen residents, not people from out in the county,” Lawson said.

“The problem with colonia residents, out in the rural areas, is they don’t have transportation. They may not know the resources; they think documentation may be necessary.”

While getting illegal immigrants around Progreso to a doctor has never been easy, it’s a task that has become much more difficult of late, said Lourdes Flores, a social worker with Migrant Health Promotion.

“They used to be out walking in the park and doing all these things, but now they’re scared. They just stay home,” Flores said in Spanish.

One of Flores’ clients, a 25-year-old mother from Mexico named Claudia, can’t send her 8-year-old daughter to school because she hasn’t had the necessary vaccinations. A number of medical clinics in the area provide healthcare to illegal immigrants, but Claudia said she is scared Border Patrol agents might be waiting outside.

Asked what she would do if one of her children were to become seriously ill, she buried her face in her hand.

“I don’t want to think about it,” she said.
____

James Osborne covers McAllen and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4428.

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