In ICE custody he lost his sight in one eye but gained a Tennessee town's support

Mike Reicher | The Tennessean

MORRISTOWN, Tenn. — He cleaned coagulated blood and fat from the slaughterhouse conveyor, making $11 an hour. That type of work was enough to buy a 55-inch television and a white Ford Focus, two of his proudest possessions.

But on April 5 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swept up Gonzalo Chavez in a slaughterhouse raid in rural East Tennessee. More than three months later, he emerged blind in his left eye into a world where he had lost nearly everything.

Gonzalo Chavez describes life after ICE raid Gonzalo Chavez describes life after ICE raid

Chavez, 42, said an ICE agent didn’t believe him when he said he had diabetes, so he went a week without medicine. His eye blurred after two weeks, then fell dark.

While in detention his landlord rented his two-bedroom apartment to someone else. Gone was his clothing, the title to his car.

“My friends used to tell me that the only thing I was missing was a wife,” Chavez said. “I had a nice television, I had nice furniture. Now I realize that all those were material things, and what matters most is my health.”

Morristown coalesced to support Chavez and other immigrants, who were woven into everyday life. With 106 manufacturing companies, the local economy depends on immigrant labor. The public schools are integrated. Mothers sell tamales at soccer tournaments. Its population is 21 percent Hispanic, compared with 5 percent in the state.

It’s one of the handful of American cities across the U.S. reeling from workplace immigration sweeps. ICE has conducted at least four other major raids since the East Tennessee roundup, which civil rights groups say was the largest in a decade.

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All the cities have seen an outpouring of support from social service groups and neighbors, said Elizabeth Oglesby, a professor in the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona. She also studied the long-term effects of workplace raids during the George W. Bush administration.

"When you take away hundreds of people from a community, people stand up and take notice," Oglesby said. "These raids throw into relief all the ways immigrants are a part of the community."

Unlike many of the other immigrants detained at Southeastern Provision, Chavez had no family in Morristown, a blue-collar city near the meat plant. He came here 20 years ago for better work and has sent money to his mother and seven siblings in Mexico City.

An immigration judge at the Louisiana detention center weighed Chavez's flight risk and chances of winning a deportation case. Both points would have been helped by family in the states. He set his bond at $20,000, the most among the 97 swept into the raid. It seemed insurmountable.

But people in Morristown knew Chavez. He drove friends to doctor's appointments and the grocery store. He volunteered to maintain youth basketball courts. His story struck a nerve.

Advocates made a GoFundMe page and started accepting donations. They raised $6,500, enough for an initial bond payment and an ankle monitor, which meant he could come home. That’s in addition to $90,000 that poured in for all the workers and their families.

"He came back to nothing," said KC Curberson-Alvarado, director of the nonprofit HOLA Lakeway. “It seems like they were punishing him for being single.”

Alina Delapaz, a family friend, took in Chavez when he was released July 15. He now lives in a spare room among her infant’s pink baby clothes, a rubber ducky in the bathtub. His wardrobe, two days later, fit into two gray Walmart plastic bags.

“I lost everything. I can’t see. I can’t drive. I feel like a burden,” he said. “I’ve been independent for 20 years.”

Immigration raids hit Trump country

The recent enforcement actions have triggered support in areas that swung heavily for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, surprising even immigration advocates. In Hamblen County, where Morristown is located, 77 percent of voters went for Trump.

Curberson-Alvarado works to integrate members of the Latino community. She's lived in Morristown for 12 years.

"I expected to be alone. I was expecting protesters," she said. "The community moved me. I wasn't expecting that at all."

Two Ohio raids in June netted more than 100 workers each from a meat supplier and a gardening and landscaping company. Agents in May nabbed 32 people from a concrete plant in an Iowa county where more than 60 percent of voters chose Trump.

“People say, ‘Why don’t we just enforce the immigration laws on the books,' ” said Erica Johnson, who directs the American Friends Service Committee in Iowa. “But then they see what it actually looks like. People care about the families that are impacted.”

Nonprofits connect immigrants with resources

Inside a meeting room at St. Patrick Catholic Church, Chavez and Delapaz sat around a folding table with advocates from the Nashville-based Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition. It was three days after his release, and they met him for the first time in person, after months of long-distance support.

Camila Herrera, integration director for the group, asked how he was feeling.

“Not a hundred percent,” said Chavez, coughing. He explained how they’ve been trying to get an appointment with an eye specialist through a local clinic.

Getting Chavez through the detention system was a temporary success for advocates, who want to maintain some momentum. Hispanic men can be reluctant to ask for help, said Curberson-Alvarado from HOLA.

Herrera and a colleague asked about his care in detention and what medications he’s taking. They went over his medical records provided by ICE.

Be sure to try this medical clinic, they told him gently. Join this Facebook group of Morristown families affected by the raid. Call this phone number to monitor your court dates. Chavez said he’s been borrowing a phone and needs to get one of his own.

They talked about all the women who’ve been helping him through his ordeal, most of them from afar. Especially the church’s director of education, who converted classrooms into donation banks.

“I’m not that handsome,” he joked. “If she had seen me, she would have left me in the detention center.”

Herrera handed him her business card. He struggled to fit it into a wallet, floppy and practically empty.

ICE required immediate medical screening within hours

Officers shackled Chavez on his hands, legs and waist. At first they brought him to the DeKalb County Detention Center in Fort Payne, Alabama. During his week stay there, he received no medical treatment or medication, said Meredith Soniat du Fossat, his lawyer from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

According to the ICE procedures manual, a health care provider or specially trained officer is required to screen detainees within 12 hours of arrival. They’re supposed to ask about diabetes and other chronic conditions. If there’s a significant finding during the screening, the officer is required to refer the person to a follow-up health assessment no later than two working days from the initial screening.

A representative from the regional ICE office did not respond to messages seeking comment. The DeKalb County sheriff, through an operator, declined an interview.

“As soon as we got there we weren’t really treated like humans,” Chavez said.

At the ICE Processing Center in Pine Prairie, Louisiana, Chavez spent two weeks in the medical clinic, and officers transported him to an outside hospital for an overnight stay when his feet swelled and his blood pressure skyrocketed, he said.

Advocacy groups studied a dozen cases in which people recently died in ICE custody and found that half could potentially have been saved if they had received adequate medical care, according to a June report from the Detention Watch Network, Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigrant Justice Center.

“I understand that I came to this country illegally. But I don’t understand why I was treated like I was,” Chavez said. “I feel like it needs to be more humane.”

Chavez now needs dialysis and a kidney transplant, Herrera said. Besides diabetes, doctors at the detention center found he had high blood pressure and stage 4 chronic kidney disease.

Paying off bond without a work permit

Chavez will face an uphill battle in immigration court.

Most of the immigrants from the raid will be pleading for some form of humanitarian relief like asylum, said Karla McKanders, director of the Vanderbilt Immigration Practice Clinic, or they will try to demonstrate that deporting them would place “extreme hardship” on their spouse, child or parent who’s a lawful permanent resident or U.S. citizen.

Since Chavez immigrated 20 years ago, it will be harder to prove that he’s fearful of returning to Mexico, said Soniat du Fossat, his lawyer. That’s one of the reasons the judge set his bail so high, she said.

Chavez has no prior convictions, Soniat du Fossat said, except two traffic infractions for driving without a driver’s license in 2014.

For now, he has to pay $499 a month while he wears the light gray ankle monitor, its rubber clearly visible between his pants and blue sneakers. The donations will cover two months of payment, after which Chavez will have to support himself. But he can’t drive and has no work permit, which could take six months to obtain, Herrera said.

For now, he's living off of the $700 that he had saved before the raid.

Some of the workers who lost their jobs at the slaughterhouse are starting their own small businesses selling flan or tamales and sewing, said Curberson-Alvarado, director of HOLA Lakeway.

“We tried to be a Band-Aid,” she said from her desk, next to a wall of support letters from the community. “But we couldn’t supplement their lost income.”

Curberson-Alvarado has watched immigrants grow more integrated into the economy and the broader society. Social service groups such as hers could be helping those affected by the raid for years, experts said.

"The effects of these raids are very long lasting," said Oglesby, the University of Arizona professor. "It throws all of the burden back on the community to support the families."

Reach Mike Reicher at 615-259-8228 and on Twitter @mreicher.