Hiding in plain sight: Immigrants struggle to navigate a changing political reality

Miriam Martinez and her husband, Luis Raphael Benavides, chat with their children, Brianna, left, 12, and Allison, 10, at their home in Stamford Monday, Miriam Martinez is an undocumented immigrant who almost faced deportation to Guatemala last month. Brianna has type 1 juvenile diabetes that requires around-the-clock monitoring. less Miriam Martinez and her husband, Luis Raphael Benavides, chat with their children, Brianna, left, 12, and Allison, 10, at their home in Stamford Monday, Miriam Martinez is an undocumented immigrant who almost ... more Photo: Tyler Sizemore / Hearst Connecticut Media Buy photo Photo: Tyler Sizemore / Hearst Connecticut Media Image 1 of / 11 Caption Close Hiding in plain sight: Immigrants struggle to navigate a changing political reality 1 / 11 Back to Gallery

Editor’s note: The names of “Maria” and “Irina” have been changed to protect their anonymity.

Blood red blemishes stretched across Maria’s cheeks. The rosacea had appeared months earlier, around the 2016 election, and it would not leave. When she visited the doctor, she was told that stress had caused the violent sores bubbling from her skin.

It was not her work that brought Maria so much anxiety, nor was it home life. The mundane had little pull on her now as she planned for what seemed a looming possibility: Forced separation from her two children, both of whom are American citizens.

If she gets deported, Maria has a whole life to lose. Now in her late 40s, She arrived in the United States from Peru in 1999, when she was six months pregnant with her daughter. For years, she worked three jobs, from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m., so eventually she could buy an apartment for her family.

Like the majority of undocumented immigrants in this country since 2007, her border crossing was legal. She arrived stateside by plane, with a tourist visa in-hand. When she settled in America and allowed her visa to expire, she committed a civil offense, not a criminal one.

In many ways, Maria is an immigrant success story. Her daughter is in college. She has built a cleaning empire of about 30 homes around Fairfield County, including in Greenwich, and she provides jobs to other women who need them. She said she has paid taxes for about 17 years, handing over approximately $1,200 to government coffers each cycle.

But when the new administration took over the White House, it disrupted the happy ending to her two decades of hard work.

Every morning, when she switches on the television, reporters confirm the legitimacy of her fears.

“My schedule is that I get up at 6, and I have my breakfast and watch the news,” she said. “And all the news is bad.”

After President Donald Trump won the highest office in the United States, Maria spoke with her tween son about what would happen if she were deported. When the boy started hearing stories about kids who came home to empty houses, their parents detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, his worries grew, too.

***

Maria is not the only immigrant in Fairfield County who is scared right now. Here, an estimated 47,400 residents are undocumented, according to a 2016 community well-being index, and gut-punching conversations about tenuous futures became the norm a year ago.

After the election, Stamford-based immigration attorney Douglas Penn fielded an overwhelming number of requests for help, both from undocumented immigrants and legal residents and naturalized citizens. Even now, someone wanders into his office almost every month to ask for advice, for the sole reason that they’re afraid.

In January, Building One Community, an immigration nonprofit in Stamford, started a new program to help parents fill out temporary guardianship forms so that if they’re deported, their children will have caretakers in the United States. Catalina Horak, the center’s executive director, remembered a Greenwich woman who came in to sign for guardianship of her house cleaner’s kids.

Meanwhile, Horak said families have grown suspicious of any institution that can be seen as part of a government they’ve come to distrust. After Trump won the presidency, some even questioned whether to keep their children on free or reduced-price lunches at school. The thought of having their names on an official list made them nervous.

At local nonprofit Family Centers, a community literacy program that caters largely to immigrants, saw a drop in attendance at its more public instructional sites just after the election, though fall 2017 registrations were strong.

“I’ve noticed a dramatic uptick in fear,” said Rep. Jim Himes, D-4th.

The concerns of local undocumented immigrants come from stories about people like them, without criminal records, who nevertheless are being detained or deported.

According to the Fiscal Year 2017 ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Report, between when Trump was sworn into office on Jan. 20 and Nov. 30, 2017, ICE arrests resulted in 61,094 removals from inside the country, away from the border. During fiscal year 2017, 13,744 of those who were removed from the interior were non-criminals, compared to 5,014 in FY2016 and 5,939 in FY2015.

In its report, ICE credited Trump’s Executive Order 13,768 — which dramatically widened the definition of whom the executive branch considered a priority for deportation and emphasized the importance of interior arrests — for shifts in statistics during FY2017.

“There has been a noticeable transition in enforcing immigration laws regardless of whether or not people had a criminal background, whether or not they pay taxes, whether or not they have U.S. citizen children,” said Horak. “Basically, the priority is anyone who is undocumented should be removed.”

Still, there are more protections for undocumented immigrants in Connecticut than in most states.

In 2013, the state Legislature passed Public Act No. 13-155, which prohibits law enforcement from contacting ICE about an individual unless he or she has been arrested and fits one of seven criteria, including being convicted of a felony or being subject to a final order of deportation.

However, Penn said he has heard of police officers in Connecticut confusing detainers for judicial warrants and accidentally calling ICE even though a case does not comply with one of the seven criteria.

Penn also has noticed ICE officers hanging around Hartford police departments and the Stamford courthouse. He cited a case in Stamford in which a person had a single arrest for a DUI. ICE picked him up before his trial was over, and before a conviction.

“My suspicion is that detentions will go up, because that’s clearly what the administration wants,” he said.

Still, if no crime has been committed, undocumented immigrants have little to fear from the police themselves. State officers, including those in Greenwich, are not allowed to ask residents for their legal status, and, at least here, the official policy is to treat everyone the same, regardless of whether they are documented.

“Since we’re not asking anything, there aren’t even any assumptions being made,” said Mark Zuccerella, a lieutenant in the Greenwich Police Department.

Zuccerella emphasized that his job is to help anyone who is the victim of a crime, including undocumented immigrants, and that he needs the cooperation of those who have been wronged to seek justice, regardless of their immigration status.

Undocumented economics

“My kids, they were born here. They belong to this country,” Irina said. “My life is here. ... If (deportation) would happen to me, that would be actually terrible. How could I leave everything here?”

But though deportation would be catastrophic to Irina’s family, there is far more on her mind than just national politics. For people like her, being undocumented doesn’t just pose a threat of removal; it also limits the ability to make a living wage.

Physically, Irina blends in with Greenwich demography. Thin and fair, she matches the Caucasian masses who traverse Greenwich Avenue on weekends, diving into Saks Fifth Avenue or Aux Délices. Though she still has a hint of an accent from her home country in Europe, she speaks good English after 12 years full-time in Fairfield County.

An outsider looking in would not imagine the hardship she has experienced.

Irina arrived stateside with a tourist visa that she allowed to expire, much like Maria. It was her husband’s idea to move to America. Though they owned property back home, he had larger aspirations of big garages and a successful company to call his own.

Originally, Irina and her husband settled in Stamford, where they had family. But when it was time to find a preschool for their son, they moved to Greenwich for the educational opportunities.

When Irina’s husband died suddenly, he left behind no life insurance and a hefty mortgage on their home.

Instantly a single parent to three children, Irina scrambled for a job. Now, she works full-time for a household, cleaning and taking care of an elderly person, despite her college education. For her toil, she gets a few hundred dollars a week. When she asked for more, her employers said they could not afford it.

“They have the money,” she said. “They’re making the rules.”

Connecticut minimum wage — $10.10 — would require a salary of $404 per 40-hour work week, far more than Irina makes. The Connecticut federal poverty line falls at $24,600 each year for a family of four; she is set to earn about $10,000 less.

Despite that, she has decided that from this year on she will pay taxes, as her husband did before, even though she doesn’t qualify for the benefits they support unless they pertain to her U.S. citizen children.

“It’s not going to be easy, because every extra payment in this situation, it’s hard for me to make it,” she admitted.

***

Employee abuse is rife in the undocumented community, and some workers aren’t compensated at all.

According to Horak, of Building One Community, many employers will refuse to pay wages and threaten to call ICE if undocumented employees complain, especially in industries like landscaping, construction and food services.

Philip Berns, a Stamford-based immigration attorney, said day laborers who are picked up for manual work are often cheated out of pay. If they take their cases to small claims court, they very well may win, but only a few of them know enough to pursue justice, he said. Some don’t even have the name of the employer who mistreated them.

And if an undocumented immigrant gets injured on the job, he or she is likely to get saddled with the medical expenses, Horak said and Berns confirmed.

Even if everything is above board, the undocumented population usually makes very little.

“They get paid way less than a U.S.-born person. There’s no question about it,” Horak said.

Despite that, they are the lifeblood of some of the area’s most essential industries. And based on reports from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, in Connecticut, undocumented immigrants pay $124,701,000 in taxes every year.

Fairfield County plays host to by far the largest undocumented population in Connecticut, totaling about half of the state’s unauthorized residents, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Undocumented immigrants work as dishwashers, babysitters, house cleaners, landscapers and in other positions that make Fairfield County run.

“There are large houses in Greenwich that rely on huge numbers of immigrants,” said Rep. Himes. “All sorts of businesses would come to a screeching halt if all of a sudden the undocumented immigrants disappeared.”

Can they legalize?

In the early-2000s, Miriam Martinez looked after a 4-year-old from Greenwich. Over the seven or eight years that she watched the child, they grew close, and they still text sometimes. When Martinez first met her now-husband, the little girl was terribly jealous — she didn’t want to lose her beloved nanny to a man.

A decade later, Martinez has two girls of her own: Brianna and Alison. Brianna really likes sports, especially tennis, and, as she chats about her day, no one would notice the insulin pump hidden beneath a seemingly healthy 12-year-old’s clothing.

But appearances can be deceiving: A life-threatening illness endangers Brianna’s wellbeing. She has Type 1 Diabetes, and her mother is her primary caregiver. Martinez constantly keeps tabs on her daughter’s blood sugar and monitors her pump to keep her safe.

Martinez came to the United States through the U.S.-Mexico border in 1992, during a bloody civil war in her home country of Guatemala. She has no other criminal record than the misdemeanor from her crossing, and, according to one of her attorneys, Sidd Sinha, all documents indicate that her taxes have been filed appropriately since she arrived.

None of that seemed to matter a month ago, when ICE demanded that she board a plane back to Central America.

After a dramatic few days filled with uncertainty, Martinez was granted an emergency stay of removal while her lawyers file a motion in her case. As they apply for asylum based on the dangerous conditions in Guatemala, she can still sit on the couch surrounded by family and keep an eye on Brianna’s blood sugar — for now.

***

One of the greatest myths about undocumented immigrants is that it is easy to get a green card, and then citizenship, once they’re here.

“Most people, when you meet with them, you can’t help them,” attorney Douglas Penn said.

Potential employers can petition for a green card, but usually they’re hunting for highly skilled workers or don’t comply with federal pay guidelines. For most undocumented immigrants, gaining legal status through employment is virtually a hypothetical, according to Philip Berns.

“There’s no way to bring in the landscaper, the waiter, the cook, the chef, the mechanic, the carpenter, the plumber, the electrician,” he said. “For all practical purposes, there’s no way to come in legally to do these jobs, and once you’re here … there’s no way to legalize.”

Those with U.S.-citizen family members have more options, especially if they did not cross the U.S.-Mexico border to enter. If an undocumented immigrant came to the United States on a visa and let it expire, they can apply for a green card in-country if they are a minor child of a U.S. citizen, the spouse of a U.S. citizen, or the parent of a U.S. citizen who is 21 or older.

Otherwise, thanks to a 1996 law, an undocumented immigrant must return to their home country to apply for a green card. If they can demonstrate that their absence will cause extreme hardship for a U.S. citizen spouse or parent — not a U.S. citizen child — they may be granted a pardon and allowed to return to the United States. Otherwise, if they have stayed stateside for more than a year without documentation, they must wait from abroad for 10 years before applying for legal status.

That means that for the vast majority of undocumented immigrants, if they try to become legal residents, they will have to spend at least a decade away from their friends and family.

There are exceptions, including U visas for those who have suffered physical injury in the United States; stipulations in the Violence Against Women Act for those who have been abused by legal residents or citizens; and asylum, though Penn said anecdotal evidence suggests the odds are against those who apply, even with an attorney.

Rep. Himes said Congress has been trying to put together a comprehensive immigration reform bill that deals fairly with the undocumented population for a while. But right now, legislative efforts are focused on those who came to the country as minors and who were previously protected by a President Barack Obama executive order.

For Greenwich First Selectman Peter Tesei, the immigration issue is personal. As the descendant of immigrants, he felt it was important to organize a panel last month at the YWCA Greenwich to tackle some of the misunderstandings and generalizations plaguing the undocumented population today. He said it was the federal government’s job to take the lead on reform, but he hoped that by raising awareness about the issue, his office could inspire locals to advocate for change on a national level.

“Maybe I’m being overly idealistic, but in my personal view I would love to see efforts made to help people become U.S. citizens,” Tesei said.

***

At Miriam Martinez’s apartment in mid-December, holiday favorites soundtracked the evening. Backed in a corner, a stout little Christmas tree strewn with ornaments served as a centerpiece for seasonal cheer.

Alison fished out her letter to Santa Claus. She covered all the bases: From slime kits to a small dog, her heart’s desires had been outlined in detail so that Saint Nick would have no excuses.

Like almost any 10-year-old American girl, she of course placed clothes and jewelry on her wish inventory.

“What? I need to look fashionable!” she exclaimed as her parents laughed at her tenacity.

But her list also included one item that most kids never have to ask for in the United States: “For my mom to stay here,” she read.

The family’s elation suddenly hushed. But just for a second. Martinez has been living with her reality for a while, and right now it’s the holiday season. Time to celebrate.

Just in case, Alison said she plans to stick her letter atop the Christmas tree, so Santa can’t miss it.

Though Martinez was granted a temporary stay in late-November, her future in this country remains unstable and uncertain. For now, she is just grateful to enjoy the holidays with the people she loves.

“It’s a gift that God has given us to be together,” she said.

On the cold winter’s night, conversation and laughter flooded through their windows, into the street. In the moment, no one could take that away.