Undocumented: Tracing a Family's Journey From Mexico to Lewis County

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Editor’s note: Chronicle freelance journalist Paul Dunn spent months interviewing an undocumented immigrant family living in the Centralia area in order to provide readers with a look at the lives of some of the people who have chosen to enter the country illegally. He did so as the topic of illegal immigration became a constant source of debate during the U.S. presidential election. His interviews began in fall 2016. The names in the story have been rearranged to protect the family and as a requirement for access to their lives. All other information is rendered exactly as received.

 

Death Before His Time

Daniel Rodrigo Castillo Rosales is dead.

His adoring big sister Magdalena Rosales — who had anxiously monitored his deteriorating health for several weeks after he suddenly collapsed and hit his head — did not attend his funeral.

The trip — to her hometown of Omealca, Veracruz, Mexico — was too risky, even to memorialize her beloved baby brother.

 

A New Administration

Though the sun shined in Centralia on a late-fall day last year, gloom pervaded Rosales’ mobile home. The temperature — predicted to surge to 64 degrees — was a rarity for that time of year in the usually cold, wet Pacific Northwest.

But no matter.

Rosales didn’t want to see the sun, didn’t want to feel it, wouldn’t acknowledge its splendor — for that might have given her false hope and a sense of security that simply didn’t exist. On this particular morning, fear wracked the usually vibrant 42-year-old.

It was 9 a.m., Nov. 9, 2016.

The night before — and against seemingly insurmountable odds — Donald Trump had been elected 45th president of the United States. For Mexican-born Rosales and many of the other 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, it was a dark day they had hoped not to witness.

Trump had touted a tough immigration policy during his presidential run, vowing at different points in the campaign to deport all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. — about half of them from Mexico. Additionally, his call for a concrete border wall between the U.S. and Mexico fueled much of his campaign rhetoric and instilled uncertainty in both countries.

“The morning after Donald Trump was elected, I was at home and closed all the doors, shut the blinds, turned off the TV and just cried and cried all day,” Rosales said in broken English, her eyes brimming with tears as she recalled the November day. “I said to myself, ‘I no longer have a future here. What will happen to my daughter if the immigration service takes me away?’”

Mexico native Benito Sanchez, Rosales’ partner for the past 15 years, has similar fears. He and Rosales described their lives in early April from the small, two-bedroom mobile home they share with their daughter Bryanna Rosales, 4, born in the U.S., and Rosales’ son Angel Rosales, 24, born in Mexico.

“I’m mostly concerned about how deportation would affect my daughter,” Sanchez, 39, said in Spanish through a translator. “I’m not a criminal.”

Sanchez, by his own account, has committed no crimes in the U.S. since illegally stealing across the border in 2005 from Mexico. And though his law-abiding ways may have insulated him and others from deportation in years past, they may not protect him now as immigration agents push to fulfill stringent immigration policies.

So they worry — as they customarily have over the years — but more so now. Rosales routinely sees goblins in the shadows. She laughs at the absurdity of her fears, but looks askance at the slightest irregularities in her daily routine.

A strange car, for instance, in the dirt road outside her home can cause the hair on back of her neck to stand tall.

“My window was open during the day recently, and I heard a noise outside,” she recalled with a brief giggle. “I was scared to look because I thought it was Donald Trump.”

The family’s struggle, like that of so many other undocumented immigrants — approximately 250,000 in Washington state alone; 130,000 of those from Mexico — is a long-term battle they know they can’t currently win.

But in the decade they’ve lived in the United States, Rosales, Sanchez and Angel have strived to better themselves in an unstable environment that can quickly deteriorate at the whim of an immigration agent.

Said Rosales: “We came here to work as a united family. We didn’t come here to hurt people or cause problems. We just want to live a simple life and try to better ourselves.”

For Sanchez, the prospect of steady employment fueled his desire to leave Mexico.

“I was told by friends in the United States that there were better opportunities to find good jobs here than in Mexico,” he said. “And with the drug cartels it was beginning to get dangerous where we lived, so we were looking for a better life somewhere safe.”

 

Fleeing Toward a Dream

Not a single mirror adorned Magdalena Rosales’ dingy Nogales, Mexico, hotel room that late summer day 10 years ago.

Nothing, therefore, to reflect the terror she felt early that morning.

But she knew how she must have looked. After a sleepless night tossing and turning, she could imagine crescent-moon-shaped bags under her eyes, reddish furrows creasing her forehead — the scrawls in stark relief against her unusually pallid skin — and sweat trickling from her brow, along her arms, down her legs.

It was Sept. 1, 2007.

From that no-name motel about a half mile from the United States border, Rosales and her 14-year-old son Angel Rosales were about to dash for their lives. They’d shared a room the night before with 18 other people — 14 of them in seven bunk beds, the others on the floor.

They had planned for this moment, reviewed contingencies, assessed the danger and decided it was worth the risk.

They had spent the previous three days on a bus from their hometown of Omealca — the hot, dusty journey finally depositing them in Nogales, Sonora. They hoped to meet their Mexican guide there — a Sonora-based entrepreneur of sorts to whom they had paid $3,000 to safely usher them across the border.

“Back in Mexico, we were guaranteed that the guide could get us to the United States safely, but we didn’t know exactly how it would work,” Angel Rosales explained.

The teenager and his mother were about to find out.

At 5 a.m., as she hurriedly struggled to get ready, Rosales’ knees suddenly weakened, and she fought the urge to vomit.

“I prayed and prayed that night,” she recalled. “But in the morning I was shaking, and my stomach and head hurt. It was very stressful.”

She and Angel discussed last-minute concerns: What would they do if immigration agents caught them?

“I told Angel not to try and run,” Rosales said. “As much as I wanted to be in America, I knew the safest move would be to just let the agents send us back to Mexico without a struggle.”

The possibility was frighteningly real. Earlier that day, border patrol agents had seized eight Mexican nationals trying to cross the border into Nogales, Ariz. The group ended up at Rosales’ hotel that night telling her about their experience.

“By the next day I was feeling like I didn’t want to cross the border,” Rosales said. “But I saw a pregnant woman that morning climb the wall with another group and thought, ‘If she can do it, I can do it.’”

So without a last look, mother and son girded themselves to quit their homeland forever. Climbing a ladder their guide supplied, mother and son quickly scaled the 15-foot-high metal border wall and slid down the other side onto American soil.

They wasted no time. Crouching low to avoid exposure, the two hiked 45 minutes to a highway in the desert where they expected to be picked up. They hid under a tree as helicopters buzzed overhead.

Five hours later, a battered Jeep Cherokee with no seats pulled up. Rosales and Angel quickly got in. They were joined by eight other immigrants — children in back, adults in front — all lying down covered by sheets.

“I wasn’t sure where we were, because I could only see the signs of stores from the floor of the car,” Rosales said. “It was very crowded.”

Three hours later, the driver deposited them at an immigrant safe house in Phoenix, then onto a nearby hotel where they stayed one night. The next day they traveled to Las Vegas for another night and from there flew by commercial airline to Raleigh, N.C. — where Rosales would reunite with a thin, dark man she barely recognized.

 

The Will to Persevere

July 4, 2005 — Independence Day in America.

On that morning, 27-year-old Benito Sanchez began a northward 1,600-mile trek that would take him through the heart of Mexico and out of his birth country forever.

The significance of the American holiday — and the irony of his departure date — offered him precious little comfort as he rambled by bus for three days from Omealca to Nogales, Ariz.

The easy part of his journey ended when he stepped off the bus, though Sanchez didn’t know that at the time.

He had paid a guide about $2,000 to get him from the U.S. border in Nogales to Phoenix — but how, exactly he would be transported he hadn’t been told.

Turns out, he would walk.

In 100-degree daytime heat, Sanchez, three other men and a teenager hiked for three days and nights through the desert, their experienced guide leading them on a prearranged path toward Phoenix they hoped wouldn’t alert immigration agents.

“It was scary and funny at the same time, because it was the longest walk I had taken in my whole life,” Sanchez recalled as he sat beside Rosales in their Centralia home.

But it became a lot less funny the third day into the trek when the men ran out of water. The gallons they had toted in backpacks hadn’t been enough to withstand the broiling sun and the hikers’ almost constant movement. They’d averaged only one two-hour break per day as they struggled to reach a house in Phoenix that would harbor them.

“We ended up having to drink from puddles the cows drink from,” Sanchez said. “They had mosquito larvae in them, so we had to try and use our shirts to filter the water as we drank.”

On the third day of the hike, Sanchez said, the men spotted immigration agents and quickly hid in nearby bushes. Soon after, they heard gunshots.

“I could hear the sound of bullets pass over my head,” Sanchez recalled. “We had to lie in the bushes for four hours before we thought it was OK to continue.”

The hike through that part of the desert — patrolled by agents from the Tucson Sector of the United States Border Patrol — is notoriously treacherous.

According to Tucson Sector Public Information Officer Christopher Sullivan, the terrain varies throughout the 262 linear miles along the Tucson Sector border, which extends from the Arizona-New Mexico state line to the Yuma County line.

Sanchez most likely crossed the border somewhere in the Tucson Sector, though at what exact point he didn’t know. He estimated his group traveled about 180 miles from Nogales to Phoenix, though it might have been farther depending on the guide’s route and circumstances.

“It’s hard to pinpoint exact routes because they are numerous, and migrants typically change directions as they travel to avoid detection,” Sullivan said. “That will make the routes longer than they might have been otherwise.”

And potentially more hazardous.

Not only do migrants typically grapple with the elements — extreme heat and little water among them — but they may be preyed upon by what Sullivan terms “transnational criminal organizations” that often control the smuggling routes and illegal drugs transported on them.

“The TCOs are ruthless, and they look at migrants as mere dollar signs,” Sullivan said.

Guides are paid, he explained, according to the number of migrants they transport — so they don’t want to lose time.

“Smugglers will typically cut people loose if they are slowing down the group,” he said. “People are left behind, don’t know where they are and may not have water. It’s a life and death situation.”

U.S. Rep Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground, who represents Lewis County in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, acknowledged the danger in an email: “The stories of people seeking to enter the U.S. unlawfully — many of them young boys and girls who were brutally attacked and assaulted on these harsh journeys — are heartbreaking,” she wrote. “Our immigration system must deter others from endangering their lives in this way by coming here illegally, and that requires strict, fair enforcement of the laws.”

Sanchez was lucky.

Once safely out of the desert, he and his group met a pickup truck at a destination road that would transport them the rest of the way to Phoenix.

“The four of us lay down covered up in the back seat so I saw nothing of the United States until we reached Phoenix,” Sanchez said.

He stayed in Phoenix at several different safe houses with other immigrants waiting for drivers to deliver them to various destinations around the country. After 15 days in Phoenix, a driver finally arrived to transport him: First stop, Tennessee.

He was following in the footsteps of five of Magdalena Rosales’ brothers who had years before crossed into the U.S. At the time, one lived in Tennessee, one in Florida, and three in Oregon.

After a week’s car ride, he arrived in Cleveland, Tennessee, where he and Rosales’ brother landscaped for a living.

He stayed in Tennessee for three months, then headed to Lakeland, Florida, to work with Rosales’ other brother. After 1 ½ years there, he moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where he continued landscaping.

It was there that the fates of Sanchez, Rosales and her son would finally merge.

The date was Sept. 6, 2007, 14 months before Barack Obama would become the first black president of the United States. It was a time of hope for undocumented immigrants; American citizenship even seemed possible.

 

A New Reality

The mood changed on Jan. 20, 2017, when Donald Trump took the presidential oath of office.

Until that relatively mild winter day, America’s undocumented immigrants could cautiously assume they would be deported only if caught committing crimes.

Some undocumented immigrants, in fact, had lived under that assumption for decades as multiple presidential administrations wrestled with the protracted controversy.

The Obama administration, for instance, concluded in 2014 that it would place the highest priority for deportation on gang members, felons and those who posed security threats.

In so doing, it narrowed its enforcement/deportation focus on two significant groups: criminals and recent unauthorized border crossers.

Though immigrant-rights groups are assailing Trump for what they perceive are his unrealistic deportation policies, Obama caught fire as well.

Under Obama — labeled “deporter-in-chief” by some immigrant-rights groups for what they claimed (WAS) his repressive immigration program — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from 2008 to 2016 deported more than 3 million undocumented immigrants from the United States interior.

That is significantly more than under either of the previous two presidential administrations, though total deportations — which include removal of migrants at the border — were twice as high under presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Trump’s legacy remains to be seen, though his administration has ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ICE, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) — which collaborate to enforce immigration laws — to focus their attention on three fronts: halting illegal border crossings, identifying immigrants who originally entered the U.S. with legal visas now expired, and identifying people who entered the country with no legal documentation — such as Rosales and her family.

{{tncms-inline content="<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><strong>Total Latino immigrants in Lewis County: 7,152</strong></span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 5,911 from Mexico</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 536 from Puerto Rico</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 57 from Cuba</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 648 from other Spanish-speaking countries</span></p> <p class="p4"> </p> <p class="p2"><strong>Total Latino immigrants in Thurston County: 21,174</strong></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 14,862 from Mexico</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 2,289 from Puerto Rico</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 296 from Cuba: 296</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 3,747 from other Spanish-speaking countries<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p> <p class="p4"> </p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1"><em>Statistics from Migration Policy Institute via U.S. Census Bureau 2015 American Community Survey</em></span></p> <p class="p4"> </p> <p class="p4"><span class="s1"> </span></p>" id="f074abc8-7857-4aaf-94e7-28f4a9f404ad" style-type="info" title="Immigrants By the Numbers" type="relcontent"}}

{{tncms-inline content="<p class="p5"><span class="s1">Below are the most up-to-date U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics for the Seattle Enforcement and Removal Operations Field Office, reflecting both arrests and removals for fiscal year 2017 through Sept. 2.</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">The stats are divided into arrests and removals from country. Additionally, they designate how many in each total were convicted criminals.</span></p> <p class="p4"><span class="s1"> </span></p> <p class="p2"><strong>Seattle Field Office Enforcement Statistics (Jan. 1 – Sept. 2, 2017)</strong></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1"><strong>Removals:</strong> 3,646, including 1,998 criminal aliens.</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1"><strong>Administrative Immigration Arrests:</strong><span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>3,077, including 2,398 criminal aliens.</span></p> <p class="p4"><span class="s1"> </span></p> <p class="p2"><strong>Seattle Field Office Enforcement Statistics<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>for Fiscal Year 2016</strong></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1"><strong>Removals:</strong> 2,124, including 729 criminal aliens.</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1"><strong>Administrative Immigration Arrests:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></strong> 2,698, including 2,450 criminal aliens.</span></p>" id="7bc7c212-addc-43bc-bad7-13d7f3a2c933" style-type="info" title="Arrests and Removals of Immigrants in Washington, Oregon and Alaska in 2017" type="relcontent"}}

But while Trump indicated in a Jan. 25 executive order that his administration will primarily deport immigrants who have committed crimes, Rosales frets — as do others in her situation who say they have broken no laws.

“We don’t leave our house much anymore like we did in the past before Donald Trump was elected,” Rosales explained. “I’m scared that I’ll get a knock on my door, and ICE will get me.”

The possibility is real, ICE statistics suggest: From Jan. 20 to April 29 in the three-state region of Alaska, Washington and Oregon, ICE arrested 1,070 undocumented immigrants — 798 of those convicted criminals, 272 crime free.

The arrests reflect the overall Trump strategy.

Virginia Kice, ICE Western Region communications director/spokesperson addressed the issue recently by email: “DHS will not exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement. All those in violation of the immigration laws may be subject to immigration arrest, detention, and if found removable by final order, removed from the United States.”

That potentially includes DACA recipients. Trump recently announced plans to wind down the Obama-era program, saying Congress should come up with a fix. He’s voiced recent support for the youths involved — going do far as to discuss possible DACA remedies with Democratic leadership in Congress — but has spoken against the program in the past. 

“Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!” Trump tweeted earlier this month. “They have been in our country for many years through no fault of their own — brought in by parents at young age.”

Established in June 2012, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals allows undocumented immigrants who entered the United States before age 16 to work and be shielded from deportation for renewable two-year periods.

But that didn’t help Angel Rosales.

In a cruel twist, Rosales — 14 when he and his mother crossed the border in September 2007 — arrived a mere three months too late to qualify for DACA, which stipulates immigrant children must have continuously lived in the U.S. since June 15 of that year.

The soft-spoken, likeable now 24-year-old displays no bitterness over the unfortunate timing, but nevertheless hopes for a better future.

“I worry about it sometimes,” said Rosales, who is fluent in English and graduated from an area high school several years ago. “I know there are a lot of things I could have done through DACA and maybe already have graduated from college.”

That would have been distinctly possible had the Obama administration succeeded in implementing a November 2014 executive order extending DACA eligibility by 2 ½ years.

Under the expansion, youthful undocumented immigrants who had lived in the country continuously since Jan. 1, 2010, could have applied for DACA — Rosales included.

{{tncms-inline content="<p class="p5"><span class="s1">Below are the most up-to-date U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics for the Seattle Enforcement and Removal Operations Field Office, reflecting both arrests and removals for fiscal year 2017 through Sept. 2.</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">The stats are divided into arrests and removals from country. Additionally, they designate how many in each total were convicted criminals.</span></p> <p class="p4"><span class="s1"> </span></p> <p class="p2"><strong>Seattle Field Office Enforcement Statistics (Jan. 1 – Sept. 2, 2017)</strong></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1"><strong>Removals:</strong> 3,646, including 1,998 criminal aliens.</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1"><strong>Administrative Immigration Arrests:</strong><span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>3,077, including 2,398 criminal aliens.</span></p> <p class="p4"><span class="s1"> </span></p> <p class="p2"><strong>Seattle Field Office Enforcement Statistics<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>for Fiscal Year 2016</strong></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1"><strong>Removals:</strong> 2,124, including 729 criminal aliens.</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1"><strong>Administrative Immigration Arrests:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></strong> 2,698, including 2,450 criminal aliens.</span></p>" id="7bc7c212-addc-43bc-bad7-13d7f3a2c933" style-type="info" title="Arrests and Removals of Immigrants in Washington, Oregon and Alaska in 2017" type="relcontent"}}

But the expansion was quickly derailed after Texas and 25 other states sued in district court a month later to enjoin its implementation. The U.S. Supreme Court later upheld a lower court ruling blocking the program’s expansion, a decision not challenged since.

 

In Never Never Land

Trump’s evolving immigration policies do not surprise Sarah Peterson, chief of the Washington State Office of Refugee & Immigrant Assistance.

“The sense I get from the community is that the federal deportation policies (under the Trump administration) are much broader than just focusing on undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes,” she said recently.

Congresswoman Herrera Beutler takes a measured approach to the issue: "Securing our borders and keeping track of those foreign nationals who enter the country to ensure they don’t overstay their visas is appropriate … Efforts have been made to locate and deport those undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes or have felonies, and that seems like a logical prioritization for immigration enforcement agencies.”

As for the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the country? Give them a chance, Herrera Beutler wrote.

“It’s not sustainable for them or good for our country to leave them in legal limbo. I support a process whereby those folks can pay a fine and make restitution, learn English, and then apply for provisional status.”

But so far that isn’t the direction Trump has taken — much to the chagrin of immigrants and social service providers.

“People are definitely expressing fear and concern — and that includes both the undocumented community and people here legitimately,” Peterson said. “We’ve seen a lot more information in the communities that stress to immigrants that they should know their rights and be able to advocate for themselves so that they can really be prepared if something should happen.”

Fatima Gonzalez Galindo sees the trepidation every day. Galindo coordinates the Centralia College Bilingual Diversity Program and routinely interacts with Magdalena Rosales.

The program, she explained, helps low-income families — some of them undocumented immigrants — connect with social service agencies in the area.

“I want to bridge the gap and help families make connections with the community and determine who to reach out for when they need assistance,” she said, adding that language barriers often make it more difficult for immigrants to obtain first-hand information.

Some immigrants, moreover, are afraid to reach out because they fear they’ll be targeted for deportation, Galindo said.

“People are anxious, and it’s affecting them emotionally,” she said. “Parents will call, for instance, and ask, ‘Is it safe for me to go to Walmart?’ People get a bit isolated because of their fear, and there is a lot of misinformation out there.”

Apprehension is also inhibiting immigrants from reporting crimes, said Centralia Police Chief Carl Nielsen.

“Right now we have victims of crimes out there afraid to call the police department,” he said. “They think it will make them vulnerable and potentially tear their families apart. Their kids are afraid they will come home from school to an empty house.”

There’s good reason for immigrants to worry, said Lisa Seifert, an Olympia immigration lawyer who counsels about 150 immigrants, many from Mexico.

“All ICE needs to deport people is if they don’t have permission to be here,”

Seifert, 55, said recently. “Trump has put communities in a high state of fear and has taken the handcuffs off the immigration enforcement officers.”

Tim Warden-Hertz, directing attorney at the Tacoma office of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, believes the president’s rhetoric — as much as the reality — has stoked fear.

“The pernicious piece of this is the change in the rhetoric and practice, which has made it so that whether you’re an undocumented immigrant or not you can feel like you are in the crosshairs,” Warden-Hertz said. “Authorities under Obama targeted people with criminal convictions, but that has ended. And I think that ICE sometimes tries to make people seem more dangerous than they really are, especially concerning arrests for such things as personal possession of drugs and even marijuana.”

The current climate, Seifert said, forces undocumented immigrants to live in the shadows: “It’s really sad. They don’t have any chance but to wait and stay low. They can’t move forward, and the honest truth is if they encounter ICE officers they are tremendously vulnerable, and they can’t take the risk.”

It’s a situation in need of a solution, Seifert stressed, noting the thousands of undocumented immigrants in the area’s cities.

“These people are not problems and not criminals,” she said. “We have to recognize that we need the law to change or we’ll have a permanent sub-class of people against whom society is allowed to discriminate because they are ‘illegal.’”



And so-called “sanctuary city” designations won’t help, Seifert added. Sanctuaries, though not legally defined, generally denote cities where local law enforcement is barred from explicitly working with federal immigration authorities.

“Just because somebody lives in a sanctuary city doesn’t mean city employees will interfere with federal law enforcement officers,” she said. “City officials can’t put up a wall against federal officers who are there to arrest somebody.”

But that hasn’t stopped some high-ranking officials from addressing the issue.

While not specifically using the term “sanctuary city,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, for instance, issued a proclamation on Feb. 23 affirming “Washington’s commitment to tolerance, diversity and inclusiveness” and barring state agencies from “targeting or apprehending persons for violation of federal immigration laws …”

That rhetoric, however, means little to Nielsen — relative to Centralia, at least.

“Centralia’s not a sanctuary city,” he said. “Our police department will work with ICE if we apprehend illegal immigrants committing crimes.”

According to Lewis County Corrections Chief Chris Sweet, his officers determine inmates’ birth countries when they’re booked into jail.

“If the individual has a birthplace outside the United States we complete an INS (now called U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) referral form that gets sent to the INS,” Sweet wrote in an email.

That’s how it should be, Nielsen acknowledged. His goals, he stressed, are to keep his community safe.

“We want to focus our efforts on criminal behavior in our community regardless of race, color and creed,” Nielsen said. “We’re not going door to door, and we’re not working with ICE unless we’re dealing with undocumented immigrant criminals.”

Lewis County Sheriff Rob Snaza takes a similar approach.

“We are not going to go out and question people on their immigration status,” he reaffirmed in July after his initial comments to the Chronicle in February after Trump issued his first travel ban on refugees. “This is not what we’re about. We’re about community.”

Snaza’s deputies — like Sweet’s officers — determine birth countries of people at arrest and relay that information to ICE agents. The sheriff’s office will release detainees unless ICE agents pick them up first — or a federal warrant requires the office to hold them.

“I don’t want them (undocumented immigrants) to be fearful of the sheriff’s office or any law enforcement office in the county,” Snaza said. “I know this is a very important topic.”

Nielsen relates.

“Ninety-nine percent of the families I’ve dealt with are good, hard-working people,” he said. “Most illegal immigrants are looking for a better life and generally have no issues. It’s that small percentage of criminals who screw it up for everyone.”

{{tncms-inline content="<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><strong>Total Latino immigrants in Lewis County: 7,152</strong></span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 5,911 from Mexico</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 536 from Puerto Rico</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 57 from Cuba</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 648 from other Spanish-speaking countries</span></p> <p class="p4"> </p> <p class="p2"><strong>Total Latino immigrants in Thurston County: 21,174</strong></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 14,862 from Mexico</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 2,289 from Puerto Rico</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 296 from Cuba: 296</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">• 3,747 from other Spanish-speaking countries<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p> <p class="p4"> </p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1"><em>Statistics from Migration Policy Institute via U.S. Census Bureau 2015 American Community Survey</em></span></p> <p class="p4"> </p> <p class="p4"><span class="s1"> </span></p>" id="f074abc8-7857-4aaf-94e7-28f4a9f404ad" style-type="info" title="Immigrants By the Numbers" type="relcontent"}}

 

A Life Lost

On a late-April morning a few days before Daniel Rosales died, his big sister sat at her kitchen table. She clutched a cellphone, her hands over her eyes.

She sobbed.

Magdalena Rosales’ 4-year-old daughter Bryanna — ever alert to her mother’s emotions — offered her a tissue, placed her small hand on her mother’s shoulder, and peered quietly into her face.

Rosales had just listened to the last words she’ll ever hear her brother speak. Doctors were about to place breathing tubes down his throat for the mere days he has left — thereby cutting off his words forever.

“I love all of you,” he said to his family in Spanish. “I will always love you.”

Rosales’ best friend Lori Tinoco, who is visiting on this day, watched from her spot at the kitchen table — the pain in her eyes reflecting the moment’s poignancy.

“I raised Daniel as though he were my own son,” Rosales said in Spanish, regaining her composure. “I feel like a mother to him. My heart is broken.”

Several days later, Rosales’ sister Elizabeth Castillo notified her that their baby brother was dead. Castillo sent Rosales several cellphone images of the memorial service. In them, bare light bulbs struggle to illuminate a wooden casket rimmed by bouquets of flowers. Family members — seated in hard-backed wooden chairs against a dusky blue wall — grieve together.

Kidney disease and leukemia killed Daniel Rosales, doctors conclude, though daily struggles in Omealca may have contributed, too.

 

A Lifestyle Recalled

Brisia del Carmen Castillo Rosales knows Omealca like a baby knows its mother.

Brisia, 30, is Magdalena Rosales’ baby sister.

She, Magdalena, and the rest of her large family were born and raised in Omealca, a tropical city of about 30,000 residents along the Blanco River 75 miles west of Veracruz city.

Brisia no longer lives in Omealca, though she might still had the town stayed as it was 12 years ago when she left to study at the University of Veracruzana in Veracruz city.

Brisia — who ultimately earned her bachelor’s degree in physical education and taught for two years at a public school — now works as a salesperson for a company in Veracruz city that manufactures parts for window blinds.

She visits Omealca every two months. A sister and two brothers still reside there, the four of them reuniting to “eat all day long” and share joyful memories of the town.

“We lived a simple life back then,” Brisia said in Spanish by phone recently. “We’d go to the creek or ride horse carts, and it was a lifestyle I really enjoyed.”

But as she aged and began envisioning her future, she reluctantly acknowledged Omealca wouldn’t meet her needs.

“I was happy there, but I wanted to go to college and there was a lack of opportunity in the town,” she said.

Now, after a decade away, Omealca little resembles the quaint, peaceful town that nurtured her.

“I don’t feel safe there now because of the crime and drugs,” she said. “I think about my family still there and worry that something bad might happen to them and that I might not be able to see them again.”

Her big sister in America occupies her thoughts now, too — though America, itself, as a final destination holds no intrigue — at least under present circumstances.

“I know Magdalena is in a better place these days economically than she would have been back home,” Brisia said. “I feel sad, though, that she is trying to reach the American dream by suffering and making so many sacrifices as an undocumented immigrant. I won’t do that.”

 

Dreaming of Home

In the early hours before the sun peeks over the horizon, Magdalena Rosales dreams. She dreams of Omealca, the sweet times shared with Brisia and the rest of her family before everything changed.

“When we were younger we lived in a house where all the beds were lined up in the living room for all of us to sleep,” Rosales recalled, smiling. “It looked like a hospital room, but I didn’t care because we were all together.”

They were usually all together, too, when the family celebrated the town’s many festivals and holidays. Though she has embraced her American lifestyle, Rosales nevertheless misses Mexican traditions that require a certain south-of-the-border atmosphere to authenticate them.

“We are trying our best to assimilate in America, but culturally we still feel as though we are Mexican,” she admitted.

Food is among those cultural traditions she misses most: “jaracho” cheese from Veracruz is a favorite, as are panuchos, a Yucatan specialty tortilla stuffed with refried black beans and topped with meat and vegetables.

“A good friend of my mother’s used to cook this type of food,” Rosales said. “It is delicious.”

Traditional Mexican religious festivals also live vividly in Rosales’ memories.

Among them is the Festival of the Lady of Guadalupe, traditionally celebrated on Dec. 12.

“It’s a big festival in Mexico where children wear indigenous costumes,” Rosales explained. “I now dress up Bryanna to attend those festivities at St. Joseph Church in Chehalis.”

A few days later from Dec. 16-24, Mexicans celebrate the religious festival of Las Posadas. The eight-day festival commemorates through music and song the journey Joseph and Mary made from Nazareth to Bethlehem to find a safe refuge where Mary could give birth to the baby Jesus.

Come summer, Rosales traditionally celebrated the festival of the Lady del Carmen, which honors the Virgin Mary and features a fireworks-emblazoned procession that leads to a service at the local Catholic church. The Lady del Carmen — to whom residents of Omealca devote themselves — is the patroness and protector of all men of the sea.

Magdalena Rosales’ fondest memories of Omealca, however, ended when the town was still innocent. The future, she said, is in America.

“I left behind a lot of bad things in Mexico,” she said simply. “It would be horrible to return to Omealca because it’s not a safe place to live. If we were deported, people would think we were rich and we might get kidnapped.”

Angel Rosales elaborated: “Some people in Omealca are now surviving by kidnapping and demanding money. It hasn’t always been that bad there, but it was beginning to get bad when we decided to come here.”

But at the time in 2007, Rosales wasn’t convinced America was the place for him. His mother had left him in the care of his grandmother — Leticia Rosales Garrido, who died from ovarian cancer at age 55 — after she found work cleaning homes three hours away in Xalapa. The arrangement would last for five years, Rosales returning every two weeks to visit her son.

The separation strained Angel’s bond with his mother, he said.

“I would have preferred to stay in Omealca back then,” he said, adding that he enjoyed the lifestyle and didn’t want to leave friends and family. “My relationship with my mother was not that strong up to that point.”

(BUT) that would change as the family planted roots in their new homeland.

“I’m convinced our journey here was the best thing that could have happened,” Magdalena Rosales said. “I was able to be with Angel through his teen years, watch him graduate from high school and develop into a hard-working man.”

 

Long-awaited Reunion

Sept. 7, 2007.

It had been two years since Rosales last saw her partner Benito Sanchez.

After crossing the United States border a few days earlier, Rosales and Angel boarded a commercial jet that would carry them to Raleigh, N.C., where they and Sanchez would reunite.

But when they arrived, the husky, light-brown man Rosales had known since July 17, 2002, was nowhere to be seen. Leaning nonchalantly against a nearby wall in his stead was a thin, dark Mexican day-worker who with a shy smile seemed to know her.

“I was so excited to see him, but was really surprised because he had changed so much,” Rosales recalled. “I cried, and we kissed and hugged, but I thought, ‘Oh, he really needs me,’ because he was so skinny and dark from being in the sun so much.”

But the trio’s conspicuousness — at least as Rosales perceived — quickly tempered her joy. Danger lurked everywhere.

“I was scared,” she said. “I was looking from right to left the whole time to make sure there were no immigration agents there. I thought, ‘No, no, no, I don’t want immigration officers too close or anybody else I didn’t know.’”

Over the next few days — with their immediate concerns temporarily quelled — Rosales, Sanchez and Angel returned to Sanchez’s temporary home in Myrtle Beach where they stayed for three months until his landscaping work declined. From there, they moved to Hillsboro, Oregon, where Sanchez and one of Rosales’ brothers worked together installing and taping drywall.

It was in Hillsboro that Rosales finally felt at home.

“The whole journey didn’t feel like it had been real until we settled in Oregon,” Rosales said.

That part of their American experience remained real until late 2010 when Sanchez’s drywall company closed. When a friend subsequently told him he could find work in Lewis County, the family packed up and moved 110 miles due north to Centralia.

 

Striving to Improve

Magdalena Rosales raises her hand triumphantly, a broad smile on her face.

It’s mid-April on a drizzling, humid day in Centralia.

Rosales is in a Centralia College Library computer classroom with about 15 other students — some fluent in English, others not. They’re taking a Reading Through Language Arts class offered through the college’s Adult Basic Education (ABE) program.

“My paragraph is ready, teacher,” Rosales says in English.

Instructor Debra Keahey walks over, reads Rosales’ work, smiles, and gestures to other students who are trying to garner her attention.

“Magdalena works hard and is coming along well,” Keahey says after class as another student waits to speak with her.

Rosales began taking classes in 2011 in the college’s English as a Second Language curriculum, then transitioned after two quarters into the General Education Diploma (GED) program where she hoped to gain her high school equivalency certificate.

Turns out, though, nature had other plans: Rosales’ and Sanchez’s daughter Bryanna was born shortly after Rosales began taking classes, temporarily postponing her mother’s education.

But several years later, when she thought Bryanna was old enough to attend daycare, Rosales returned to school. She expects to finish the ABE program in about nine months.

“I wanted to improve my English so I can help Bryanna with her homework as she grows up,” explained Rosales, who like Sanchez has a Mexico-equivalent middle-school education. “I want to be able to understand what her teachers are trying to tell her.”

Her goal is laudable — and necessary — said Deborah Shriver, the college’s ABE program manager.

“You can’t function in the community without English or advocate for your children at school or effectively go to the grocery store unless you acquire those English skills,” Shriver stressed. “Language impacts people across the board with family, community interactions and employment.”

The Centralia College experience has helped Rosales integrate into her community and has simultaneously added intellectual purpose to her life. She hopes at some point to work as an educational assistant or help Sanchez and Angel hang and tape drywall as they often do seven days a week.

“She’s not really sure what she wants,” laughs friend Lori Tinoco. “I think she doubts herself sometimes.”

Maybe, but not when she’s in her kitchen.

“I love to cook,” Rosales said on a recent night as she prepared a batch of tamales in her mobile home. “Especially chicken.”

Tamales are Rosales’ specialty — a culinary skill she has parlayed into an informal, but thriving small business. Her entrepreneurial enterprise began four years ago when she began hawking her authentic, homemade food to neighbors in the apartment complex in which the family lived at the time.

She now sells about 200 tamales a month, she figures, some to neighbors and friends, but the majority for parties. One Olympia customer, in fact, routinely orders 120 tamales every year to augment her Thanksgiving turkey.

Her enterprise has expanded Rosales’ small world.

“Since I arrived I have felt comfortable because our neighbors have treated our family really well,” she said. “I became popular when I began selling tamales, and I have felt no discrimination.”

 

Planning for the Worst

Lori Tinoco, who gave birth to her own daughter six months before Bryanna was born, could play a critical role in Rosales’ life.

Should they be detained or deported at some point, Rosales and Sanchez have designated Tinoco, 34, as Bryanna’s temporary caregiver.

The Temporary Parental Consent Agreement they entered permits Tinoco to indefinitely make healthcare, childcare and educational decisions for Bryanna until the agreement is terminated.

Tinoco welcomes the responsibility should it arise.

“Bryanna is an amazing little girl, and I would raise her like my own child until it’s safe enough for her to be reunited with her own family,” she said.

But even with the best caregiver, her parents’ deportation could cause Bryanna psychological and emotional distress. So says Lonnie Tristan Renteria, executive director of Puentes, a Burien-based mental health advocacy organization for immigrants.

“The child learns that the world is an unsafe place,” he explained “Many children become extremely anxious and in some cases develop depressive symptoms.”

Parents suffer, too, Renteria added.

“The separation (from their children) can provoke depression or an adjustment disorder in the family members,” he said, particularly if the parents are from Latin America.

“If the parents come from Mexico, especially from more rural areas, folks with lesser education are also impacted because the family functions as a system,” he said. “If one part of the system is affected, the whole system will see repercussions and the outcomes are not often positive.”

To help mitigate that possibility, Rosales and Sanchez are trying to secure their daughter’s dual citizenship.

It’s an important consideration, Renteria said.

“The concern for her would be that (without dual citizenship) Mexico at the moment is ill-equipped to care for these children because they are not Mexican citizens,” he said. “In some cases they are not able to receive benefits or go to school.”

Bryanna, meanwhile, seems to be thriving. Since 2016 she has attended the Centralia College Lab School — a change in her life that at first unsettled her.

“Bryanna had a hard time talking at all to us when she first got here because it was her first school experience,” said lab school Program Manager Donna Burkhart. “Now she talks all the time.”

And she’s extraordinarily polite. Visit her at home, for instance, and her face lights up with obvious delight. By the end of the visit, she seems genuinely sorry to see you go.

“Thank you for coming to our home,” she says after a recent visit, extending her hand in farewell

 

Processing Her Grief

Daniel Rodrigo Castillo Rosales died on April 30, 2017 — his sister Brisia Rosales at his bedside, her hand in his.

The 28-year-old left behind seven siblings — two sisters and two brothers still in Mexico; five brothers and one sister in the United States.

Daniel’s death has particularly devastated Rosales, who at a year older than her brother was his constant childhood playmate.

“It has been very difficult to overcome this,” she wrote in a recent email from Veracruz. “I have a lot of bitterness … and every day I feel that anger towards life because of the injustice that was with him.”

To help cope with her grief, she has written a memoir commemorating her brother and their lives together.

She recalls one of her earliest memories in the opening paragraph (translated from Spanish): “Remember when we were kids and you kicked me out of the tree? You almost killed me, remember? (But) you were very fast and brave to take me back to the house to be seen. I remember you carried me on your back. I would have left you lying there (LOL). Thank you for saving my life …”

And farther down (written on the day doctors intubated Daniel): “Today I am here with you holding hands. The Brisia forte is no longer. It's painful to see you in that bed without being able to do anything, just hold your hand. I love you …”

 

Battling the Guilt

On a recent mid-July day, Maria Rosales reads her sister’s memoir out loud to several people in her living room. She brushes away tears as Brisia’s words haunt her anew.

“If only I could have been there to help him,” Maria says. “Then maybe things might have been different …”

•••

Over a 40-year journalism career, Olympia resident Paul Dunn has written, edited and photographed for a variety of publications around the country. He can be reached at dunn_pl@hotmail.com.