On September 7 Ernesto Cruz was sitting on his parked motorcycle outside his girlfriend’s home in Albany Park when a car pulled up and two men got out. Cruz, a 21-year-old native of Mexico City who came to Chicago with his parents and brother six years ago, says the men were wearing jeans, bulletproof vests, holsters, and green-and-yellow baseball caps that said U.S. Border Patrol. One of them asked if his motorcycle had a license plate. “I pointed to it,” he says.
Cruz’s girlfriend, Jessica Monzalvo, who’d come out of the house in the meantime, watched the car drive to the police station just a few blocks away. She walked there and called his 19-year-old brother, Juan Cruz. Juan, a political science major at Northeastern, went to the police station and called the Albany Park Neighborhood Council, a community organization he and Ernesto volunteer with. He told the group’s executive director, Jenny Arwade, he didn’t know why Ernesto had been taken to the police station, since the men who took him away had been wearing border patrol hats. Arwade called immigration lawyers and was told that immigration agents had started using police stations as temporary holding facilities. (APNC staff made it clear they wouldn’t talk to me for this story unless I promised not to ask Cruz whether he’s in the U.S. legally or not; they said it wasn’t relevant.)
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As more anti-immigrant legislation has been proposed–including last year’s infamous House Resolution 4437, which would, among other things, make assisting an illegal immigrant a crime–rumors have raced through Latino neighborhoods in Chicago. Because I regularly report on immigration issues, in August I got frantic phone calls describing a roadblock on Cermak in Little Village. The rumor turned out not to be true: “Someone saw what they thought was an immigration checkpoint, and people started calling other people and letting them know or asking if they’d heard,” Victoria Cervantes, an immigrants’ rights activist in Little Village, told me. “Maybe it was just a state trooper pulling someone over. But for undocumented people, there is always this current of fear that they could be deported at any time. So when someone thinks they see something it spreads like crazy. People stay home from their jobs and are afraid to send their kids to school.”
Ernesto Cruz has contested both the tickets he was given and has a traffic court date in December. He’s also considering filing a civil lawsuit. APNC has already helped him file a complaint with the police department’s Office of Professional Standards. “We’re demanding a full investigation,” says Arwade. “Why was he stopped, why was he asked his status, and why were they wearing those hats?”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo byYvette Marie Dostatni.
