‘American dream’ twists into immigrants’ despair

Martin Kuz

Sunday, Feb. 28, 1999 | 9:33 a.m.

Sleep is the only escape.

"Sometimes I wish I wouldn't wake up," Esperanza Solorio said. "Sometimes I wish (for) forever nights."

Alan Torres has made the same wish. On a table in his home, a small clay statue depicts a field worker bent by weariness. He sits with his knees drawn up, arms resting upon them, his bowed head invisible under a sombrero.

"Sometimes I feel like that," Torres said.

Eduardo Martinez shares the sense of defeat. When an ice-cream truck jingles past his apartment, he doesn't bother checking his pockets. He knows he can't buy his young daughter a treat.

"Before, we (had) money to spend for basic needs -- food, rent, bills, everything," Martinez said.

"Now we can't do anything. We can't even stand up."

In recent months Solorio, Torres, Martinez and their families have seen opportunity fade into uncertainty. They are among an estimated 18,000 nonresident immigrants living in Nevada who can no longer work legally in the United States. A ruling by a federal appeals court last fall stripped them of their work permits -- and their lives, they say.

"I thought the United States was the ideal place," the 43-year-old Solorio said through an interpreter. She and her husband arrived in Las Vegas not long after slipping across the border from their native Mexico in 1988.

"I don't want to think this is reality. I don't want to think I'm being stepped on."

A belief that they are being trampled by the federal government festers among nonresident immigrants, who despite having entered the U.S. illegally defend their right to live and work here. Righteous anger aside, however, their chances of doing either grow weaker by the day.

Their woes began Oct. 1, the date a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision kicked in to annul the work permits of about 350,000 illegal aliens nationwide. Those affected are plaintiffs in numerous federal lawsuits that fault the government for hindering their efforts to gain amnesty.

Under two federal amnesty programs -- the last of which had a May 1988 deadline -- about 3 million immigrants received protected status, shielding them from deportation. Class-action suits subsequently filed on behalf of the hundreds of thousands who missed the deadline have sought to force the government to grant them late amnesty.

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service allowed late-amnesty applicants to carry work permits as the cases traversed the legal system during the past decade. The permits, which must be renewed annually, enabled illegal immigrants to hold jobs without fear of getting shipped back home.

But the appellate court's action voided the permits and gave INS officials the power to revoke them, thereby exposing immigrants to deportation. The ruling also left employers little choice in retaining workers: no permit meant no job. Just that quickly, 18,000 immigrants statewide were unemployed, including 2,000 members of the Culinary Union.

Five months later, nonresident immigrants in Las Vegas, the majority of whom came to the United States from Mexico, struggle to survive as their money and resolve slowly run out.

"They're doing anything they can just to feed themselves," Culinary Union representative Mario Rocha said.

"They don't have the rent or the mortgage on their mind. They're just trying to eat."

Solorio's husband pulled down $4,000 a month between jobs at the Mirage hotel-casino and Barley's Casino & Brewing Co. before losing his permit. Now, desperate to provide for his wife and three children, he's working illegally -- a common solution for immigrants without a permit -- in a local restaurant, earning $500 a month.

"He's about suicidal. He feels like he no longer deserves to be a father, to be a husband," said Solorio, who takes sporadic housekeeping and catering jobs to help the family make ends meet.

The couple has prospered during their 11 years in the United States, reaching a quality of life that remains a fantasy for most residents of Mexico. They own a three-bedroom home and two cars; their two eldest children, ages 16 and 13, attend public school; and their 3-year-old son benefited from comprehensive natal care.

Today, as the family's savings dwindle, they subsist on beans, potatoes and too many eggs for their liking -- "pretty soon I'll be a hen," Solorio said with a tired smile. They will have to return to Mexico and the prospect of almost certain poverty this summer unless her husband, whom she asked not be named, regains his work permit.

"My heart really shrinks because the kids say, 'Are we going to be here next week? Are we going to eat this week? Am I going to have to leave my school?' " Solorio said.

Pausing, she looked away, her eyes filling with tears. "I'm desperate."

Despair has become the constant companion of immigrants such as Torres, who fled Guadalajara, Mexico, and stole into California in 1987, moving to Las Vegas two years later.

Yet his covert journey across the border was the proverbial walk in the park compared to the anxiety he feels driving his minivan to the grocery store these days. A routine traffic violation would result in a background check showing Torres has no work permit. At that point, authorities would hand him over to the INS for a deportation hearing.

"I'm afraid," Torres said.

"They don't care if you have a home, if you have kids. It's a law, and that's it."

Torres, 34, earned $3,000 a month as a food server at Palace Station until losing his permit. He and his wife, Norma, now make a combined $2,500 a month working in a relative's restaurant. The couple fell several months behind on mortgage payments and other bills last year, forcing them to file for bankruptcy.

More than once Torres has related to the statue of the field worker in his family room. He frets about the future of his children, Ashley, 6, and 11-month-old Alan Jr. Both born in Las Vegas, they in essence would be booted out of their native country if their dad is deported. Torres wonders how the "land of humanity," as he called the United States, can shun its own children.

"They're not pets," he said. "They're not like furniture: 'We'll take care of them for you. Leave them in storage and then maybe you can pick them up later.' It's very hard to believe."

For Martinez, the disbelief is unrelenting. In September, after working at the Flamingo Hilton hotel-casino for nine years, he suddenly found himself without a job -- and, just as perilously, without health insurance.

When his 5-year-old daughter, Lised, recently suffered a respiratory illness, Martinez decided against taking her to the hospital -- but not only because he was short on money. He also feared that INS officials might somehow learn of the hospital visit and track him down. While Lised recovered from the ailment, her father's exasperation lingers.

"I can't get any medication. I can get nothing. We can do nothing," he said.

Martinez's wife, whom he asked not be named, earns $500 a month working for a cleaning company, barely enough to keep the family of four afloat. Although the couple has relatives in Las Vegas who help them financially, they probably will pack up for Mexico in two to three months. For Martinez, who came to the United States in 1978, going back would represent an ugly twist of fortune.

"Like everybody, I came for American dream. Now it's American nightmare," he said. "I got no home, no job (in Mexico). I don't got nothing back there."

The lament is familiar to Malena Burnett, chairwoman of Fair Treatment for Immigrants, an advocacy group formed last fall to assist nonresident aliens. The organization's office at 300 E. Charleston Blvd. has become an oasis for immigrants in Las Vegas, a place they visit as much for a shoulder to lean on as to hear the latest about their status.

Burnett has run Amigo Services, a business that prepares immigration and tax paperwork, for the past nine years. She, Rocha and Helena Garcia, head of a life-skills training center for Hispanics in Las Vegas, founded Fair Treatment for Immigrants with their own money and additional funding from the Culinary Union.

Seeking help in D.C.

Burnett and Garcia have made three trips to Washington, D.C., in the last six months to lobby federal and elected officials. They also have met with the likes of Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and Sens. Harry Reid and Richard Bryan, both D-Nev. The organization has staged several protests locally, and will join other immigrant-advocacy groups from across the country for a demonstration in the nation's capital in early March. Activists intend to discuss the immigrants' dilemma with Vice President Al Gore and Attorney General Janet Reno.

At the very least, Burnett argued, the federal government should grant nonresident immigrants the same temporary protected status as Central Americans received late last year after fleeing Hurricane Mitch. Temporary protected status, which gives immigrants the right to live and work in the United States for up to 18 months, is typically reserved for those escaping political or economic strife or natural disasters in their homeland.

Burnett contends that the 350,000 illegal immigrants who worked -- and paid taxes -- for a decade or more in the United States deserve similar treatment, if only to get their lives in order. She has related their plight to federal INS and Justice Department officials as well as members of the Clinton administration, but she admitted, "I'm totally discouraged. I don't see anything happening."

No federal legislation is pending to aid nonresident immigrants, according to Reid spokesman David Cherry. Reid has met with local and national Hispanic groups on the issue, and he hopes to galvanize support among his colleagues to persuade President Clinton to consider administrative action that would provide relief for immigrants, Cherry said.

Remedies could range from restoring work permits to immigrants to conferring temporary protected status upon them. Any help can't come fast enough, Burnett said.

"This is like beating (immigrants) up. This isn't a natural disaster -- you couldn't forecast this one. This is a man-made disaster. Government did this," she said.

Torres conceded that he broke U.S. law when he entered the country illegally 12 years ago. Still, he and his wife, like other immigrants, feel used. Torres pointed out, for instance, that they may never benefit from the money they pumped into the Social Security fund over the years.

"We've paid taxes, Social Security and things like that. We've been good residents. We've never been on welfare, never had bad credit. We've bought homes and cars. Then they say to us, 'Get out.' They don't care," Torres said.

The government's revocation of work permits further frustrates nonresident aliens in Las Vegas because thousands of them were duped by officials who were supposed to help them obtain one.

The INS authorized the Nevada chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens to prepare paperwork for immigrants seeking work permits in the late 1980s. Federal authorities discovered in 1990 that several LULAC officials in Las Vegas filed spurious documents with the INS on behalf of 22,000 illegal aliens, all the while pocketing millions of dollars from them.

The scheme resulted in convictions of nearly 60 people on charges of immigration fraud. Among those convicted were Jose Velez, former Nevada director of LULAC, and former Las Vegas INS official Barbara Farley. But because LULAC supplied fraudulent information to the INS, thousands of work-permit applicants subsequently were dropped as plaintiffs in the federal class-action suits, costing them their right to employment.

Fair Treatment for Immigrants held two demonstrations earlier this week to protest the second reduction of Velez's prison term since he was sentenced to six years in 1995. His term, cut to four years in 1997, will be trimmed another year if a recent ruling by a federal appeals court stands. The news infuriated Burnett, who said if LULAC had operated legally a decade ago, nonresident immigrants would not face deportation today.

"These people were victimized once before by LULAC, and now they're being revictimized by the government," she said.

Perhaps the only trickle of optimism for illegal aliens springs from the unlikeliest of sources -- the INS. Routine sweeps of workplaces and job sites notwithstanding, the agency has no plans to round up aliens who lack a work permit. The INS has detained fewer than 100 immigrants on those grounds since October, said Stephen Usiak, supervisory special agent in charge of investigations for the INS office in Las Vegas.

Then again, the INS hasn't started a resume service for illegal aliens, either.

A 'Catch-22'

"It's a tough situation. You feel for these families that are out there ... but it's a Catch-22. There's nothing we can do on this end. It's pretty much out of our hands," Usiak said.

Short of an executive order from Clinton or intervention by the Justice Department granting immigrants temporary protected status -- and the odds of either occurring remain uncertain, Burnett said -- they will continue to live in limbo. They have only themselves to blame, according to Russ Bergeron, an INS spokesman in Washington, D.C.

"Individuals who enter the United States illegally do so with the recognition that they have no legal entitlement to live or work in the United States. That is the risk of undocumented immigration," Bergeron said.

The harshness of that reality contrasts with the warm hopes Antonio Sotelo-Padilla brought with him to the United States from Mexico more than a quarter-century ago. He moved to Las Vegas in the late 1970s to work, sending money he earned to his wife and their seven children in Mexico.

"I could not have supported them there," he said. "Here I had a chance."

Sotelo-Padilla, 50, worked as a kitchen helper in the Excalibur hotel-casino from 1993 until last year when he underwent a kidney transplant. His health insurance covered the cost of surgery and post-operative treatment, but he has had to pay for his own care since losing his work permit last fall.

It has not been easy. Unsightly crimson lumps have formed on Sotelo-Padilla's arms from blood clots, the result of his inability to consistently obtain anti-rejection medicine. Last week, with Sotelo-Padilla down to his last pill, Rocha managed to secure more medication for him.

Such close calls have taken a toll on Sotelo-Padilla, physically and psychologically. Although he spoke through an interpreter, his sagging shoulders needed no translation.

"It's devastating," he said.

"Words can't explain my emotions."

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