An Ugly Stain on a City’s Bright and Shining Plan

CHANDLER, Ariz. —  The city fathers of this fast-growing Phoenix suburb had a plan to create a bright and shining center to their community, a downtown worthy of the self-proclaimed capital of “the Silicon Desert.”

The Police Department took the first step, with what soon became known as “the roundup,” an apt term for a place where cattle still live side by side with the factories of high-tech giants Intel Corp. and Motorola Inc. A plan to clear the city of illegal immigrants, the July 1997 roundup was a resounding success--and a plan gone horribly wrong.

Too late did city officials realize that their five-day operation was targeting scores of legal residents and U.S. citizens who happened to “look Mexican,” according to witnesses. The resulting controversy--a big-city-style brouhaha tinged with ethnic overtones--has consumed Chandler ever since.

“They just can’t stop people based on looks,” said Phoenix attorney Stephen Montoya, who has filed a $35-million lawsuit against the city. “They thought the Hispanic community would not unite against this, but we did.”

Just this month, the city manager officially reprimanded Police Chief Bobby Joe Harris for the way he conducted the raid, while a group of Latino activists launched a recall against the mayor and two City Council members.

Much to the dismay of leaders in this city of 143,000 people, the drama long ago took on a life of its own. The next chapter may come in February in a federal courtroom in Phoenix, when opening arguments are scheduled in Montoya’s civil rights suit. At the same time, the Arizona Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will hold hearings on the affair. The U.S. Border Patrol is conducting its own internal investigation.

A spokesman for the Police Department declined to comment on the operation, because of the pending lawsuit. In a written statement, Chandler Mayor Jay Tibshraeny echoed the findings of the city’s investigation, saying the operation was flawed and that officers were not properly trained to carry out complex immigration laws. He called for a “cultural diversity training program” for the department.

“Things are more scrutinized” in the wake of the controversy, said Sgt. Ken Phillips, a police spokesman. “We’re more careful.”

Friction Can’t Be Erased Overnight

“It’s going to take 10, 15 years for people to feel comfortable in Chandler again,” said Ed Delci, a Latino native of the city and a plaintiff in the civil rights lawsuit, although he was not detained during the raid. “Reparations have to be made.”

The raid was one of dozens of similar actions taken by authorities in Southwestern and Rocky Mountain boomtowns, where an explosion of Latino immigration has dramatically transformed the social milieu.

In few places are the contradictions of rapid urban growth--and the role of immigrants, legal and illegal, in that growth--as stark as they are in Chandler, the second-fastest growing city in the country.

Chandler’s raid may have provoked the strongest outcry, because local authorities failed to take into account a basic truth about the city: Its immigrants live side by side with a large, well-established Mexican American community. Latinos make up about 15% of the population.

Four government agencies have conducted investigations, and a small group of activists staged the latest in a series of protest marches Dec. 19.

Local newspapers have editorialized against Chandler’s city leaders and its police.

Perhaps the most cutting comment came from Arizona Republic cartoonist Steve Benson, who depicted Chandler’s finest as a group of obese men with batons standing over a cowering immigrant.

“You have the right to remain silent,” the caption reads. “Any brown pigment in your skin can, and will, be held against you.”

Phillips responded, “Our people come to work, they do a good job, and then we’re perceived by some media as being the bad guy. We take the hits and we move on.”

Still, it’s not the sort of publicity that Chandler’s leaders envisioned when they launched Operation Restoration. The city was breaking ground for a new civic center, including a new police headquarters, municipal court and library on the edge of the Spanish-style plaza first laid out by Dr. Alexander Chandler in 1912.

Chandler was once a resort for snow-weary Midwesterners, and then a farm town where irrigation turned the desert soil green with cotton and other crops. Later, it became another in a line of bedroom communities swallowed by the spreading asphalt grid of greater Phoenix. After the techno-boom of the 1990s spurred a dozen subdivisions, Chandler had become, in effect, two cities: an affluent sprawl of cul-de-sacs and the old, impoverished downtown.

City officials concluded that illegal immigration--and the resulting crowding--was partly to blame for the city center’s decay.

“Since July [1994], citizens in the central and eastern portions of downtown have continuously complained about the criminal activity relating to illegal immigrants,” one police official wrote in a post-mortem to Operation Restoration. “This criminal activity ranges from simple disorders and liquor violations to murder.”

(FBI statistics show the city’s crime rate is near the average for Arizona.)

Unfortunately, the local Border Patrol office didn’t have the manpower for the sort of wide-ranging sweep Chandler officials felt they needed. Chandler police proposed a joint operation, and the Border Patrol agreed.

Operation Restoration began July 27, 1997. What happened over the next five days has been dissected in two different investigations released so far, first by the Arizona attorney general’s office and then by the city itself.

Both inquiries agree that the joint operation was a dramatic event that saw two dozen police officers and five Border Patrol agents fan out across downtown, sometimes chasing suspected illegal immigrants from work sites, filling up buses with captured people.

In all, the police held and eventually deported 432 illegal immigrants, all but three of them from Mexico.

As the police questioned people leaving markets patronized by Latinos, they invariably encountered U.S. citizens. Venecia Robles Zavala, a resident of nearby Mesa, said she was stopped outside a Food 4 Less market as she was leaving with her children.

She was disciplining her son, in Spanish, when an officer stopped her and asked for her papers.

“What papers?” Zavala responded in English. “Newspapers?”

“No,” the officer said. “Immigration papers.”

Thirty tense minutes later, she found a copy of her birth certificate in her car and the officer let her go.

Another U.S. citizen, Catalina Veloz, charged that officers placed her in handcuffs and released her only when she started to curse at them in English.

For attorney Montoya, who is representing Zavala, Veloz and 13 others, such stops violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment because white people in the area were not stopped.

“We see this as a law-and-order case,” Montoya said. “The police have to obey the law.”

Report Cites Operation’s Missteps

Four months after the raid, Arizona Atty. Gen. Grant Woods released the results of his inquiry. The Chandler police, the report concluded, had stopped residents and had entered the homes of suspected illegal immigrants without warrants “for no other reason than their skin color or Mexican appearance or the use of the Spanish language.”

What’s more, city officials had failed to request formal permission from the U.S. attorney general to pursue such an action, as required by a 1996 federal law.

The city’s own review, written by a former Arizona Republic reporter, was released last month. The review included an expansive report on the events leading up to the raid, highlighting the spread of illegal immigrant camps on the outskirts of town. Residents complained of “naked aliens” wandering about and others who tried to entice schoolgirls into the citrus groves.

“Today, as the Chandler economy diversifies and flourishes,” the report said, “hordes of Mexican immigrants continue to be drawn northward.”

Still, the report chastised the police for a lack of preparation, saying its officers were not trained to enforce immigration laws.

The Border Patrol, meanwhile, is conducting its own internal investigation.

Tibshraeny has outlined a series of measures designed to improve relations with the Latino community. The Police Department has hired a Latino liaison. The city’s Human Relations Commission has been resurrected. Only Harris, the police chief, has been reprimanded. A second lawsuit, seeking $8.7 million in damages on behalf of about 40 plaintiffs, has been filed in state court.

City spokesman Dave Bigos thinks the controversy has already begun to dissipate, in part because there are so many new people in Chandler. In boomtowns, community memory is a fleeting concept.

“Sure, we [angered] a large segment of the Hispanics in the downtown area. Our biggest mistake was not establishing a dialogue with the community before,” Bigos said. “But the majority of people are going about their jobs, and it really hasn’t touched their lives.”

More than a year after the police and Border Patrol descended on several building projects, hauling away Latino workers, Chandler remains a vast construction site.

The new police headquarters opened this month. At new subdivisions, with names like Clemente Ranch and Eden Estates, Latino workers push wheelbarrows and wield hammers as more homes sprout from the dusty red farmland.

Tired of talking about immigration, city officials would much rather engage visitors in a conversation about the shopping “power centers” going up on the edge of town.

Bigos sits in a conference room with a large map of the city that looks a lot like maps of Southern California in the 1960s, with long dotted lines representing the new freeway that will soon reach Chandler and others planned for the next century.

“The city is confident that it can take off,” Bigos said. “It’s the right time.”

For others, the mood is not quite so sanguine. Juanita Encinas, 43, sees dark forces threatening the neighborhood where she grew up.

Just a few blocks from the city’s central plaza, the old, sagging wood-frame houses and dusty lawns of the barrio abut a new, adobe-colored cement wall. Behind that wall, the frames of much taller homes are being erected, part of the San Marcos Country Club Estates.

“This has been el barrio, and all of a sudden you have development coming in,” Encinas said. “The gringos say the downtown area is a disgrace. I tell them, ‘These are the same people who take care of your children, who clean your yards.’ ”

Several downtown property owners have sold out to developers, and new homes will probably displace many immigrant families. Eventually, Encinas and others fear, the economics of the real estate market may accomplish what Operation Restoration could not.