Immigration hotline is one-woman show

Miriam Mesa knows what kind of day she’ll have by the number of phone messages on the immigrant hotline answering machine. At 9:15 one morning, there were 37. Easy day.

She took a deep breath, opened a message pad and punched in her password. But as soon as she began jotting down names and phone numbers, a call interrupted her.

The caller was a high school teacher. Two of her students are here illegally, she said. They and their parents live in Huntington Park and were ordered deported. Is there any possibility that they will be able to stay?

Mesa responded, as she often does, with bad news: “The chances are not good. They will need a very resourceful attorney.”

The teacher continued: The students are scared to come to school. Will immigration agents come onto the campus and arrest them?

Mesa is careful not to make any promises, but she responds that immigration officers generally stay away from schools. “I don’t think they would start doing that,” she said. “It would be a big issue all around the country.”

For the last seven years, Mesa’s job has been to allay the fears of immigrants, answer their questions and refer them for help. Even though she holds a chemical engineering degree from Cuba, here she wears several unofficial hats: legal advisor, therapist, friend.

Mesa, 35, is the one-woman hotline at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, an advocacy organization established after thousands of Central Americans fled civil wars in the 1980s and arrived in Southern California.

Her tools are few: the Internet, a Rolodex, a map and three thick black binders filled with fliers and brochures about health clinics, community centers and citizenship classes. But to do this job, Mesa also needs patience and the ability to be brutally honest.

“Maybe I am not telling them what they want to hear, but at least I am telling them the truth so they don’t get in the hands of someone who is going to take advantage of them,” she said.

She switches back and forth between Spanish and English, depending on which language the caller speaks first. Most weekdays, she receives about 100 calls. But the number can rise dramatically. On more than one occasion, the number has shot up to nearly 500.

“It was totally crazy that day,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh, no. I can’t deal with this.’ ”

Calls spike whenever immigration is in the news -- during raids, congressional debates or citizenship drives. As the issue heats up in the presidential campaign, Mesa expects the number of calls to increase.

As she decided which calls to return first on a recent weekday morning, she employed her own triage system.

She returned a call from a Colorado man looking for a friend who had been arrested at a day laborer gathering site. Mesa found the number of the nearest detention center and a nonprofit immigrant rights organization nearby.

Then she dialed a Los Angeles woman, Flor. The woman asked Mesa if she could receive economic help for her U.S.-born children without hurting her chances of getting legal residency in the future.

Mesa, who has spent years studying immigration policies and attending training sessions, rattled off the answer quickly. Food stamps or Medi-Cal for the children -- not a problem. But receiving money through programs such as CalWORKs, the state’s welfare program -- that’s different.

“That isn’t advisable,” she told Flor. “If you do that, they are going to give you a hard time -- un dolor de cabeza -- a headache.”

The phone rang again. A West Covina man named Dennis told her a story about a friend who paid a consultant, who claimed he had connections inside the Social Security Administration, $3,000 in cash for a Social Security card. Dennis said his friend never received it.

“My friend wants his money back,” he said. “They are saying the money is already gone.”

Now the consultant was offering another service, fraudulent proof that the immigrant entered the country legally.

Mesa quickly responded: “That is not very wise. He will not get anything. And he will get into trouble.”

Another call came in. A woman named Veronica said a fight occurred outside a Compton laundromat where she works. At the direction of her boss, she called police and told them what was happening and helped describe the men involved in the altercation. Then the prosecutor called her to testify.

“Are you worried about your status?” Mesa asked.

“I don’t have papers,” she said. “I don’t want to go to any court.”

Mesa suggested she consult with an attorney, but that if a subpoena arrived, she would have to go to court. She wouldn’t have a choice.

Mesa has firsthand knowledge of the immigrants’ plight. She fled Cuba on a raft in 1994 but was caught by the U.S. Coast Guard and spent a year at a then-immigration detention center at Guantanamo Bay before being flown to another facility in Florida and released. She received her green card. In Miami, she worked cleaning hotels and caring for an elderly woman. She later made her way to Los Angeles.

A friend told her about the job at the coalition and she applied. She started in 2000.

Mesa said she receives calls from all over, from New York, Mexico, even as far away as Germany. Hotline callers’ questions run the gamut: housing, workers’ rights, immigration and healthcare. Mesa said she is thanked every day by immigrants, both legal and illegal, desperate for help.

But she doesn’t always receive praise. Mesa receives her share of phone calls from anti-illegal immigration activists.

Mesa doesn’t advertise what she does, but her friends sometimes do. And the questions begin. She has helped advise relatives, friends and even her landlord on immigration issues.

“If I go to a party, and my friend says, ‘She works at CHIRLA,’ my night is gone,” she said.

The coalition is well-known throughout the immigrant community and its hotline number, (888) 624-4752, frequently appears in Spanish-language media. The number also appears on fliers at community centers, health clinics and schools. The organization has gained the community’s trust by working firsthand with immigrants throughout the area, said John Ayala, chairman of the Southern California chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn.

Niels Frenzen, who runs the immigration clinic at USC, said unscrupulous attorneys, or notarios, prey on illegal immigrants, so it’s important to have a place such as the coalition where people can go for trustworthy advice. Even if the coalition tells an immigrant that nothing can be done to help them, “that is valid and valuable because it means they are less likely to be ripped off,” Frenzen said.

Some of the undocumented immigrant callers ask about risks involved in traveling to visit relatives or friends, Mesa said.

Fernando, for example, explained his situation: He has a driver’s license but no green card. He wants to travel from Glendale to Miami to spend New Year’s with some friends.

“I am going Greyhound. Is there any problem?” he asked.

Mesa explained that the trip could be risky. Immigration agents at checkpoints in Texas and New Mexico could board the buses, ask for immigration documents and arrest anyone without papers.

“I have seen it with my own eyes,” she answered.

“Is it better by plane?” he asked.

“By plane is worse,” she said, sighing. “It’s a great risk. . . . To travel, there is no safe way. Better to stay at home.”

anna.gorman@latimes.com