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Saturday, 1 April 2006
Latino suburb welcomes illegals
BBC News, Maywood, California
|  Much of California's manual work is carried out by immigrants
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Driving around Maywood there is little to distinguish this small Los Angeles suburb from any other predominantly Hispanic area.
Maywood is 97% Latino. You can hear the Spanish tones on every street and on every radio station.
Familiar strip malls are peppered with signs such as Clinica Latina, Pescaderia and Agua.
But Maywood is a trend setter. In the midst of an intense national debate about immigration the city council has officially declared Maywood a safe haven for illegal immigrants.
At a weekly immigrants' support group meeting there is a sense of purpose in the air.
It is chaired by the driving force behind the controversial decision, Maywood's deputy mayor Felipe Aguirre.
"We don't think that people are breaking the law if they simply don't have documents, so we decided to turn this place into a sanctuary city," he said.
Police accused
Not everyone in Maywood is pleased, but at the Saint Rose of Lima church they seem to be singing with one voice - in favour of the council's decision.
The congregation is strongly backing the move, which is seen less as a statement about national immigration reform than an answer to the local police setting up check points and impounding cars belonging to the many local people without documents.
"I used to see women having to walk home with tiny children," explained Rosa Pecheko.
"The police said they were stopping people to check for drunk drivers, but that's not what they were really doing. They were just taking away the cars from those without driving licenses and taking money from them."
When he is not preaching to his flock, Pastor David Velasquez is speaking in revolutionary tones.
"The people felt that they were being persecuted, but now they have the power over the police. They can't tell us what to do."
At the local police station, Lieutenant Pine agreed to share his concerns about enforcing the law in a city that has declared itself above it.
"We need clarity. We don't know what's going on," he said.
He denied that the police checkpoints were an attempt to make money from illegal immigrants: "At those checkpoints we caught a lot of people breaking the law. We found drunks, felons - we even found one man who had just murdered his wife and still had blood on his hands and the knife in his car."
Wider debate
If the police are confused, many Californians are angry.
On the John and Ken show on local Los Angeles radio station KFI 640 Maywood's mayor was angrily accused of turning his city into a magnet for illegal immigrants.
Felipe Aguirre says he has had threatening phone messages and other council members have received physical threats. But he remains defiant.
"We don't consider these immigration laws to be just. It's not right that if I'm talking to someone who doesn't have the correct papers, I could be considered a felon. No, we answer to a higher law."
And other communities are beginning to follow Maywood's lead.
It is not clear whether this stance will help the cause of illegal immigrants.
But what it does make plain is just how polarised - and passionate - the debate about them has become in the US.
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We don't think that people are breaking the law if they simply don't have documents
