news-record.com

By Lorraine Ahearn

Metro Columnist

We can all sleep tonight, thanks to the diligence of Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson.

That’s because even as we speak, 23-year-old Marxavi Angel Martinez is locked up in a Charlotte holding cell, to be arraigned Monday on charges of aggravated identity theft.

This came after immigration agents, accompanied by a federally sworn Alamance deputy, acted on a tip Sheriff Johnson said he got from a confidential “reliable” informer.

The tip led straight to the Graham Public Library, where agents asked Martinez, a circulation clerk, to show proof of citizenship. When she couldn’t, they arrested her at her job.

The moment a judge released her, Martinez was bound over to federal custody on suspicion of misusing a Social Security number and making a false statement on a library job form.

Now, if you listen to the bleeding hearts, you’ll hear violins. The petite former cheerleader graduated with honors from Cummings High School, they tell you. She was working her way through community college, with a dream of teaching kindergarten. She’s married with a son, age 1.

And besides, the argument goes, she herself was brought here from Mexico legally as a child, age 3, by parents who came on a temporary visa, but then stayed to work in restaurants and raise two daughters. What choice did the children have?

A question our immigration system, such as it is, might answer this way:

Rules are rules. Illegal is illegal.

Ah, but that’s precisely where the problem may lie for Sheriff Johnson and several immigration-enforcement crusaders on the local board of health, lately a briar patch of issues over services to the undocumented.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that the rule of law is the rule of law. So, what happens when law enforcement doesn’t follow those rules? The arrests that result could conceivably turn out to be — much as we hate to use this word — “illegal.”

As we’ll see, the Martinez matter isn’t the only burr under the saddle for Johnson’s posse, a particularly aggressive version of local law enforcement deputized with the federal power of “ICE” — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Then again, seeing as the case involves a friendly, helpful young mother who worked at the library — suggesting that cafeteria lunch ladies and church custodians could be next — the Martinez story is quite enough.

“We have drug dealers and gang members walking the streets, and they go after somebody like this?” said Jackee Abercrombie, who retired from the Mebane library branch and knows Martinez. “Here’s somebody who worked hard, paid her taxes, put money into Social Security. Is this the United States of America?”

What some legal observers and the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina find most troubling in the Martinez matter was the shadowy origin of the tip.

Initially, Johnson told reporters that Martinez’s name surfaced in an investigation of people served by the Health Department — she sought prenatal care for her unborn son — but asked for notes excusing them from work under aliases.

The way the sheriff was tipped off implied that undocumented workers were being identified through medical records. What made things smell worse was that Martinez’s arrest came close on the heels of a flap raised by the Alamance Board of Health chairman, Keith Whited.

Whited, who is running for District Court judge with a promise to combat what he terms “an invasion of illegal immigrants,” in late June forced the Health Department to give him the roster of clients who requested aliases in notes to their employers. At the time, the Burlington Times-News quoted Whited as saying he was reviewing the list.

Though Sheriff Johnson could not be reached for comment Friday, his spokesman said the sheriff’s tipster was not employed at the Health Department and did not have access to confidential medical files.

“What was (the sheriff) supposed to do with this information, not pass it along?” said Johnson’s spokesman, Randy Jones. “Embarrassingly, it involved a county employee.”

Last week, as the case continued to grab headlines, a grad student acting in protest tried to turn himself in at the Alamance Sheriff’s Department, saying he was from Mexico and had no papers to prove he is here legally.

As the cameras rolled, the sheriff took pains to emphasize that his department does not perform immigration enforcement because that is a federal role.

On paper, the specific agreement between Alamance and ICE is a detention agreement, meaning that the wheels of immigration enforcement only begin turning after a person is arrested for some other crime. The purpose of what’s known as the 287(g) program, according to ICE, is to help local agencies catch major criminals — killers, rapists, drug smugglers, human traffickers.

But legal observers cite mounting evidence that when the cameras aren’t rolling, Alamance deputies are randomly arresting Hispanics, typically on minor traffic violations that otherwise wouldn’t result in arrest, in order to book them and check their immigration status.

Most glaring, of course, was the July case in which an Alamance deputy pulled a Honduran woman over on I-85 for an improper license plate and found that she had no license.

Although it was 2 a.m. and the woman’s three children were in the car, ages 6, 10 and 14, the deputy arrested the woman, and left the children with a male passenger from her church. The passenger, fearing arrest, then fled, and the children stayed in the car all night until a relative could get there.

At a hastily called citizen meeting in Elon on Thursday night, representatives from the Mexican consulate listened to alleged abuses from Alamance, the county that the ACLU’s state legal director called “ground zero” for over zealous enforcement.

Courthouse observers said Hispanics were being arrested on minor offenses and given neither interpreter services nor explanations of legal options. As a result, defendants were spending months in jail awaiting trial, then pleading guilty simply to get out.

For non-Hispanics, noted an attorney who has practiced in Alamance for eight years, it is unheard of to be arrested for having no license.

“It’s probably easier to let it happen to these people because they have no one to speak for them,” said the lawyer, Ebher Rossi, who serves on the Governor’s Advisory Council on Hispanic and Latino Affairs.

“But if we let it happen to them, there’s nothing to stop (authorities) from doing it to us.”

Earlier in the day at Graham Public Library, Martinez’s former co-workers said they were instructed not to talk about her arrest.

A library patron who knew Martinez said he was outraged, but didn’t want his name used — his wife is a county schoolteacher.

At the circulation desk, a clerk meanwhile struggled to communicate with a Spanish-speaking family. In a library branch that has a Spanish section, and keeps People en Espanol right next to the New York Review of Books, helping the Hispanic clientele was one of the bilingual Martinez’s duties.

But thanks to Sheriff Johnson, Alamance County is safe from the shy, 5-foot-2 former cheerleader, plus the high school sweetheart she married, her sister and parents, all of whom face deportation.

The only one unscathed so far is Martinez’s son, Wyatt, who at 16 months is hidden away somewhere, according to friends, with the good luck of being born a U.S. citizen.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m going to sleep much better tonight.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com