Yesterday thousands of volunteers from the political campaigns knocked on doors to invite undecided voters to vote for their candidate. But in the homes of some Latino families, when a stranger knocks on your door, it can mean bad news. The last time that three strangers knocked on the door of the Avalos Yépez family, they were not wearing buttons with the face of a presidential candidate. Rather they had metal plates identifying them as immigration agents.
“They came to arrest my husband, but he wasn’t home that day,” Elizabeth Yépez says of the events last July 8. “They intimidated me, and they told me that if I didn’t tell them where he was that they would arrest me too.”
What Yépez most feared was that her two children, a 6-year-old boy and a 4-year-old girl, would be left by themselves. That is why, after learning of the visit and after a lot of thought, Yépez’s husband Juan Avalos decided to turn himself in.
“Since we have no money, my husband decided to turn himself in so that I would not be taken as well and the children left alone,” said Yépez, unable to hold back tears. Avalos in now in a federal prison in Iowa, and he could be sentenced to two years in prison for identity theft, among other charges.
Juan Avalos was one of the first victims of an immigration raid that a year ago shook Marshalltown, a town 35 miles from Des Moines, the capital of the state. On December12, 2006, Immigration agents surrounded the Swifty &Co. meat processing plant and arrested 90 people. The operation was repeated in other cities, ending with 1,297 arrests.
At that time, Avalos, who had been working for three years at the company, was deported within days to Mexico, his native country. However, he decided to return to be with his family, which he started with Yépez 13 years ago. The children were in school and they were paying a mortgage on their house in this small town of 27,000 inhabitants, including around 7,000 Latinos.
“With children, a wife and a house here, how could he leave everything? He had to come back,” said Olga Yépez, Elizabeth’s sister, a U.S. resident who today helps support the family, and visits Juan in jail. The lawyer recommended that Elizabeth not visit Juan in jail, since she would run the risk of being detained as well.
In these times of the electoral campaign, Yépez spends her days at home. She says that she still does not know what will happen with her husband. “If he can’t be here, the best thing is for us all to go.”
Many other Latino families live the same drama in silence. “The candidates when they come don’t talk about the roundups,” said Carmen Montealegre of the Santa María Church, who was there when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama visited the town. “When they were asked, they only said that they will work for immigrants, but that’s all.”
The impact that the raids has had on this town of wooden houses and snow-covered gardens is still visible on the streets. After the operation, many undocumented families left. On the main street, it is easy to see old signs for restaurants selling Latino food that, according to some, closed after the arrests.
“The fear in the town is real,” said Erica Balmer, coordinator in Marshalltown of Latinos in Action. According to Balmer, the arrival of Latinos a decade ago benefited business and life in the town.
