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Home - Cover Stories
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Dark Divide
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Fremont’s do-it-yourself immigration ordinance has turned neighbor against neighbor
by Rob McLean
On her Nebraskans Advisory Group’s website, Susan Smith looks like a cross between Sarah Palin and “Rocky and Bullwinkle’s” Natasha Fatale.
Standing above a bald eagle wearing a sparkling American flag on its face like a luchador mask, her animated avatar’s scratchy, recorded voice warns web surfers that the group means business.
“And now a message to all sanctuary city politicians and those who profit from illegal immigration,” Smith says. “Citizens across the country will not tolerate illegal immigration or amnesty, nor will we allow you to manipulate or bastardize the laws of our land.”
Much of the site’s content references the Fremont ordinance adopted by voters last month, banning the renting of homes and the hiring of undocumented immigrants. The law was written in part by the same person who wrote the law forcing Arizona police to question the citizenship of suspected undocumented persons, along with immigration ordinances in communities across the country.
Fremont, like those other cities, could eventually spend millions of dollars to defend its law, with no guarantee it could ever be enforced.
The city of about 25,000 has grown over the last 20 years largely because foreign workers from Spanish-speaking countries who were attracted to its meatpacking industry. Fremont is about 74 percent white, and about 15 percent Latino or Hispanic, according to 2008 census records.
But the ordinance has divided the community into those who are white, and those who aren’t. Latino citizens have reported being shot at, yelled at and denied bathroom access. It’s created a paranoid environment where neighbors suspect neighbors, said Kristin Ostrom of One Fremont-One Community, a group that opposes the law.
“In Fremont now, Hispanic equals illegal,” Ostrom said.
As the Smith avatar’s eyes follow your cursor, she claims heaven helped locals to pass Fremont’s law.
“Emotions are ranging from tears of relief and joy to a renewed sense of hope for the future of our state and country,” she says. “The road has been a long and hard one, but with God’s help and courageous citizens, Nebraskans have prevailed.”
***
Divine intervention didn’t stop the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal and Education Defense Fund from filing separate federal lawsuits last week to stop the law from taking effect July 29. The ACLU suit seeks a temporary restraining order, leading to a permanent injunction. It requires every renter buy a permit and prove citizenship or immigration status; employers must use the government’s E-Verify system in an effort to ensure workers are legal.
Both suits argue the ordinance violates the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause which gives the federal government authority over immigration and other specific areas. They contend the ordinace violates the equal protection and due process clauses. And they claim it violates the federal Fair Housing Act and state laws on municipal powers.
MALDEF is representing five plaintiffs, ranging from landlords to immigrants.
The ACLU suit has a unique twist — its Nebraska chapter is a litigant. The organization fears the Fremont city attorney would sue because the ACLU doesn’t use the E-Verify system that the the ordinance requires. The chapter’s employees often work in the city.
The organization will represent six other litigants in the case, said ACLU Nebraska Executive Director Laurel Marsh, including four tenants, a landlord and the United Food and Commercial Union, Local 22.
The Fair Housing Act doesn’t speak to citizenship, said Tim Butz. ACLU Nebraska’s former executive director, and current assistant director for the Fair Housing Center of Nebraska-Iowa, said the law makes no reference to illegal immigration status. However a landlord could use immigration status if he used it consistently.
But he said Fremont’s ordinance wouldn’t be used consistently — it would allow discrimination against Latinos. The city requires police to enforce the law, but it’s unclear whether authorities will be trained in fair housing laws or if they would speak in other languages besides English.
A Fremont spokesperson said the city has three Spanish-speaking officers.
Butz said police mistrust might also hinder legal immigrants’ ability to find housing. The ordinance requires police to collect immigration information from renters, but some undocumented immigrants may be reluctant to speak with authorities.
“Immigrants are wary of the police,” he said, via email. “They have fled countries where the police are abusive, corrupt and not their friends.”
Fremont City Council will consider suspending its law and could decide who will represent the city in court at a July 27 meeting.
One thing’s for sure, defending the law won’t come cheap.
The cities of Hazelton, Pa., and Farmers Branch, Texas, passed similar laws in 2006 that have yet to be enforced. Instead, the cities — similar in size to Fremont — have paid millions of dollars in costs and have been tied up in the courts for years.
Farmers Branch has paid $3.2 million — about $800,000 a year — to defend its ordinance, according to a fact sheet published by the City of Fremont. And Hazelton has paid even more, about $5 million — some $1.25 million annually — on legal fees.
Hazelton and Farmers Branch faced their legal costs alone. The cities’ insurance companies refused to cover them, because of the ordinance’s illegality, according to the City of Fremont. Hazelton is suing its insurance carrier to pay $4.6 million of its court fees.
Those costly lawsuits have helped persuade nearly 40 other cities to forego similar laws, according to the City of Fremont. And city officials estimate implementing the ordinance would cost Fremont an average of $1 million a year.
But the toll the issue has already taken on the community may also give the city pause.
***
Miriam Berganza, 36, and her family have felt the sting of the regulation. Berganza moved to the U.S. from Mexico when she was 9 years old. She came to Fremont three years ago from Emporia, Kan., where she and her husband worked at a Tyson meatpacking plant. Her husband now works at the Hormel plant south of town. She became a U.S. citizen two years ago.
She said Fremont was the nicest place she had lived — with numerous parks and schools close to her home.
Things have changed. She doesn’t want to let her two teenage children leave the house. When her family speaks Spanish while shopping at Wal-Mart, other customers tell them to use English. And at the lakes around Fremont where all the town’s families would relax to play during the summer, Berganza rarely sees Latinos.
“You don’t feel safe anymore,” she said. Berganza has no answer when her 15-year-old daughter asks why she is treated differently in school, despite being a U.S. citizen.
She says the ordinance is “crazy nonsense.”
She’s not alone. More than 200 Latinos packed the Sinai Lutheran Church July 18 when One Fremont-One Future held a question-and-answer meeting for the Latino community and city officials. City Administrator Robert Hartwig and Deputy Police Chief Jeff Elliot explained the law and how it would be enforced.
Organizers at One Fremont-One Future said some landlords are asking for immigration papers, though the law has not taken effect. And they presented statements made by anonymous Fremont residents who have been harassed in public:
“Three days ago, while looking out my window, I discovered my family was being fired at with BB guns. I am not afraid for myself. I am afraid for my children,” one resident who chose to remain anonymous told the organization. Latinos in Fremont are afraid to reveal their names, Ostrom said, because they feel so much hostility.
One ACLU plaintiff — a U.S. citizen born in Fremont — took her child into a store to use the restroom. The store clerk told her “no restrooms for Mexicans.”
Plaintiff Mario Martinez’s wife was told to “go back to Mexico” because of her accent, according to the lawsuit. And Martinez, an American citizen who has lived in Fremont for 13 years, has seen T-shirts worn by fellow townsfolk saying “Proud to be an American: If You’re Not, Go Home.”
Nebraska Appleseed and other organizations have collected dozens of anonymous, handwritten testimonies from Fremont’s Latino community, telling of 10-year-old children afraid to play outside and El Salvadorean immigrants being offered that popular refrain: “Go back to Mexico.”
Fremont citizens and others can be heard expressing fears in a recording of a city council meeting two years ago. Fremont resident John Wiegert told the council that American culture was under attack.
“We do not want our public schools burdened with the massive influx of non-English speaking children of parents who broke our laws,” he said.
At the meeting, Smith stayed true to her animated doppelganger when she said illegal immigrants bring disease into America.
“Nobody’s even talking about the medical theft that’s going on,” she said. “The health issues — the Center for Disease Control has reports of tuberculosis and how Mexico is one of the biggest ... Illegal aliens, no matter which country they come from are the main cause … of the diseases coming into our country.”
***
Kris Kobach is Boris to Smith’s Natasha. And he’s the attorney Smith wants to represent the city.
He’s uniquely qualified. Kobach works with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a hate group, citing its funding sources and the ideology of its founder. He helped write the controversial Arizona law that makes it a crime for aliens not to carry immigration papers, as well as laws in Farmer’s Branch and Hazelton. And he’s running for Kansas Secretary of State on a platform that promises to end purported voter fraud by undocumented immigrants, though the incumbent Kansas Secretary of State says none of the seven cases of voter fraud reported in the last five years involved undocumented immigrants.
Just as the agenda-armed Kobach swoops into communities to which he has no ties, Smith lives in Omaha. She told The Reader its the duty of citizens like her to become involved when politicians do nothing.
Her attitude appears the same as it was during that city council meeting in 2008, when she asked officials, “If the city council does not pass this ordinance, will the citizens be placed in a position to defend ourselves by any means necessary?”
The U.S. District Court in Omaha will hear the ACLU’s complaint July 28 — one day before the city ordinance would go into effect. A rock concert in Benson on July 31 will help raise funds for ACLU’s legal costs. The Reader and its sister publication El Perico are media partners for the event. Smith and her group plan to protest at the concert.
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