Texas Mayor Caught in Deportation Furor
IRVING, Tex. — Just after sunrise one morning last summer, as his two sons hurried out the door to school, Oscar Urbina might have presented a portrait of domestic stability in this Dallas suburb, a 35-year-old man with a nice home, a thriving family and a steady contracting job.
But a few weeks earlier, after buying a Dodge Ram truck at a local dealership, he had been summoned back to deal with some paperwork problems. And shortly after he arrived, so did the police, who arrested him on charges of using a false Social Security number.
Mr. Urbina does not deny it; he has been living illegally in the Dallas area since coming to the country from Mexico in 1993. But the turn of events stunned him in a once-welcoming place where people had never paid much attention to Social Security numbers.
If the arrest had come earlier, it might have had little effect on his life. But two years ago, Irving made a decision, championed by its first-term mayor, Herbert A. Gears, to conduct immigration checks on everyone booked into the local jail. So Mr. Urbina was automatically referred to the federal authorities and now faces possible deportation, becoming one of more than 4,000 illegal immigrants here who have ended up in similar circumstances.
As battles over illegal immigration rage around the country, Irving's crackdown is not unusual in itself. What makes it striking is that it happened with the blessing of a mayor like Mr. Gears, an immigrant-friendly Democrat with deep political ties to the city's Hispanic leaders, a man who likes to preach that adapting to immigration — especially in a city like his, now almost half-Hispanic — is not a burden but an opportunity, or as he says, it's "not a have-to, it's a get-to."
But as a wave of sentiment against illegal immigration built around Dallas and the nation, Mr. Gears came to realize that his city would be unable to remain on the sidelines — and that his own political future would depend on how he navigated newly treacherous terrain.
Irving is one of a growing number of cities across America where immigration control, a federal prerogative, is reshaping politics at the other end of the spectrum, the local level, in the absence of a national policy overhaul. To watch its experiment play out over the better part of the past year in City Hall and in its residents' lives is to see how difficult political moderation has become in the debate over what to do with the country's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
Irving's jail program was started by the city's police chief as an experiment with federal immigration officials. But Mr. Gears saw in it a kind of release valve for the political pressure building around him, which had been energized by much more aggressive measures to force out illegal immigrants in Farmers Branch, a smaller suburb next door.
"I let my instincts rule the moment in that instance," he said. "What weighed heavily in my thoughts is that if we didn't do something, a lot more immigrants were going to be hurt."
"And now," Mr. Gears added ruefully, "I'm the hero of every redneck in America."
Nationally, most of the attention in the immigration fight has centered on smaller cities that have taken a hard line on illegal immigration, like Farmers Branch and Hazleton, Pa., or on cities that have moved to protect illegal immigrants, like San Francisco and New Haven.
Irving is one of the places with a growing percentage of illegal immigrants that has tried to take — Mr. Gears's critics say has stumbled upon — a much less explored middle road.
As a first-ring suburb whose non-Hispanic white population has slipped from the majority in the last few years, Irving describes itself as a multicultural community. Under Mr. Gears, it recently opened a hospital clinic that caters to low-income patients, many of them Hispanic, and gave $100,000 to support its fledgling Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
But even as it was doing so, its policy on immigration checks prompted the Mexican consul in Dallas to issue an unusual warning to Mexican immigrants to stay clear of Irving. And businesses both Hispanic-owned and not, including Wal-Mart, began howling to the mayor that fear was driving away Hispanic customers.
Mr. Gears, 46, is a big, gregarious, politically agile Texan who won re-election last May against an opponent whose campaign promised much tougher immigration measures. The mayor describes the rise of such sentiment around him as disturbing, a manifestation of "domestic extremism," and he derides its adherents as "the crankies."
"We defeated the crankies, and no one thought we could," Mr. Gears said of his re-election. "We've defined what our responsibility is, and that's only to allow the federal government to do its job. It's not our responsibility to evaluate it or assess whether it's good or not."
Mr. Gears happened to be making these points in a booth at his favorite local bar, where he was being served by his favorite waitress, a friendly mother of five — in the country illegally — whom he has known for years and tips lavishly to help her make ends meet.
He acknowledges that Irving's policy, whose chief goal is to get rid of dangerous criminals who are in the country illegally, has resulted in "casualties," with many people deported as a result of lesser, nonviolent offenses like driving without a license or insurance.
The police chief, Larry Boyd, said he believed that the city's enviable crime rate (last year was its lowest on record) is at least partly due to the deportation program. "You will never hear me blaming Irving's crime problems on illegal immigration," Chief Boyd said. But he added that the program "keeps some criminals off of Irving's streets longer and potentially keeps them off of Irving's streets for good."
The city's political straddle on immigration has angered and confounded Mr. Gears's opponents. Critics to the right accuse him of opportunism and of shirking his duty to legal residents. Advocates for the immigrants accuse him essentially of undercutting them.
But Mr. Gears's position is one he seems to struggle every day to defend, said Carlos Quintanilla, a vocal advocate who, like many other Hispanic leaders, initially supported the jail program but now deplores it.
"I call Herb the most tormented man in America," Mr. Quintanilla said.
The Hard-liners
Lucia Rottenberg, an Irving resident for almost 40 years, was upset in June 2007 when she stood at a City Council meeting in the amphitheater-like chambers at City Hall. Citing fears of crime, disease and economic harm to her city, Ms. Rottenberg called for tougher measures against illegal immigrants and bragged that her husband used his vacation time to volunteer with the Texas Minutemen, a contentious civilian group that tries to keep people from crossing the border illegally.
As she turned to leave the lectern, Mr. Gears leaned into his microphone and stopped her.
"I need to clear something up, because I was told something that was disturbing," he said. "Were you at a meeting, a club meeting, where applause was given to the comment that anyone who comes over the border should be shot?"
Ms. Rottenberg, who has contributed to one of Mr. Gears's campaigns and whom Mr. Gears said he considers a friend, confirmed she was at the meeting. "I don't remember if there was applause or not," she said, taken aback.
"Did you make that remark?" Mr. Gears asked..
"Yes, I did," she admitted, her voice rising. "And my frustration is this — "
Mr. Gears cut her short: "You don't have to explain it to me. I understand."
It was at that Council session that the city adopted the federal cooperation program for residency checks inside the jail. It was also a public turning point in the political reorientation of Mr. Gears, who spoke volubly, sometimes irascibly, in defense of the checks while trying to shame those he saw as using immigration to divide the city further.
"I viewed it as something that would be painful to some, and so that was distasteful to me," Mr. Gears said later about the jail policy. "But we were in a battle here on this issue."
Like many Texas cities its size, Irving was mostly white a generation ago, a farming town turned sprawling suburb as middle-class families flocked to its affordable neighborhoods.
In 1970, when the city's population hit 100,000, the Census estimated that less than 5 percent was Hispanic. By 1990 the percentage had tripled, during the next decade it doubled, and it is now thought to be 45 percent or higher. In the fall of 2008, the last time a count was taken, 70 percent of the students enrolled in kindergarten through fifth grade in Irving's schools were Hispanic.
While no one knows exactly how much of that increase was a result of illegal immigration, Irving was one of several Dallas suburbs that experienced a huge influx of illegal workers as part of the wave that has tripled the nation's illegal population since 1996. Officials estimate that more than 20 percent of Irving's 200,000 residents may be in the country illegally.
A drive down North Belt Line Road, one of the city's commercial spines, takes a visitor past a big Kroger grocery store whose next-door neighbor is a La Michoacana Meat Market almost its equal in size. Both stores sit not far from dozens of Hispanic restaurants, laundries, stores, auto-repair garages and curanderas, or psychics' shops, scattered throughout the city's south side.
Some white, longtime Irving residents say illegal immigration has done much more to erode than bolster the city's older shopping strips and neighborhoods, its image and its property values. They complain to Mr. Gears about white flight from the Irving Mall and about well-kept older residential blocks marred by "patrón houses," overcrowded single-family homes, clustered with cars, used as bunkhouses for illegal workers.
Beth Van Duyne, a city councilwoman who advocates tougher immigration policies and has battled Mr. Gears, likes to show visitors a favorite exhibit in her case, a hulking big-box store that was once a Wal-Mart. It is now called Irving Bazaar, a battered flea-market-like assortment of merchants with handmade window advertisements in Spanish for wrestling matches and cheap jewelry.
"People hate it," Ms. Van Duyne said. "It's just not a good thing to have in your city."
Such discontent had been rising for years, though as recently as 2005, when Mr. Gears was elected to his first term, it remained well below the political surface. Sue Richardson, the vice president of the Greater Irving Republican Club and probably Mr. Gears's most persistent opponent, said she believed that it had finally risen into view because many people realized Irving was in the midst of a "silent invasion" from Mexico.
"The people who come here illegally across the border are not educated people," Ms. Richardson said. "They don't have any culture or any respect for ours.."
A Political Career
Arriving one fall morning at a regular kaffeeklatsch of longtime residents — a mostly white group that once held court in a diner but, since it closed, has moved to a Mexican restaurant — Mr. Gears made his way around the table shaking hands and telling jokes. "This is where I cut my teeth," he said. "These are the people who really run the place."
He looks and often plays the part of a good old boy, a flamboyant dresser with flashy gold-rimmed eyeglasses and rings and cufflinks embossed with pictures of Elizabeth Taylor, who reminds him of his mother when she was young. Mr. Gears's stamina and self-confidence as a talker can evoke a combination of used-car salesman and Southern Baptist preacher, though his fondness for vodka, Marlboro reds and easygoing profanity might disqualify him from the pulpit.
"You're going to think I'm making this up, but I was known as Bubba when I was young," he said. "Now when I go back to the country they call me Mayor Bubba."
Mr. Gears makes a comfortable living running a financial consulting firm with his wife. But he owes his political career to the poor and the working class, both Hispanic and not. A pivotal issue in his first City Council campaign (the contests are nonpartisan, though Mr. Gears describes himself as a conservative Democrat) was his support for beleaguered mobile home residents, and the "trailer-house vote," as he likes to call it, made the difference.
He could readily identify with those voters. He was born in East Texas to a deeply troubled mother who raised him and his two sisters mostly by herself while wrestling with poverty and drug addiction; she committed suicide at 63.
Mr. Gears clearly relishes the political life and thrives in it. He raised almost $100,000 in contributions in last year's mayoral race, a huge sum for such suburban contests. But he says he has no higher political aspirations than perhaps to serve another term or two as mayor. He jokes that "the Democrats wouldn't have me — especially now — and I wouldn't have the Republicans." Still, he counts among his backers powerful and wealthy real-estate developers, and his political options remain open.
In public, Mr. Gears reveals few hints of the internal turmoil that friends describe. His oldest Hispanic friends say they understand why he supports the jail policy but add that the position has always sat uncomfortably on the shoulders of a man who has long worked for Hispanic causes, including serving as president of a local nonprofit group that helps immigrants.
"I think the world of Herb," said Platon Lerma, who is considered the grandfather of Irving's Hispanic activists. But Mr. Lerma, 82, said he believed that the immigration checks had betrayed the mayor's ideals.
"To me the program itself is a crime, in human terms," he said. "We're breaking up families. We're not doing right in the eyes of God."
But in the next breath he added that Mr. Gears had simply chosen "the best of several evils." Hispanic residents of Irving do not vote in large numbers, Mr. Lerma explained, and it had become apparent that too many other voters were clamoring for immigration change.
If the election last year had gone to Mr. Gears's closest opponent, a lawyer, Roland Jeter — who had warned that Irving was becoming a "sanctuary city" for illegal immigrants — it would have almost certainly sent the city down a more stringent path.
In his campaign, Mr. Jeter advocated joining a federal program that deputizes police officers as immigration agents. The program has resulted in large numbers of deportations in other cities, and has sometimes led them to initiate other aggressive measures to round up illegal immigrants.
Still, even the more passive approach taken by Irving soon became unpopular among Hispanics. In 2006, before the systematic jail checks began, local police officers were handing about 300 people a year to the federal government for immigration reasons. By the summer of 2007, as many as 300 people a month were entering immigration proceedings, and Mr. Quintanilla, the Hispanic advocate who only three months earlier had spoken in support of the policy at the City Council hearing, helped organize protests against it.
Mr. Gears soon found himself defending the approach on national television while trying to deflect blame toward those he believes are responsible for the problem.
"The complaint that people have with this program," he said on CNN, "should be directed at the federal government."
Restive Allies
Now, nearly a year after his re-election, Mr. Gears is still vilified by his conservative opponents while also facing a simmering rebellion from Mr. Quintanilla and other Hispanic leaders, who say the jail policy has unnecessarily damaged the lives of people who have had no serious run-ins with the law.
As of early March, of the 4,074 people whose arrest led to their being handed over to immigration officials, 129 had been charged with violent crimes or illegal possession of weapons, and 714 with other types of serious felonies. In addition, 579 had been charged with driving while intoxicated. The other 2,625 had been arrested for lesser offenses; the largest categories were public intoxication and not having a driver's license or insurance.
If he were in charge of changing federal policy, Mr. Gears said, he would find a way to allow many illegal immigrants to move toward citizenship. It is a goal that was sought by President George W. Bush and now, in a similar plan, by President Obama.
For now, Mr. Gears is still smiling, still talking and still trying to be the mayor of all of Irving's inhabitants, even those he knows might soon be gone, like Mr. Urbina, the illegal immigrant who now awaits a deportation hearing.
Not long before Mr. Urbina's arrest, the mayor tossed out the first pitch at the opening of a Pony Baseball World Series for 9- and 10-year-olds, who had come to town from places as far away as Puerto Rico and Mexico. The event felt like a United Nations game, with national flags and food and blaring music. "Isn't this great?" Mr.. Gears said. "This is what Irving's all about."
Using his scant Spanish to throw around the occasional greeting, the mayor took his place on the field in his French-cuffed shirt, sweating alongside players from one of Irving's teams, their names spelled out on the backs of their jerseys: Gomez, Conaway, Aleman, Shastid, Riker, Flores, Herrin, Childress, Ehrke, Rodriguez.
As the strains of the Puerto Rican anthem faded from the loudspeakers, Mr. Gears took the mound and wound up. His pitch was low, but the catcher scooped it up from the dirt, and the mayor walked off to generous applause.
"Fighting him is kind of like fighting against your brother," Mr. Quintanilla said of his friend the mayor. "But you put your guard down, and the first thing you know you're being hit in the face."
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