Nowhere to run

San Francisco police role in Mission District immigration raids may violate local law

By Camille T. Taiara

camille@sfbg.com

San Francisco's City of Refuge Ordinance was created to protect immigrants from abuse: If someone fears deportation, then they're not as likely to report a crime, demand decent work conditions, or report to a hospital if they've suffered an injury or become ill. So the law bars local officials from collaborating with federal immigration authorities in all but a few explicit circumstances.

Yet the Bay Guardian has learned that in at least one case, city cops helped US Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents and possibly even fingered immigrants for deportation, in apparent violation of that law. As a result, a 23-year-old man from El Salvador faces deportation and fears for his life.

Wilbert Anibal Castillo was originally picked up by ICE during an April 4 sweep at 20th and Lexington Streets as part of an operation named Mission Possible.

The subsequent ICE arrest report describes Mission Possible as "an ICE-led joint enforcement action with the California Department of Justice and the San Francisco Police Department."

Its stated purpose is to target alleged gang members. Yet Castillo was picked up only for immigration violations and insists he does not belong to any gang. He spent two and a half months in immigration detention before his attorney got him out on bail pending hearings on whether or not he can remain in the United States.

"Any collaboration between local police and immigration makes me very suspicious," La Raza Centro Legal's Renee Saucedo told us. Saucedo has been challenging ICE and local authorities on behalf of immigrants following a rash of raids in the first half of 2005.

In this case, "we're not only talking about a potential violation of the sanctuary ordinance," she said. If the SFPD suspected a group of young men were gang members but had no evidence to support criminal charges and pointed them out to ICE instead, then "we're talking about civil rights violations. We're talking about racial profiling."

Neighborhood gangs

Castillo was born to a single mother in Mizata, a poverty-stricken village along El Salvador's mountainous Pacific Coast. He moved in with his grandparents when he was 13 or 14 and soon began cutting classes and hanging out with the wrong crowd. "I rebelled," he said.

Castillo told us he was beaten up twice as a young teen by members of the notorious Mara 18 gang, who mistook him as a member of Mara Salvatrucha, their main rivals, because of where he lived and some of the people he knew. Castillo said gang members even tried to shoot him once. When those death threats were compounded by threats from a wealthy family whose daughter he dated, Castillo decided to flee to California.

"In El Salvador, if someone says they're going to kill you, they kill you," Castillo told us in Spanish.

Castillo says he's been working hard and sending his mother and siblings about $200 a month since arriving in the Bay Area five years ago. But he also joined a soccer team – and the specter of gang life visited him once again: Some of the other guys on the team were associated, to varying degrees, with San Francisco's Mara Salvatrucha.

"They're Salvadoran, like me," he said. "We became friends. We saw each other every Sunday," at soccer games and barbeques.

Castillo's only other arrest is a year-old, nonviolent misdemeanor – involving friends who stole a DVD from a car – for which he's completing a pre-plea diversion program. His attorney expects the charges to be dropped any day now.

Then came his arrest by ICE and the SFPD while he was headed to a taqueria with friends. The report describes Castillo as an "associate" of Mara Salvatrucha and says he was dressed in blue. But Castillo denies being a gang member and insists he was wearing black pants and a white shirt at the time of the arrest. He sports no tattoos and has never been convicted of any crime.

No refuge

In many ways, Castillo is just the kind of person the City of Refuge Ordinance was formulated to protect – a recently arrived Central American fleeing systemic violence back home.

"The late '80s were a particularly vulnerable time for immigrants from Central America" – mostly recent refugees from vicious, US-supported civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, said Robert Rubin, the principal drafter of the ordinance. Rubin now serves as legal director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. "Criminal elements would prey on them, knowing that they would not report it."

The City of Refuge Ordinance, passed in 1989, explicitly prohibits local officers from assisting in the enforcement of immigration laws or even inquiring into people's immigration status, except as overtly required by state and federal law. San Francisco authorities may only alert the feds to undocumented immigrants who've been booked on felony charges.

"Backup assistance is justified only in rare circumstances where INS [sic] agents are in 'significant' danger," SFPD guidelines state.

After we provided the SFPD with a copy of the ICE report, Sgt. Neville Gittens of the SFPD's Public Affairs Office admitted police took part in the operation. "We did assist, but our focus is on criminal activity," Gittens said later. Yet Castillo was not charged with any crime. Fifteen immigrants were swept up by ICE in the Mission District from April 4 to 6, according to a subsequent ICE press release.

"I'm afraid"

ICE's characterization of Castillo as a gang member makes him even more vulnerable should he be returned home, said attorney Karl Krooth, who's applied for asylum for Castillo.

"We know that the US government is identifying individuals as gang members when they're deported," Krooth told us. And back in El Salvador, being tagged as a member of Mara Salvatrucha puts a person at risk of violence not only from Mara 18, but from the Salvadoran government, which has instituted draconian zero-tolerance laws, and from paramilitary groups.

"I'm afraid of what they'll do to me," Castillo told us.

His next immigration hearing is March 15.

"It'll all be decided in the space of a couple of hours," Krooth said. And frankly, he's worried. "Unfortunately, we're dealing with an executive branch that's extremely biased against foreign nationals who're alleged to be gang members."