Year after raid, Cache mightily divided over immigrants

LOGAN - Cache Valley residents looked into the faces of the children and spouses left behind in the Christmastime raid at Swift a little over a year ago and reacted with their hearts and their hands.
    They tied quilts and donated clothing, food and fuel. They boned up on passport rules and helped fearful strangers figure out how to return home to Mexico or Central America or survive here without the family breadwinner.
    But did seeing the human side of the immigration debate change how Cache Valley residents think about immigrants?
    Not much.
    "It was a humane response, but I'm not sure of the extent that it affected attitudes," says Kelly James, coordinator for second-language services in the Cache School District.
    The compassionate response was about people, not politics, says Melanie Domenech Rodriguez, a psychology professor at Utah State University who helped the families.
    Sen. Lyle Hillyard, R-Logan, agrees that residents remain essentially in the anti-immigration or pro-immigration camps.
    "We're really divided. A lot of people have made a decision. They're one way or the other," says Hillyard.
    Already on the margins, many Cache Valley immigrants have gone virtually underground.
    "They have by and large removed themselves from the public eye," says Jason Williams, a family therapist at Bear River Mental Health, where he has counseled Spanish speakers, including children of those arrested, for anxiety and depression in the past year.
    Many immigrants had dropped their guard while living among Cache County's "kind" people, he says. The Swift raid, he says, "destroyed all that."
    Now their lives are marked by "hyper-vigilance, severe anxiety, suspicion of law enforcement," says Williams. "They are feeling, in a very large sense, 'I can no longer feel safe here.' "
    In fear, many have left jobs at large employers, such as Swift and Icon Fitness & Health, and now work in construction or on farms in Cache, where they make less money but feel less visible.
    Rolando Murillo, an insurance agent who is on the local board of the national advocacy group ACELA, says immigrants are also feeling heat from strident anti-immigration residents.
    "There is a wave of anti-immigration," says Murillo. "We saw a face of the valley we had not seen before, which was an ugly one."
    Murillo has received screaming phone calls from people angry that he helps "wetbacks." He tells of a Logan business owner, an immigrant, who closed his windshield-repair business and left town after threatening phone calls.
    Hillyard says he was shocked to hear a high school student at the county fair suggest immigrants be shot at the border.
    David Bennett, chief deputy in the Cache County Sheriff's Office, says it took several meetings with local Latino leaders, but immigrants seem to have gotten the message that local law enforcement officers are not interested in their immigration status, unless they commit a crime.
    Deputies don't check the legal status of those pulled over for traffic infractions or who are witnesses to crimes, he says.
    "It was an us-[versus]-them mentality for a while," says Bennett. "Things are as back to as normal as possible."
    Murillo says Cache County learned one thing in the raid: At least at Swift, the immigrants were not displacing American workers.
    The company struggled for months to replace the arrested workers. The meatpacker had to shut down for a time, raise pay and offer bonuses to employees who recruited friends. Even then, productivity was slow to recover, says Murillo.
    Hillyard agrees. "It opened eyes that they are not taking jobs Americans want," he says. "If suddenly they [immigrants] were all taken out of our environment, we'd have a lot of employment problems."