Federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, arrest a woman at Sun Valley Group’s Arcata floral farms in 2008. | Photo by Bob Doran, courtesy the North Coast Journal.

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Celestino hasn’t heard from his immigration lawyer in years. After getting wrapped up in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid on Arcata’s Sun Valley Group in 2008, he and a coworker, José, hired a Bay Area attorney named Christopher Todd. 

“We paid that lawyer so he would be able to help us find some kind of work permit,” Celestino told the Outpost in a recent interview. “He told us he’d look into it, but he hasn’t sent us any paperwork — not a phone call or anything.”

Nearly 60, Celestino has iron-gray hair and wears wire-rim glasses over his weathered face. He’s currently employed at a local restaurant, and he spoke to the Outpost through an interpreter at our office in Old Town Eureka. José, 33, wore an Adidas ball-cap and striped shirt to an interview at Starbucks. Small and athletic, he had numbers and notes written in ball-point pen on his forearm. José currently works in the fisheries industry.

Like the rest of the Sun Valley Seven — a group of Mexican immigrants fighting to stay in the United States — Celestino and José have appealed their deportation orders on the grounds that the evidence against them was obtained illegally. A stay of their removal orders has been granted while their cases are reviewed in San Francisco’s Ninth District Court of Appeals, but with a backlog of more than 80,000 immigration cases statewide there’s no telling how long it will take to resolve them. In the meantime they’re here, living and working in Humboldt County. (Celestino is a pseudonym; José was fine using his actual given name.)

Celestino said it’s difficult not knowing if he’ll get to stay in the U.S. and not knowing what his attorney is doing about the situation. 

“It’s that feeling of being in purgatory,” he said. “I even sent him a fax and a letter, telling him that I paid everything and that I needed some kind of paper I could show [to be able to work].” Celestino has spent upwards of $10,000 on legal fees, including more than $2,000 paid to Christopher Todd. 

José has paid Todd the same amount, and he said the uncertainty of his status here is stressful. “When you don’t have an ID, a social security number, when you don’t have the opportunities and you have to be in a process that’s so long, so tedious … and thinking, ‘What’s gonna happen tomorrow?’ It’s very difficult,” he said.

Celestino has tried to contact Todd.

“Sometimes I want to communicate but he doesn’t answer his phone,” Celestino said of his ostensible attorney. “I don’t know anything about what is happening. I have a card of his at home … . It’s the only thing I have. So I don’t know anything about what is happening. I don’t know anything.”

According to Fernando Paz, a community organizer with the nonprofit True North Organizing Network, it’s not uncommon for people to take advantage of immigrants. “The cases of fraud among undocumented people is really high — either being defrauded by lawyers or by notaries, by people who say they can help you process your paperwork and then they don’t,” he said.

Paz contacted Todd on behalf of Celestino and José and was told he needed to obtain a release from the two men granting Todd permission to discuss the case with him. Paz got the release and sent it to Todd but never heard back — until last week, after the Outpost had managed to reach Todd via email.

In Todd’s email to the Outpost he said Celestino and José’s cases have gone exactly as he’d hoped and projected. With the stays on their deportation orders in place (for more than three years now), there’s “not much to do for either of them,” Todd wrote.

He made no mention of obtaining work permits for Celestino and José, and as of publication time he hadn’t responded to a follow-up email.

It’s not just attorneys and notaries who take advantage of vulnerable immigrants. Documented or not, non-native employees often work long hours in dangerous conditions for less than minimum wage. Employers who hire these workers save money on workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, health coverage and disability, and the workers have no legal recourse for complaints.

Celestino came to Humboldt County in 1999 from the Mexico City suburb of Valle de Chalco. He was hired almost immediately to cut tulips at Sun Valley Group’s Arcata floral farm. In an interview with the Outpost Sun Valley CEO Lane DeVries insisted his company follows all employment laws. But Celestino said the company’s management never asked for any documentation. 

“They knew that I didn’t have paperwork,” he said.

For immigrants, paperwork can be your salvation (if you manage to get a work permit, for example), but it can also be your downfall. On Sep. 3, 2008, the day of the raid, José nearly signed his own deportation order.

As ICE agents swarmed the farm, José hid with some coworkers on the roof of one of the Sun Valley buildings. He was found, arrested and taken to the Coast Guard base in McKinleyville, where ICE had set up a temporary processing center. José was one of about two dozen people suspected of working at Sun Valley without documentation. He was photographed and fingerprinted. They recorded his voice. He watched as a coworker refused to talk to the ICE agents and was immediately hauled off to be deported, José said.

After several hours in detention agents brought José a piece of paper that listed two options: appear before a judge to argue his case or get deported directly to Mexico. 

“On my paper they’d already checked off that I wanted to leave for Mexico,” José said. “But because I understood a little bit of English I understood what it said. I asked the officer, ‘Why is it marked that way? Why is it marked to go to Mexico without me seeing a judge?’ He told me, ‘If you want we can change it.’”

Those who didn’t understand English were effectively in the dark. Celestino also signed a form after the raid, but to this day he doesn’t know what is said.

For months afterward, José had to be home on a specific day of every week to receive land-line phone calls from ICE agents checking in on him. But eventually they stopped requiring these check-ins.

Paz said there’s no discernible rhyme or reason to the way the Department of Homeland Security handles immigration cases. After the raid, some of the arrestees had to do these phone check-ins while others didn’t. Some eventually received work permits and went back to the flower farm while others were deported. 

“There’s no real clear sense of why those decisions are made,” Paz said.

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Like everyone who immigrates to this country, Celestino and José were hoping to improve their lives. Celestino, a father of five, came here in part because he’d borrowed some money back home from a loan shark who charged exorbitant interest, jacking the debt up from 15,000 pesos to 85,000 pesos. In Mexico Celestino could never hope to pay that back, but he paid it in full after just a year and a half living in Humboldt.

His three sons were here at the time, but after the raid they moved back to Mexico. His two daughters also live there. Celestino said he misses his kids. He sustains them with the what little he earns here, and while he’d love to live near them he doesn’t want to return to Mexico. 

“At my age, it is so difficult to find work there,” he said. “They don’t give us work anymore. … And honestly I don’t want to return because with the violence in Mexico, it is very difficult to be there.”

José doesn’t want to leave either, despite making minimum wage after eight years at his current job. He’s come to love Humboldt County. “There’s a lot of good people,” he said, “people who say ‘Hello’ without even knowing you.”

He knows that not everyone wants him here. Asked what he wants locals to understand he said it’s this: While some people come to this country and commit crimes, many come just to work, often working jobs that nobody else wants to do. 

“Many times people think that because they arrest somebody who’s Mexican with drugs we are all the same. But it’s not true,” José said.

After living for more than a decade in this community, Celestino and José hope an appeals court judge will let them stay. 

And if not? Is there any other path to citizenship for them? Their attorney, Todd, said in his email there may be one other possibility.

“If either is ever the victim of a violent crime, there might be options,” he wrote. Here’s what he means: If a non-citizen gets physically or mentally abused and then helps law enforcement investigate or prosecute the crime(s), he or she may be eligible for a u-visa. “They can be very powerful tools if one is ‘lucky’ enough to be a victim,” Todd advised.

So there’s that.