SUNDAY STORY:The specter of deportation

COSTA MESA — In the living room of Luis Sanchez’s apartment is a framed photo, a studio portrait taken of Sanchez and his wife with their two children, before their youngest son was born.

The family is now five members, but the next time they get a portrait taken, Luis Sanchez might be the one missing.

He came to the U.S. illegally from Guatemala 15 years ago, and because he was pulled over by Costa Mesa police in January for a traffic infraction, he could be sent back for at least a short time.

In November, Costa Mesa officials made an agreement to have a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent work in the city jail, checking the immigration status of people who are arrested. Between December 4 and April 30, the agent has flagged more than 200 people who are suspected of immigration violations, and Sanchez is one of them.

But not everyone found to be in the U.S. illegally gets immediately put on a plane or bus back to his or her home country. Some, like Sanchez, have enough other considerations — how long they’ve lived here, if they’re married to a legal U.S. resident or have children born here — that they may be allowed to petition to stay.

“If I didn’t have my wife here and my kids weren’t born here, I’d probably have a different thought” about going back, Sanchez said in a recent interview at his family’s Costa Mesa apartment. “But I have my kids here, and I can’t leave them behind.”

An affable young man wearing jeans and a plaid, short-sleeved shirt, Sanchez is now 30. He came to the U.S. in 1992 by paying a smuggler to bring him.

That was half his life ago. He joined his mother here, but she also came illegally, so she couldn’t sponsor him for legal residence.

In the last few months before Sanchez left Guatemala, he said, he got beat up at school. He didn’t necessarily plan to build his life here, but he thought it would be safer than at home, and he expected to find more opportunities for jobs.

Once he arrived, Sanchez settled in, attending Estancia High School and starting work at 16. While at school, he met Roxana Ochoa, and within a few months they were dating. They’ve been together 10 years now, and they decided last year to get married.

“I like working hard, I pay my taxes, and I spend time with my kids,” he said. “I’m blessed that I have a whole family that’s healthy.”

As Sanchez talks about his life, his youngest son, 1-year-old Paulo, keeps toddling over to him for hugs. Curly-haired Gaizka, 3, sits on his mother’s lap, and 9-year-old Fernanda shyly hangs back, except when she politely offers the guests bottled water.

Roxana’s eyes fill with tears when her husband matter-of-factly says he might have to leave the family for a while. “We’re in the same situation. We both grew up without fathers,” she said. “We don’t want that for our kids.”

But it’s better for Sanchez than for some because if he has to go at all, he can probably come back.

Under the federal immigration act, people who have lived in the U.S. for more than 10 years, have not been convicted of serious criminal offenses, and have a spouse, parents or children who are citizens or legal residents may ask a judge not to deport them, said Gloria Curiel, a Santa Monica immigration attorney who gave advice at a Costa Mesa event in March.

“But 99% of those cases are denied because it’s very difficult to convince a judge that they have met the standard of extreme and unusual hardship for those family members,” she said.

In Sanchez’s case, his job managing an Irvine sandwich shop is the family’s only income because Roxana stopped working to take care of Paulo.

He can try to immigrate legally through his wife, Curiel said, but when undocumented immigrants who have been here more than a year leave the U.S., they can’t return for 10 years. Once again, you can petition for a waiver to come back sooner, but there are so many requests that it’s taking federal officials as long as a year and a half to process them.

“For six years, we’ve had people who cannot immigrate even though they’re legally married to a spouse who can immigrate,” Curiel said. “We break up families, and then we make them destitute.”

The Sanchez family’s present trouble began Jan. 8, when Sanchez, with his wife and kids in the car, was going to work. The arresting officer’s report says the car had a defective brake light. They were pulled over.

“My point of view about this is they’re doing a little bit of profiling,” Sanchez said of how he was stopped by police. “I don’t usually talk about this stuff because I’m open-minded…. The reason I don’t really feel that it was fair was they didn’t have any warrants.”

Sanchez showed a matricula consular card, a photo ID issued by the Guatemalan consulate that doesn’t prove legal residence in the U.S.

Costa Mesa Police Department policy gives officers discretion on whether to consider the matricula card sufficient or to require other proof of identity, City Manager Allan Roeder said.

“That’s very much what I think triggered ‘I’m going to check this guy out,’ ” Sanchez said. “I think it could have just as easily been a ticket.”

Instead, police handcuffed him and put him in the cruiser. He worried about his wife and kids, he said.

“I didn’t like the feeling of him [my son] looking at me and me being handcuffed,” he said. “That’s not something you want your kids to see.”

According to the police report, Sanchez told police he never had a driver’s license, but state DMV records show that his driving privileges had been suspended. Also, the last name and birth date on his matricula card didn’t match DMV records, so the officer “was unable to positively confirm his identity,” the report said. So he went to jail.

“When I got there the immigration guy was already waiting for me. He was like, ‘You’re the guy from Guatemala’ — so I’m kind of famous,” Sanchez joked.

They sent him to a federal detention facility in Lancaster for a week. Since getting out, he’s gotten a lawyer and has been to an immigration judge, who for now has postponed a decision on whether Sanchez must return to Guatemala.

The family is pinning its hopes on federal immigration reform, but that may not come soon, said Louis De Sipio, chairman of Latino studies in UC Irvine’s sociology department.

“My best guess is that there isn’t going to be a compromise this year,” he said. “There’s still a core of 100 or so House members who want nothing to do with any sort of legalization.”

President Bush tried to make immigration reform a priority of his second term, but he was blocked in 2006 by a Republican-controlled Congress that seemed to be responding to public outrage. Now Democrats are in control, but Bush still needs some GOP members to get his plan passed, and he has largely backed off any talk of legalizing the undocumented, De Sipio said.

“He has to be willing to take some of the political heat for that,” De Sipio said. “Every time he speaks, he says ‘This will not allow for legalization,’ and it’s going to be a part of the bill.”

Even if federal reforms go through, De Sipio said the proposals he’s seen don’t give different treatment to people like Sanchez just because they’ve been here a long time — they would still have to “wait in line” behind those who are immigrating legally.

Sanchez is due to appear before the judge again in August. He doesn’t want to leave his family, but he knows it’s not his decision.

“I can’t escape from it. I have to go through it,” he said. “I would feel better if there were some kind of law change…. I’m sure I’m not the only parent who’s in the same situation…. Uniting families is the whole purpose of getting legal.”