The War on Mexicans Strikes Ellensburg

Three hours before dawn on a frigid Thursday in January, more than 50 agents from nine federal, state, and local law-enforcement groups gathered at the Kittitas County Fairgrounds in Ellensburg, Washington. In the same buildings that host the roping and riding events during the city's annual rodeo, the lawmen planned a roundup.

Keegan Hamilton

Ellensburg residents from all walks of life rallied around the Hispanic community in the wake of the January 20 raid.

Details

SLIDESHOW: Meet the people and protesters in Ellensburg's immigration battle. For video footage of the Ellensburg protest on the one-month anniversary of the raid, see Keegan's post on The Daily Weekly. UPDATE from the Daily Weekly: 3/7/11 Ellensburg Residents Say ICE Agents Are Back, Making Arrests in the Middle of the Night

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More About

• U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
• Gilberto Barrientos-Ariza
• Ellensburg
• Immigration
• Illegal Immigration and Deportation

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They hoped to arrest at least 34 people and serve 11 search warrants, the culmination of a year-and-a-half-long Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security investigation into "the manufacture and purchase of counterfeit identity and employment documents," a statement issued the next day proclaimed.

Two ICE agents briefed several members of the Ellensburg Police Department on their assignment. The local cops were to help apprehend one of the prime suspects, a 38-year-old Mexican man named Gilberto Barrientos-Ariza, and his wife, Maria Morales-Fierro. Though he stands just 5 feet 5 inches tall, Barrientos-Ariza has a criminal record that includes charges of malicious mischief, reckless endangerment, and drug possession—enough to convince the authorities that arresting him at his family's trailer would be a "high-risk entry" that would require a team of at least seven armed men, according to an Ellensburg Police Department report.

Barrientos-Ariza also is the pastor at a small Pentecostal church in Ellensburg. But the feds suspected that he and his wife, who worked as a maid at Ellensburg's Quality Inn, were forgers. They told Ellensburg police that somewhere in the couple's house they would find "the document production equipment from which a large number of other counterfeit documents in the community had come."

Around 6:40 a.m., the cops and agents descended on Barrientos-Ariza's trailer park, a hodgepodge of about 30 ramshackle single-wides clustered haphazardly on unpaved streets on the town's western edge. They carried a picture of Barrientos-Ariza's house to ensure that they knocked on the right door. A police helicopter hovered overhead, its search beam shining in the early-morning twilight.

Andrew Houck, a bilingual officer on the Ellensburg police force, was first up the steps to the Barrientos-Ariza residence. Houck wrote later in a report that he kicked the front door "to announce our presence." The door "flew open" and Houck shouted, "Police! Search warrant! Come to the door!"

Barrientos-Ariza was standing in the kitchen, clad in nothing but his underwear. Houck ordered him in Spanish to put his hands up, then pinned him against the wall. Once handcuffed, Houck ordered Barrientos-Ariza to lie on the floor.

The other officers roused Morales-Fierro from bed and handcuffed her, along with the couple's 19-year-old nephew. Their two children, ages 11 and 14, were in another bedroom when the police burst in with their guns drawn "at the low ready," according to the police report. They considered handcuffing the kids but decided against it, ordering them instead to sit on the living-room couch, but not before searching it for weapons and evidence.

The cops scoured the residence for nearly four hours, going so far as to check cereal boxes for contraband. In the end, according to Ellensburg Police's "agency assist" report, they found the couple's bank statements, driver's licenses, pay stubs, and Mexican birth certificates. They also found Social Security cards and "pictures of a male which had been cut to what appeared to be placed within an identification card."

As Barrientos-Ariza's home was being turned upside down on January 20, ICE agents coordinated actions at 22 other residences in and around Ellensburg, primarily in trailer parks that cater to low-income Hispanic families. Across town at Millpond Mobile Manor, 17-year-old Ricardo Gonzalez says loud knocking and his mother's screaming woke him up.

Lanky with a thin mustache, the soft-spoken Gonzalez recalls from a seat in his family's living room how the police told everyone in his house to come out with their hands up. When he opened his bedroom door, Gonzalez says the agents aimed their weapons at him. "They had a laser scope on the gun," he says. "They pointed the scope at me, in my face. They were, like, 'Put your hands up!' Then they pointed it at my legs. They had, like, big guns."

Gonzalez says he and his brothers, ages 15 and 19, were briefly handcuffed and instructed to sit on the couch. His father Ramon was bare-chested in handcuffs, with the front door left open and a wintry draft blowing through the house. Gonzalez says it took him 15 minutes to convince the officers to let his dad put a shirt on, and longer for them to produce a warrant.

"I asked them for a search warrant, but they didn't have it," he says. "I kept asking and they just said, 'It's on the way.' Finally they showed it to me, but they wouldn't let me read it."

In Barrientos-Ariza's trailer park, near Interstate 90 on West University Way, a woman named Margarita (who declined to give her last name, fearing law-enforcement reprisal) says police mistook her for her sister-in-law Isabella. "They interrogated me," Margarita says. "They had her photo and they put it up next to my face and said, 'You're Isabella.' I said, 'No, look at my pictures on the wall. I'm Margarita; I've got ID.' They said us Mexicans got a habit of changing our identities. They kept insisting I was Isabella."