Texas Mayor Caught in Deportation Furor

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IRVING, Tex. — Just after sunrise one morning last summer, as his two
sons hurried out the door to school, Oscar Urbina might have presented
a portrait of domestic stability in this Dallas suburb, a 35-year-old
man with a nice home, a thriving family and a steady contracting job.

But a few weeks earlier, after buying a Dodge Ram truck at a local
dealership, he had been summoned back to deal with some paperwork
problems. And shortly after he arrived, so did the police, who
arrested him on charges of using a false Social Security number.

Mr. Urbina does not deny it; he has been living illegally in the
Dallas area since coming to the country from Mexico in 1993. But the
turn of events stunned him in a once-welcoming place where people had
never paid much attention to Social Security numbers.

If the arrest had come earlier, it might have had little effect on his
life. But two years ago, Irving made a decision, championed by its
first-term mayor, Herbert A. Gears, to conduct immigration checks on
everyone booked into the local jail. So Mr. Urbina was automatically
referred to the federal authorities and now faces possible
deportation, becoming one of more than 4,000 illegal immigrants here
who have ended up in similar circumstances.

As battles over illegal immigration rage around the country, Irving’s
crackdown is not unusual in itself. What makes it striking is that it
happened with the blessing of a mayor like Mr. Gears, an immigrant-
friendly Democrat with deep political ties to the city’s Hispanic
leaders, a man who likes to preach that adapting to immigration —
especially in a city like his, now almost half-Hispanic — is not a
burden but an opportunity, or as he says, it’s “not a have-to, it’s a
get-to.”

But as a wave of sentiment against illegal immigration built around
Dallas and the nation, Mr. Gears came to realize that his city would
be unable to remain on the sidelines — and that his own political
future would depend on how he navigated newly treacherous terrain.

Irving is one of a growing number of cities across America where
immigration control, a federal prerogative, is reshaping politics at
the other end of the spectrum, the local level, in the absence of a
national policy overhaul. To watch its experiment play out over the
better part of the past year in City Hall and in its residents’ lives
is to see how difficult political moderation has become in the debate
over what to do with the country’s estimated 12 million illegal
immigrants.

Irving’s jail program was started by the city’s police chief as an
experiment with federal immigration officials. But Mr. Gears saw in it
a kind of release valve for the political pressure building around
him, which had been energized by much more aggressive measures to
force out illegal immigrants in Farmers Branch, a smaller suburb next
door.

“I let my instincts rule the moment in that instance,” he said. “What
weighed heavily in my thoughts is that if we didn’t do something, a
lot more immigrants were going to be hurt.”

“And now,” Mr. Gears added ruefully, “I’m the hero of every redneck in
America.”

Nationally, most of the attention in the immigration fight has
centered on smaller cities that have taken a hard line on illegal
immigration, like Farmers Branch and Hazleton, Pa., or on cities that
have moved to protect illegal immigrants, like San Francisco and New
Haven.

Irving is one of the places with a growing percentage of illegal
immigrants that has tried to take — Mr. Gears’s critics say has
stumbled upon — a much less explored middle road.

As a first-ring suburb whose non-Hispanic white population has slipped
from the majority in the last few years, Irving describes itself as a
multicultural community. Under Mr. Gears, it recently opened a
hospital clinic that caters to low-income patients, many of them
Hispanic, and gave $100,000 to support its fledgling Hispanic Chamber
of Commerce.

But even as it was doing so, its policy on immigration checks prompted
the Mexican consul in Dallas to issue an unusual warning to Mexican
immigrants to stay clear of Irving. And businesses both Hispanic-owned
and not, including Wal-Mart, began howling to the mayor that fear was
driving away Hispanic customers.

Mr. Gears, 46, is a big, gregarious, politically agile Texan who won
re-election last May against an opponent whose campaign promised much
tougher immigration measures. The mayor describes the rise of such
sentiment around him as disturbing, a manifestation of “domestic
extremism,” and he derides its adherents as “the crankies.”

“We defeated the crankies, and no one thought we could,” Mr. Gears
said of his re-election. “We’ve defined what our responsibility is,
and that’s only to allow the federal government to do its job. It’s
not our responsibility to evaluate it or assess whether it’s good or
not.

Mr. Gears happened to be making these points in a booth at his
favorite local bar, where he was being served by his favorite
waitress, a friendly mother of five — in the country illegally — whom
he has known for years and tips lavishly to help her make ends meet.

He acknowledges that Irving’s policy, whose chief goal is to get rid
of dangerous criminals who are in the country illegally, has resulted
in “casualties,” with many people deported as a result of lesser,
nonviolent offenses like driving without a license or insurance.

The police chief, Larry Boyd, said he believed that the city’s
enviable crime rate (last year was its lowest on record) is at least
partly due to the deportation program. “You will never hear me blaming
Irving’s crime problems on illegal immigration,” Chief Boyd said. But
he added that the program “keeps some criminals off of Irving’s
streets longer and potentially keeps them off of Irving’s streets for
good.”

The city’s political straddle on immigration has angered and
confounded Mr. Gears’s opponents. Critics to the right accuse him of
opportunism and of shirking his duty to legal residents. Advocates for
the immigrants accuse him essentially of undercutting them.

But Mr. Gears’s position is one he seems to struggle every day to
defend, said Carlos Quintanilla, a vocal advocate who, like many other
Hispanic leaders, initially supported the jail program but now
deplores it.

“I call Herb the most tormented man in America,” Mr. Quintanilla said.

The Hard-liners

Lucia Rottenberg, an Irving resident for almost 40 years, was upset in
June 2007 when she stood at a City Council meeting in the amphitheater-
like chambers at City Hall. Citing fears of crime, disease and
economic harm to her city, Ms. Rottenberg called for tougher measures
against illegal immigrants and bragged that her husband used his
vacation time to volunteer with the Texas Minutemen, a contentious
civilian group that tries to keep people from crossing the border
illegally.

As she turned to leave the lectern, Mr. Gears leaned into his
microphone and stopped her.

“I need to clear something up, because I was told something that was
disturbing,” he said. “Were you at a meeting, a club meeting, where
applause was given to the comment that anyone who comes over the
border should be shot?”

Ms. Rottenberg, who has contributed to one of Mr. Gears’s campaigns
and whom Mr. Gears said he considers a friend, confirmed she was at
the meeting. “I don’t remember if there was applause or not,” she
said, taken aback.

“Did you make that remark?” Mr. Gears asked.

“Yes, I did,” she admitted, her voice rising. “And my frustration is
this — ”

Mr. Gears cut her short: “You don’t have to explain it to me. I
understand.”

It was at that Council session that the city adopted the federal
cooperation program for residency checks inside the jail. It was also
a public turning point in the political reorientation of Mr. Gears,
who spoke volubly, sometimes irascibly, in defense of the checks while
trying to shame those he saw as using immigration to divide the city
further.

“I viewed it as something that would be painful to some, and so that
was distasteful to me,” Mr. Gears said later about the jail policy.
“But we were in a battle here on this issue.”

Like many Texas cities its size, Irving was mostly white a generation
ago, a farming town turned sprawling suburb as middle-class families
flocked to its affordable neighborhoods.

In 1970, when the city’s population hit 100,000, the Census estimated
that less than 5 percent was Hispanic. By 1990 the percentage had
tripled, during the next decade it doubled, and it is now thought to
be 45 percent or higher. In the fall of 2008, the last time a count
was taken, 70 percent of the students enrolled in kindergarten through
fifth grade in Irving’s schools were Hispanic.

While no one knows exactly how much of that increase was a result of
illegal immigration, Irving was one of several Dallas suburbs that
experienced a huge influx of illegal workers as part of the wave that
has tripled the nation’s illegal population since 1996. Officials
estimate that more than 20 percent of Irving’s 200,000 residents may
be in the country illegally.

A drive down North Belt Line Road, one of the city’s commercial
spines, takes a visitor past a big Kroger grocery store whose next-
door neighbor is a La Michoacana Meat Market almost its equal in size.
Both stores sit not far from dozens of Hispanic restaurants,
laundries, stores, auto-repair garages and curanderas, or psychics’
shops, scattered throughout the city’s south side.

Some white, longtime Irving residents say illegal immigration has done
much more to erode than bolster the city’s older shopping strips and
neighborhoods, its image and its property values. They complain to Mr.
Gears about white flight from the Irving Mall and about well-kept
older residential blocks marred by “patrón houses,” overcrowded single-
family homes, clustered with cars, used as bunkhouses for illegal
workers.

Beth Van Duyne, a city councilwoman who advocates tougher immigration
policies and has battled Mr. Gears, likes to show visitors a favorite
exhibit in her case, a hulking big-box store that was once a Wal-Mart.
It is now called Irving Bazaar, a battered flea-market-like assortment
of merchants with handmade window advertisements in Spanish for
wrestling matches and cheap jewelry.

“People hate it,” Ms. Van Duyne said. “It’s just not a good thing to
have in your city.”

Such discontent had been rising for years, though as recently as 2005,
when Mr. Gears was elected to his first term, it remained well below
the political surface. Sue Richardson, the vice president of the
Greater Irving Republican Club and probably Mr. Gears’s most
persistent opponent, said she believed that it had finally risen into
view because many people realized Irving was in the midst of a “silent
invasion” from Mexico.

“The people who come here illegally across the border are not educated
people,” Ms. Richardson said. “They don’t have any culture or any
respect for ours.”

A Political Career

Arriving one fall morning at a regular kaffeeklatsch of longtime
residents — a mostly white group that once held court in a diner but,
since it closed, has moved to a Mexican restaurant — Mr. Gears made
his way around the table shaking hands and telling jokes. “This is
where I cut my teeth,” he said. “These are the people who really run
the place.”

He looks and often plays the part of a good old boy, a flamboyant
dresser with flashy gold-rimmed eyeglasses and rings and cufflinks
embossed with pictures of Elizabeth Taylor, who reminds him of his
mother when she was young. Mr. Gears’s stamina and self-confidence as
a talker can evoke a combination of used-car salesman and Southern
Baptist preacher, though his fondness for vodka, Marlboro reds and
easygoing profanity might disqualify him from the pulpit.

“You’re going to think I’m making this up, but I was known as Bubba
when I was young,” he said. “Now when I go back to the country they
call me Mayor Bubba.”

Mr. Gears makes a comfortable living running a financial consulting
firm with his wife. But he owes his political career to the poor and
the working class, both Hispanic and not. A pivotal issue in his first
City Council campaign (the contests are nonpartisan, though Mr. Gears
describes himself as a conservative Democrat) was his support for
beleaguered mobile home residents, and the “trailer-house vote,” as he
likes to call it, made the difference.

He could readily identify with those voters. He was born in East Texas
to a deeply troubled mother who raised him and his two sisters mostly
by herself while wrestling with poverty and drug addiction; she
committed suicide at 63.

Mr. Gears clearly relishes the political life and thrives in it. He
raised almost $100,000 in contributions in last year’s mayoral race, a
huge sum for such suburban contests. But he says he has no higher
political aspirations than perhaps to serve another term or two as
mayor. He jokes that “the Democrats wouldn’t have me — especially now
— and I wouldn’t have the Republicans.” Still, he counts among his
backers powerful and wealthy real-estate developers, and his political
options remain open.

In public, Mr. Gears reveals few hints of the internal turmoil that
friends describe. His oldest Hispanic friends say they understand why
he supports the jail policy but add that the position has always sat
uncomfortably on the shoulders of a man who has long worked for
Hispanic causes, including serving as president of a local nonprofit
group that helps immigrants.

“I think the world of Herb,” said Platon Lerma, who is considered the
grandfather of Irving’s Hispanic activists. But Mr. Lerma, 82, said he
believed that the immigration checks had betrayed the mayor’s ideals.

“To me the program itself is a crime, in human terms,” he said. “We’re
breaking up families. We’re not doing right in the eyes of God.”

But in the next breath he added that Mr. Gears had simply chosen “the
best of several evils.” Hispanic residents of Irving do not vote in
large numbers, Mr. Lerma explained, and it had become apparent that
too many other voters were clamoring for immigration change.

If the election last year had gone to Mr. Gears’s closest opponent, a
lawyer, Roland Jeter — who had warned that Irving was becoming a
“sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants — it would have almost
certainly sent the city down a more stringent path.

In his campaign, Mr. Jeter advocated joining a federal program that
deputizes police officers as immigration agents. The program has
resulted in large numbers of deportations in other cities, and has
sometimes led them to initiate other aggressive measures to round up
illegal immigrants.

Still, even the more passive approach taken by Irving soon became
unpopular among Hispanics. In 2006, before the systematic jail checks
began, local police officers were handing about 300 people a year to
the federal government for immigration reasons. By the summer of 2007,
as many as 300 people a month were entering immigration proceedings,
and Mr. Quintanilla, the Hispanic advocate who only three months
earlier had spoken in support of the policy at the City Council
hearing, helped organize protests against it.

Mr. Gears soon found himself defending the approach on national
television while trying to deflect blame toward those he believes are
responsible for the problem.

“The complaint that people have with this program,” he said on CNN,
“should be directed at the federal government.”

Restive Allies

Now, nearly a year after his re-election, Mr. Gears is still vilified
by his conservative opponents while also facing a simmering rebellion
from Mr. Quintanilla and other Hispanic leaders, who say the jail
policy has unnecessarily damaged the lives of people who have had no
serious run-ins with the law.

As of early March, of the 4,074 people whose arrest led to their being
handed over to immigration officials, 129 had been charged with
violent crimes or illegal possession of weapons, and 714 with other
types of serious felonies. In addition, 579 had been charged with
driving while intoxicated. The other 2,625 had been arrested for
lesser offenses; the largest categories were public intoxication and
not having a driver’s license or insurance.

If he were in charge of changing federal policy, Mr. Gears said, he
would find a way to allow many illegal immigrants to move toward
citizenship. It is a goal that was sought by President George W. Bush
and now, in a similar plan, by President Obama.

For now, Mr. Gears is still smiling, still talking and still trying to
be the mayor of all of Irving’s inhabitants, even those he knows might
soon be gone, like Mr. Urbina, the illegal immigrant who now awaits a
deportation hearing.

Not long before Mr. Urbina’s arrest, the mayor tossed out the first
pitch at the opening of a Pony Baseball World Series for 9- and 10-
year-olds, who had come to town from places as far away as Puerto Rico
and Mexico. The event felt like a United Nations game, with national
flags and food and blaring music. “Isn’t this great?” Mr. Gears said.
“This is what Irving’s all about.”

Using his scant Spanish to throw around the occasional greeting, the
mayor took his place on the field in his French-cuffed shirt, sweating
alongside players from one of Irving’s teams, their names spelled out
on the backs of their jerseys: Gomez, Conaway, Aleman, Shastid, Riker,
Flores, Herrin, Childress, Ehrke, Rodriguez.

As the strains of the Puerto Rican anthem faded from the loudspeakers,
Mr. Gears took the mound and wound up. His pitch was low, but the
catcher scooped it up from the dirt, and the mayor walked off to
generous applause.

“Fighting him is kind of like fighting against your brother,” Mr.
Quintanilla said of his friend the mayor. “But you put your guard
down, and the first thing you know you’re being hit in the face.”