Amid fears, Hispanic immigrants in Memphis try to live normally

The small business owners who rent space inside El Mercadito shopping mall in Memphis offer a bit of everything: jewelry, insurance, cell phones, cowboy boots. Shoppers can play video games, eat at a restaurant or pause at the monument to the Virgin of Guadalupe, which is decorated with Christmas lights.

Most of the shoppers are Mexican immigrants or their children. But business at the Hickory Hill shopping mall has dropped by about 50 percent in the past couple of months as wary immigrants stay close to home, said mall owner Gaspar Perez.

“Everything that the president said has affected me,” he said.

President Donald Trump's push for increased deportations has spread apprehension among millions of Hispanics living throughout the nation.

In Memphis, interviews suggest strict new immigration policies are prompting some immigrants to avoid unnecessary trips. Despite the apprehension, many immigrants try to go about their lives as normal.

No one can predict exactly how strict new federal immigration policies will play out.

Immigration sweeps under the Trump administration have recently taken place elsewhere in the United States including in Mississippi, but apparently not so far in Memphis and Shelby County, home to about 57,000 Hispanics, or about 6 percent of the population. Most are Mexican immigrants who began arriving in the mid-1990s or are children of immigrants.

"ICE conducts targeted immigration enforcement in compliance with federal law and agency policy," agency spokesman Thomas Byrd said in an email. "ICE does not conduct sweeps or raids that target aliens indiscriminately."

Byrd wouldn't reveal plans. "As a matter of policy, and the safety of our personnel, we do not discuss upcoming operations," he said.

Trump's administration issued executive orders in February that subject virtually every person living in the U.S. illegally to arrest and deportation — a shift from earlier policies that focused on those who had committed serious crimes.

In Memphis, the new rules have raised fears among people who themselves are here illegally, as well as  their children. Some immigrants who have legal documents are on edge, too, following the travel ban imposed in January on immigrants from mostly Muslim countries. Many legal immigrants had their visas canceled, although courts later overturned the action.  And during the campaign, Trump pledged to strip legal protections from hundreds of thousands of young people brought to this country as children, many of them from Mexico. So far, he's left the program in place.

In Memphis, signs of disquiet are appearing. Civic groups have organized immigration protests. A large group of students walked out of Kingsbury High School near Summer Avenue last week in a demonstration over national immigration policies. The school has a big population of students from immigrant families.

A short distance from the school, Streets Ministries, a Christian organization,  will host local lawyers from the MEMigration Coalition at 2 p.m. Saturday to help immigrants deal with the possibility of deportation. Topics to be covered include preparing power-of-attorney documents that allow trusted people to make decisions about the immigrants' property, money and children in case they're arrested.

In Memphis, many adult immigrants from Mexico and central America arrived illegally or overstayed visas. Historically, the federal government has not strictly enforced immigration law in nonborder areas. Many unauthorized immigrants have often lived openly with limited rights. Many have bought houses and raised children — those born in the United States are citizens, regardless of parents' status.

Last week, immigration agents were rumored to be about to conduct sweeps in Memphis, said Luz Velasquez  of El Mercadito  mall. That day, many people didn't go to work, and several of the mall vendors closed, she said in Spanish.

Perez, the mall owner, said  in Spanish that an increasing number of people are bringing personal belongings to a man who works at the mall and specializes in shipping items back to Mexico.

Perez and Velasquez, both 39, are likewise thinking of returning to Mexico.

“I have this business, and I also have houses,” Perez said. “We’ve thought maybe it’s better to sell and go back to our country. Or go to another country.”

At La Michoacana ice cream parlor on Summer Avenue, Hispanic newspapers carry headlines such as "The threat of deportation" and "Our rights with immigration agents — what to do if you're arrested."  Staffers said people  seem nervous, but they haven’t seen sales drop.

“We only see people have fear, but other than that, no,” said Ana Montiel, 24, who's married to one of the owners of the family business.

It's not clear how far the government will go and when it will do it. Shipping millions of people out of the country would likely take more manpower than immigration authorities have. Trump's administration also aims to hire an additional 10,000 agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a step that would require Congressional approval.

Large-scale sweeps could also provoke backlash from employers who've grown to rely on unauthorized immigrant labor.

“While the number of undocumented workers in Memphis is small relative to the overall labor force, they probably would have a fairly dramatic impact on certain parts of construction and distribution,” said David Ciscel, a University of Memphis economics professor emeritus involved in a 2001 study on the Hispanic work force.

The construction and distribution industries “vastly underestimate” the number of unauthorized workers they hire, Ciscel said, pointing out most workers may have legally obtained documents, such as a driver’s license, or purchased documents to land a job.

In the Memphis-area home-building industry, foreign-born labor isn't a priority issue, said several members of a West Tennessee Home Builders Association committee that met in Memphis this week. Committee members said they use the federal “E-Verify” database to ensure a legal workforce, and provide workers' compensation insurance subject to government audits, but their major issue is finding enough skilled trades workers to replace retiring baby boomers as competition from booming markets like Nashville and Atlanta  draws away construction workers.

For Mid-South farmers, upcoming seasons for planting and  harvesting produce and tobacco will reveal the White House policy's impact on migrant labor, said Lee Maddox, a spokesman for the Tennessee Farm Bureau Federation in Smyrna.

Farmers have a legal source of migrant foreign labor, the federal H-2A temporary agricultural workers program.With a required wage of at least $10.92 an hour this year in Tennessee, the complicated program currently has 415 workers statewide, according to the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

Amid the uncertainty and flying rumors, many aspects of immigrant life in Memphis continue as normal.

On March 1, evening Spanish-language Ash Wednesday mass at St. Michael’s Catholic church on Summer Avenue was packed so full that people stood in the aisles and in the back.

Farida Flores Arita, 18, said she's continuing life as usual. She works in La Michoacana ice cream shop and has legal documents through Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that Trump said he'd end, but has left in place for now.

She said the immigration news and armed robberies in the neighborhood have made her pay more attention to her surroundings. But she hasn’t changed her own routine.

She said her older brother, a college student who also has Deferred Action legal documents, recently went on a hiking trip to another state. She said she urged him to be careful, but to go anyway. He did.

“If we let fear overtake our lives, we won’t be able to do anything the way we used to,” she said.