It was barely 6 a.m. on Dec. 2, when Guillermo Zavala walked out the front door of his Mountain View apartment and straight into a trap.
Eight men were watching him as he opened the door to his work truck to head to a construction job. Positioned on either end of the block, Zavala’s observers confirmed that he was the right man. As he started the engine, five unmarked cars pulled out and surrounded his truck.
The men in the cars, some carrying assault rifles, approached Zavala and ordered him out of his vehicle. They told him they were from Immigration and Customs Enforcement as they searched him. Zavala readily admits he came to the U.S. from Mexico about 16 years ago to work even though he lacked papers, but he was still dumbfounded as to why law enforcement was coming after him after all these years.
“I started to think — What’s going to happen to me and my family?” he said. “I was worried about the money. How would my family pay for rent and utilities?”
Barely awake at the time, his wife Alma Garcia was startled a short time later by a knock at the door. On her porch was a stranger in a black jacket, who identified himself as a federal agent. Her husband was being detained and taken to San Jose, he told her, not explaining any more.
The last thing she remembers is the ICE agent handing her the keys to her husband’s work truck. They were useless to her, she recalled with a nervous laugh. She can’t drive a manual transmission.
She said the one thing stopping her from having a full-blown panic attack was their two daughters — ages 7 and 8 — still asleep in their bedroom. She said she felt a sense of relief they weren’t seeing their father being taken away.
“I was in shock,” she told the Voice through a translator. “He’s never hurt anyone, never stolen from anyone. What was going to happen to us now?”
For the past two months, the Zavala family has been living the nightmare dreaded by the estimated 11.3 million undocumented residents in the U.S. While the 41-year-old Zavala alone faces possible deportation, his arrest has shaken up his family as well as the larger migrant community in Mountain View.
His first phone call home came later on the morning of his arrest. He only had a few minutes to talk and couldn’t tell his wife much, because he barely knew anything, she said. All he knew was that he was facing deportation and needed a lawyer. In next few days, ICE officials took Zavala on a criss-cross trip across California, first to San Jose’s central jail, then to San Francisco and then to Martinez to stay the night in a cell with about two dozen other men. Over the next days, he said he was taken to Sacramento, then to Fresno and then Bakersfield. Through it all, he was kept ignorant as to what would happen. His last stop was an immigration holding facility near Los Angeles, where he would remain for the next two months while waiting for a court hearing.
In recent days, local activists have pointed to Zavala’s arrest as a warning for migrants to remain on guard, despite recent efforts by police and other local officials to nurture more involvement from the Latino community. One outspoken advocate, Elena Pacheco, in recent weeks has led talks in front of church and community groups urging the undocumented to always carry a “red card” — a wallet-size list of their rights.
In many ways, the Zavala family were model citizens, Pacheco said. For the years they had lived in Mountain View, the family lived a traditional domestic life with dad as the breadwinner, a stay-at-home mom and two girls enrolled at Castro Elementary. The family goes church at St. Joseph’s on Sunday. As her daughters joined the public school system, Garcia said she took on a larger volunteer role, serving as president for school’s English Learners Advisory Committee and helping out twice a week at the city-run day care center.
“This is the typical undocumented family, and now you have it broken,” Pacheco said. “What if (immigration officials) come tomorrow and take Alma, who’s going to take care of her children?”
Needless to say, Zavala’s arrest comes at a sensitive time in the debate on immigration policy, both at the local and national level. Mountain View police officials emphasize that they had no involvement in Zavala’s arrest. ICE officials did notify the city police in advance of a Dec. 2 operation in town, which is typical for any outside agency stepping into another jurisdiction. Mountain View police Capt. Chris Hsiung said he was concerned that the federal immigration action could sow distrust against local police.
“We don’t want anyone to fear for their immigration status when they call 911,” he said. “My biggest fear is this story could be misconstrued that it’s the Mountain View Police who are tipping off ICE.”
As the lone parent at home, Garcia said she sought to keep domestic life as normal as possible. She decided not to tell her daughters what happened to their father, saying that papa was in Nevada working on a remote construction site.
“I was focused on giving the girls the same routine,” Garcia said, explaining that they were too young to grapple with what was really happening.
But as the days dragged on without their father, it became clear the children were suffering. Zavala would usually be home when his daughters came home from school, ready to dance or play Legos with them. Returning home each day reminded them all over again he was gone.
Over the weeks, Zavala’s cell phone accumulated a string of texts from the couple’s youngest daughter. Many of the messages showed only crying emojis and sad cartoon faces.
“I miss you papa / Where are you?” her younger daughter wrote.
Garcia didn’t tell her daughters she had hidden Guillermo’s cellphone in her bedroom. The last couple months have come with “a lot of crying,” she said.
Her older daughter never said anything, but Garcia said she began noticing the girl would sometimes pack all her stuffed animals under the bed covers. Garcia would sometimes find her daughter silently hugging the mound as if it was her father.
Zavala wrote letters home to his daughters. On each lined page, he sketched a picture of Mickey Mouse or Tinkerbell while encouraging them to be good and study hard. But in fact, he confided to his wife that he was depressed and worried what would happen. He was imprisoned with hardened gang members, murderers and rapists, he said. To the prison guards, he was just another illegal alien waiting to be booted from the country.
“I was feeling like a real criminal,” he said. “I know I’ve made mistakes, but this wasn’t right for what I did.”
The family was hurting in other ways. Without Zavala to provide income, Garcia was worried what her family would do to pay for rent and food. She applied for food stamps and received temporary help for paying her bills through local charities. Meanwhile, she tried to find temporary work — asking friends and neighbors if anyone needed cleaning or other services. Some jobs she’s had to decline because the cost of hiring a babysitter for her children would cost more than she would earn.
Through it all, Garcia fretted most about the uncertainty. Would she be deported next? She decided to write up a letter spelling out her wishes for who was to take custody of her daughters if she were detained. While he was gone, she told the Voice she had no idea why her husband was singled out by ICE officials.
After several weeks of requesting information about Zavala’s case, ICE officials told the Voice that Zavala came to their attention due to two drunken-driving misdemeanors. Court records indicate his first arrest was in 2012 from a hit-and-run DUI in which he struck a parked car in Mountain View. His second arrest came in November when an officer saw him weaving on Highway 101 near Gilroy.
Asked about this, Zavala admitted he had consumed about six beers after finishing up work in Watsonville.
ICE officials say their top priority is to detain and deport those who present a threat such as non-citizens with ties to terrorist groups and criminal gangs, or those arrested for violent felonies. But the agency also enforces a list of second-tier priorities, including those convicted of sexual crimes and possessing firearms or illegal substances. Drunken driving is included among those secondary priorities, said Daniel Shanfield, a South Bay immigration law attorney who previously worked for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor of ICE.
“You could have a long-term undocumented resident in the U.S. with deep family ties — that individual doesn’t fall under ICE’s enforcement priorities,” he said. “But if you add to that a history of unlawful activity then that comes to the fore as far as who to detain.”
Speaking in general terms, fully adjudicating this kind of case will take years, Shanfield said. Factors such as family ties and the length of time in the U.S. can be considered by a judge before deciding whether to deport an individual. At best, an individual facing deportation can be found eligible for a cancellation and work permit, only 10,000 of which are granted each year.
In late January, Zavala arrived for his first court hearing at an administrative immigration court under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Justice. His lawyer described Zavala’s family and the nature of his case, and the immigration judge agreed to lower the bail from about $20,000 down to $6,500.
After taking out a bond loan, Zavala was released last week and caught a train back to the South Bay. On Feb. 4, he was able to surprise his daughters by picking them up at school.
Zavala says he now feels closer to his family, having experienced what it feels like to lose them. He’s promised to try to be a better person for their sake.
“As a father, sometimes we don’t think of the small errors we make,” he said. “I need to be a better example for my daughters.”
Zavala said his old employers welcomed to him back, offering him extra work if he needed it, he said.
His daughters have been clinging to him non-stop, always wanting to sit on his lap and eat right next to him, he said. Eventually, he and his wife plan to explain to them what really happened. They say their attorney is warning them that fully adjudicating his case could take up to seven years. While it is reassuring to hear nothing immediate will happen, it still won’t be easy living with that kind of uncertainty for so long, they told the Voice.
Garcia said she gives her husband a pep talk. “We’ll worry about that when it comes.”
—Michelle Le contributed to this report. Susie Ochoa acted as translator.
