I met Gena while she was participating in a 'Lobby Day' held at the Washington state capitol. She moved into a small town next to a couple of nasty sounding people who happened to be very well connected. She explained that just recently she has been able to speak about what happened without becoming incoherently angry, and has decided to tell the story. The following text comes from an article for RealChange by Cydney Gillis, and doesn't contain some of Gena's more angering descriptions of police behavior. Gives you an idea though.
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[Gena] and her husband, Francesco, had been legal U.S. residents for 30 years when they moved from the Eastside to Monroe in 2004. But trouble with the husband of the white couple next door started almost immediately.
In the past three years, Mejia says, the man has come at her husband with a crowbar, spit in his face, and spewed racial epithets. She got a restraining order but says Monroe police never enforced it. Then in August 2005, the day after she filed for a new protection order, she says armed immigration agents showed up on her doorstep demanding to know where her son was.
Mejia cooperated, bringing her son, Ceasar Keymolen, then 30 years-old and the working father of two young children, to Monroe police headquarters. Hours later, she says, agents carried him out like an animal for transfer to Tacoma’s Northwest Detention Center. It took six months to get him out, she says – and he is a legal resident who’s spent his whole life in the United States.
Immigration activists say Ceasar Keymolen isn’t alone – one reason protesters held a 24-hour vigil outside the Tacoma Detention Center on July 13 and 14. In a press conference held prior to the vigil, members of the Church Council of Greater Seattle, Hate Free Zone and Washington Community Action Network compared the center to a corporate run gulag – a private lock-up where people have no recourse to get out, other than a deportation hearing in which they are not entitled to any free legal help.
In the wake of the U.S. Senate failing to pass immigration reform this month, the activists called for a halt to the type of workplace and home raids that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted recently in Bellingham, Portland and across the nation. Instead of targeting criminals, says Tim Smith, chair of Tacoma’s Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the raids are rounding up working families with children like Keymolen’s.
. . .
After her son’s experience, Mejia describes the 1,000-bed detention center as “a place to break people’s spirit.” Run by a private company called GEO Inc. – the new name for a former division of a private prison operator, the Wackenhut Corporation – Mejia says her son was given bad food, dirty laundry and put in a cell with a violent criminal.
ICE’s reason for picking him up, she says, was an earlier domestic violence charge that Keymolen had pleaded guilty to after an argument with his girlfriend and mother of his children. The resulting sentence – 365 days probation – put him in a felony category for which ICE can seek deportation. So Mejia hired a lawyer and went back to court with the girlfriend’s mother and aunt, who spoke on his behalf.
The judge dropped the sentence by one day, removing the legal grounds for Keymolen’s deportation. In February 2006, he was finally released.
“We are legal,” she says, fighting back tears. “We’re not terrorists. We’re not criminals. We were just following our American dream and it became a nightmare.”
“We’re going to sell this house and move, and I don’t think we’ll ever set foot in this town again.”
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