Man Seeks Help in Finding Deaf Wife INS Put on Bus

Maria Arevalos is missing.

She may be in Los Angeles but, if she is still alive, she almost certainly does not know where she is.

Arevalos cannot tell anyone her plight, cannot ask for help, because the 34-year-old Mexican national is almost totally deaf and can speak only a few words in Spanish. She cannot read, write or use sign language. She carried no identification papers, and had only $5 in her pocket when she vanished two weeks ago.

Jose Herrera, her 48-year-old common-law husband, said Wednesday that he has been searching since May 1, when two Immigration and Naturalization Service agents took Arevalos off a train at Oceanside for questioning.

Herrera said he tried to tell the agents that she could not talk, but they did not seem to understand. He said he did not learn until much later that Arevalos was taken to San Clemente and then, after she failed to respond to questioning from INS agents, she was given a ticket and put on a bus for Los Angeles.

“I think something bad happened to her,” Herrera said.

Then, hopefully, he added: “Or maybe she met somebody at the bus depot in Los Angeles, a kind and good person who is taking care of her. If someone took her in, I want them to communicate with me . . . I am very worried . . . She is very timid, very shy.”

Speaking through an interpreter at the Los Angeles office of the National Center for Immigrants’ Rights, Herrera asked that anyone with any information about his wife telephone him at (213) 232-8281, the number of the Los Angeles home of the missing woman’s sister, Margarita Recendos. Herrera, who has lived and worked in Fresno for the last five years, holds a green card work permit and is in this country legally. He admitted that Arevalos was entering the United States illegally.

“She was going to come live with me in Fresno,” he explained.

When the plainclothes agents took her from the Amtrak passenger train, Herrera said, he expected that she would be sent back across the border at Tijuana, where their journey had begun.

Instead, as an INS spokesman said Wednesday, she was taken to the agency’s San Clemente facility. Marshall Mehlos, assistant chief of the agency’s San Diego Sector, said the agents who questioned Arevalos thought she was only pretending to be deaf. He said that at one point she made a rocking motion with her arms and, apparently by pointing northward, caused the agents to believe she had a baby in Los Angeles.

Mehlos said the INS could neither prove nor disprove that she was an illegal alien and so she was released and put on the Los Angeles-bound bus.

“You can only hold somebody so long,” he said. “You can’t hold them an unreasonable amount of time.”

Mehlos said the INS did not realize she was an illegal until Herrera showed up at their Chula Vista headquarters and told them his story.

Robert Schey, executive director of the Center for Immigrants’ Rights, said that the INS has been “reasonably cooperative” since Herrera contacted his organization earlier this week and he and his staff began making inquiries. But, he said, checks with the six alien detention centers in Southern California turned up no trace of the missing woman.

Schey believes Arevalos should not be missing at all.

“I think it should have been evident that she had significant disabilities, that she was without funds and without any form of identification,” he said. “I think under the circumstances as they were related to me--that she was put on a bus and left to her own resources--that it was an improper course of action.”

Herrera said that Arevalos did not have her sister’s Los Angeles address and, because of her hearing and speech disabilities, could not communicate with anyone.

“She can hear me if I talk real loud,” he said, “and she can say about 20 words, but not consecutively.”

Herrera, a seasonal farm worker presently employed at a Fresno tortilla factory, said he first met Arevalos five years ago, and has considered her his wife for the past 2 1/2 years, although they are not legally married.

He described her as 5 feet 3 inches tall, weighing about 145 pounds, with dark eyes and long dark hair. When he last saw her, she was wearing a red sweater, a blue blouse, blue jeans and black shoes. He said she trembles visibly when she is nervous or upset.

“I fear for her life, of course,” he said.

If she is alive, he said, “she probably is very confused . . . if she did get to Los Angeles, she would probably go with the first person who showed her some kindness.”