Immigrants Advocate Tells of Racial Assault

SACRAMENTO — A student intern working for Assemblyman Richard Polanco has told police that she was attacked twice by men who warned her to stop speaking out on behalf of immigrants at UC Davis.

University police are investigating the report as a hate crime. State police also have joined the investigation because the attackers allegedly told the student, Irma Munoz, that they would harm Polanco if she reported the assault. The Los Angeles Democrat has taken a lead role in opposing several bills introduced this session that target illegal immigrants.

In an interview at the Capitol on Tuesday, Munoz, a 20-year-old engineering student from Hayward, said the men forced her into a vacant field at the Davis campus last Wednesday evening, wrote racial epithets on her arms and a leg and cut her hair with a knife.

“They said, ‘Illegal aliens are just bringing problems, they bring diseases, now the wetbacks should go back,’ ” Munoz said.

“I told them it wasn’t true, and they punched me in the stomach. They said that they wanted me to remember all those things and make sure I never forgot, so they wrote on my arms.”

On one arm, they wrote in ink the words, “Go Home.” On the other, they wrote “Illegal.” On the back of a leg, they wrote “wetback.” When she protested that they were hurting her, the men scraped her arms and leg with a knife, she said.

By the time she reported it to police, she had washed away the writing. But on Tuesday, she still had scabs on her arms and a slight bruise on the side of her face.

“It’s disgusting, it’s horrible,” Polanco said. “To have someone like Irma experience this because of her beliefs and her statements, it’s crazy, it’s bizarre.”

The veteran assemblyman summoned UC Davis Police Chief Calvin Handy to the Capitol on Tuesday to discuss the investigation and ensure that it is being taken seriously. In an interview Tuesday, Handy said investigators view Munoz’s report as “extremely real.”

“We have focused all the resources we can on this report,” Handy said. “We’re taking the report from Irma seriously. There is no reason not to believe it.”

Campus police intend to post notices on the campus today asking for help in the investigation. So far, they have found no witnesses to the attack, said Mike Miller, assistant police chief at UC Davis. Other Latino students have begun escorting Munoz and have planned a rally today on the campus, 15 miles west of Sacramento.

“I’m not blowing this off at all,” said Detective Jerry Everett of the State Police, who is investigating the threat against Polanco and spent more than two hours questioning Munoz.

In the interview, Munoz said the attack occurred about 9 p.m. last Wednesday as she walked toward her apartment from the UC Davis library. She had decided to study at the library instead of her home because earlier in the evening she had several crank messages on her telephone answering machine.

For the past three weeks, she said, she had been receiving threatening notes but had thrown them away.

She described the attackers as in their mid-20s. One was Anglo and the other was Asian. At one point, she said, they warned that if she told of the incident, they’d “ ‘kill you and all your wetback friends, including that . . . Polanco.’ ”

Munoz, who works afternoons for Polanco in the Capitol, said she did not report the incident to police that night for fear that the men would hurt the assemblyman.

The next night, however, Munoz, who is on the UC Davis Student Council, went to a council meeting and pushed for support of a bill pending in the state Legislature that would allow illegal immigrants to attend California universities.

At the Thursday meeting, Munoz said, she stepped out to make a phone call when a man approached her, demanded that she cease speaking out on the issue and bloodied her lip. The man was not one of those who accosted her the night before, she said. When she returned to the Student Council meeting, she said, her friends urged her to report the attack.

Munoz’s father, a chemical engineer from Guadalajara, immigrated illegally when she was a child and was granted residency under the 1986 amnesty program. In 1989, she and her family joined him in Hayward.

There, she became an A student as well as the focus of articles in Bay Area newspapers when she was first denied admission at UC Davis because she was in this country illegally. She has since been granted legal residency.

She said she decided to make her story public because, as a friend told her, the assailants are “messing with the wrong people.”

“You stand up for what you believe in,” she said. “We’re not willing to let anything get us down or make us give up. I want to thank these people because now I know I’m never going to give up.”

Munoz said she has no idea whether the assailants were students, adding: “That’s the last thing I would want. That’s my school. That’s the place where I feel safe. It’s the place I love so much. I would hate to think that somebody who goes to Davis is capable of this.”