Migrants Tell of Harrowing Flight From Authorities

Later, authorities would accuse them of hurling beer cans and bumping cars.

Later, talk radio would crackle with calls for them to suffer humiliations: to be flogged, to be dumped in the ocean, to be handled like wayward animals.

Later. For now, though, they were huddled, terrified, in a disintegrating pickup truck as it rattled down a freeway, pursued by speeding squad cars.

They were hungry. They hadn’t eaten in two days. They were confused; they hadn’t a clue where their driver was headed. Most of all, though, they were scared.

“It was like a nightmare,” 21-year-old Eleazar Mendoza said.

The 19 illegal immigrants rounded up near the Pomona Freeway on Monday have, by now, become famous. News cameras captured many of them leaping from the back of the pickup and fleeing into a nearby tree nursery while two Riverside County sheriff’s deputies clubbed two of their comrades-in-flight near the truck and allegedly roughed up a third.

Throughout that wild ride and its televised finale, the immigrants had no inkling of the fierce controversy they would soon generate. Looking somewhat overwhelmed--and somewhat flattered--by all the attention, they told their tales Thursday at a news conference and in interviews with The Times.

Mexican Consulate officials talked at the news conference both of the generous donations and the hateful threats the immigrants have drawn.

The immigrants, meanwhile, sat silently with hands clasped, staring straight ahead. One wore a T-shirt reading “Wanna Get Lucky?” Another wore an advertisement for the resort town of Cancun. Their moods scarcely matched their carefree attire.

In low voices, they told of an arduous journey that began in the foothills of northern Mexico. There, waiting for their chance to sneak across the border, they got to know one another. They had arrived in small clusters from villages across Mexico. Eleazar Mendoza and his brother Julio were traveling with five of their cousins. Alicia Sotero Vasquez and Enrique Funes Flores--the two who would later be beaten on video--considered themselves almost married. But many of the 19 immigrants who ended up in the rust-pocked blue pickup met for the first time in the Mexican mountains.

There was Eleazar Pinon, a 21-year-old who had made the treacherous crossing before. He had worked in Santa Ana for a while. Now he was back for another chance.

There was Roberto Medina, a farm worker without a farm. A single 26-year-old from Guadalajara, Medina figured he would have a better chance at work in the bountiful fields of California. He was aiming for Salinas, but he was ready to take any job, to go anywhere. Mendoza, on the other hand, had a specific goal in mind: He wanted to join his uncle in Watsonville to pick up some money picking strawberries.

Then there was Eduardo Roman. At 29, he was a bit older. He had a family, too, four young children in the town of Rio Blanco, Veracruz.

The others might have been talking bold, dreaming of making a sturdy, successful new life in the States. Not Roman. He knew he belonged in Mexico. He wouldn’t have left in the first place except that the auto body shop where he worked had shut down. With no paycheck and no prospects, he joined the group heading north--planning to stay no more than nine months, then hustle back to his wife and children.

At their rugged border stakeout, the Mexicans met a coyote, a man with a truck who promised to deliver them to Los Angeles. But they had to cross the border on their own. Willing, they set out--and ended up trekking two days and nights, with sips from a smelly, dirty creek as their only water.

But they made it. They met their driver near San Diego. He promised most of them they would not have to pay his $400 fee upfront.

Instead, he wouldlet them settle in and find work before coming around to collect.

That driver has so far eluded authorities. The immigrants say they cannot identify him. They say they don’t know his name. But experts suggest another reason for their silence: a fear that ratting will only bring trouble.

“Many aliens are terrified by their smugglers,” said Jim Pilkington, a spokesman for the Border Patrol in San Diego. “It is standard practice for some smugglers to slap and hit the immigrants they are guiding to prove that they will hurt them even worse if they ever give up any information.”

Although they won’t talk about their driver, Mendoza, Medina and the others will talk about their jolting flight from law enforcement. They describe it in one word: terrifying. They were barreling along so fast that bits of the camper shell on their run-down pickup broke loose, scattering on the road and leaving them exposed to the wind, sun and sirens.

“We saw two, three, four patrol cars,” Medina said. “When we saw them following us, we got scared.” Hunched in the pickup, Mendoza said, “we all decided that if they stopped us, we would run.”

Medina ran into a sheriff’s deputy, who was holding a gun and yelling “Stop!” The deputy handcuffed him and told him to sit on the ground while authorities rounded up the other runaways. A few, including the driver, got away.

Mendoza said they were treated well. Yet when they saw the taped beating, they got angry. Not surprised--some had heard tales of violence--but definitely upset. “I think it was wrong how they treated our friends,” Roman said.

Since the episode exploded onto the public’s attention Monday afternoon, the 19 immigrants have heard themselves described as the worst kind of miscreants. They do not even recognize themselves amid all the rhetoric.

The Sheriff’s Department version of the chase, for example, has them tossing debris at pursuing squad cars. The immigrants insist that they never threw anything at anyone. Witnesses accuse them of sideswiping other vehicles in a deliberate attempt to divert deputies. They say they had no idea what their driver was doing, and were just as frightened as anyone on the road.

Their fright has eased since the Mexican Consulate took them in, fed them and found them clothes. They are trying to settle in. Meanwhile, debate still thunders around them. Although civil rights activists have rallied on their behalf, anti-immigrant voices have shouted loudly, too. Critics have called for them to be tossed in the ocean and forced to swim ashore, or flogged 200 times by a very strong arm.

“My first solution to the problem would be to mine the border,” said Robert, a Santa Monica man who called a KFI radio talk show. “. . . . The second thing I would do is round up these idiot wetbacks.”

That type of backlash has proved so potent that the Mexican consul general called for immigrant rights activists to stop waving the Mexican flag at demonstrations, lest they stir up tension. The immigrants’ attorneys, meanwhile, report death threats.

The immigrants simply plead for understanding.

“We didn’t enter the country to do any harm,” Roman said.

The others echoed him. Earnestly, they repeated: All we wanted to do was work. All we wanted to do was work.

Now, ironically, they may get that chance. All 19 will be allowed to remain in the United States for at least six months so they can cooperate with investigators, according to Rosemary Melville, of the INS’ Los Angeles district. During their stay, they can apply for work permits--which will probably be granted only to those likely to remain in the United States longer than six months to testify in future trials, Melville said.

That news so elated the immigrants that they high-fived one another in the INS detention center. “It was worth it, despite everything,” Medina said. “I never thought I could have permission to stay here. I always thought we’d be jailed and be sent back.”

When they are no longer needed as witnesses, the immigrants will be expected to return to Mexico voluntarily. Their cooperation could save them from future problems. Foreigners who have been deported once and then get caught sneaking back into the United States illegally can be prosecuted as criminals and sentenced to jail, Melville said. These 19, however, will avoid a deportation mark on their records.

That arrangement sounded pretty good to Roman. “I feel good right now,” he said. “But more than that, I feel free.”

Relieved to be out of custody, Roman said he would not dissuade a friend in Mexico from attempting a border dash, despite his own harrowing experience. “If he wanted to come, he should come,” Roman said. “Because he would be coming to work, nothing else.”

Times staff writers Tony Perry in San Diego and Matea Gold, James Rainey, Margaret Ramirez, George Ramos and Stephanie Simon in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

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