Immigration Sweep Stirs Cloud of Controversy Residents sue Arizona town, saying crackdown on illegal workers led to harassment of U.S. citizens.

On a recent morning, while driving home from the store, Catalina Veloz was pulled over by a Chandler police officer who had a question. In Spanish, he asked, “Got your papers?”

The query puzzled the 35-year-old security guard and lifelong Arizona resident.

“I said, ‘I’ve got toilet paper, writing paper and newspaper--what kind do you want?’ ” she recalled. “He said, ‘No, your immigration papers.’ ”

The officer and his companion, a Border Patrol agent, threatened to deport Veloz until she convinced them, in forceful English, that “I was born here!”

Later the same day, a Border Patrol agent on a bicycle followed her into a parking lot near her home and asked, “Where’s your papers?”

“What the hell did you ask me?” she responded indignantly. “I was born here! I went to school here! I raised four kids here! Do I have to tattoo the words ‘U.S. Citizen’ on my forehead?”

Veloz is among 16 Chandler residents who filed a $35-million class-action lawsuit accusing the city of civil rights violations during a five-day roundup of 432 undocumented workers in late July. Adding to the outrage, local authorities conceded that the crackdown targeted a downtown redevelopment area anchored by small businesses catering to Latinos.

Arizona Atty. Gen. Grant Woods has launched an investigation of the sweep, the largest ever in this boomtown of 165,000 people--19% of whom are Latino--just south of Phoenix. The probe aims to determine whether some residents were harassed or treated unfairly on the basis of their national origin, ethnicity or skin color.

“We have to get to the bottom of what went on there and make sure that if people were stopped because of the color of their skin, it never happens again in Arizona or the United States,” Woods said. “In my state, as in California, to be Hispanic is to be part of our state’s heritage.”

Still, complaints are increasing now that federal authorities are teaming up with local police and sheriff’s deputies in immigration sweeps. Recent operations have been conducted in Denver, Tucson, Flagstaff, Ariz., and Little Rock, Ark.

Last September, police officers and federal agents in Jackson Hole, Wyo., rounded up 150 legal and illegal Latino workers, inked numbers on their arms and hauled them off to jail in patrol cars and a horse trailer soiled with manure. In January, a similar sweep in Crescent City, Fla., spawned a lawsuit alleging violations of search-and-seizure laws.

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In most cases, these sweeps were conducted after local police had received almost daily complaints from residents who accused undocumented workers of public drunkenness, loitering and burglary.

The Chandler operation was different, critics say. They contend that the city wants to drive Latinos, whether they are legal or illegal residents, out of the downtown redevelopment area. Officials hope the area will one day compete with upscale civic centers in Mesa, Tempe and Scottsdale.

Chandler Assistant City Manager Patrick McDermott said “the objective of the operation between the Chandler Police Department and the Border Patrol was to address the problems related to illegal immigrants in the redevelopment area.”

But Stephen Montoya, the Phoenix civil rights lawyer who filed the lawsuit, said, “We’re suing them for racism because their primary criterion for stopping people was skin color, a practice that is against the law.”

Jose Garcia, a Vietnam combat veteran and retired Mesa Police Department lieutenant, agreed.

Standing in front of his small video rental business in the shadow of Chandler City Hall, Garcia said: “The police were way out of bounds. One of our customers was stopped four times within a single block while on her way home on foot.

“They were looking for dark-skinned workers speaking Spanish,” he said, shaking his head. “And they thought we’d just take it. They were very wrong.”

Given that the city is facing a lawsuit, local officials are reluctant to discuss the sweep, let alone charges of civil rights violations. However, Chandler Mayor Jay Tibshraeny recently told a gathering of 200 Latinos that the city will never again engage in such an operation.

Chandler Police Department spokesman Sgt. Ken Phillips would not go that far. But Phillips, who denied that anyone was stopped without probable cause, acknowledged that the operation was flawed.

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“We concede that we could have done things to soften the impression--so we’ve learned too,” he said. “We are now considering suggestions, including that we notify the Mexican consulate and community leaders before we implement another operation.”

Those concessions are not sufficient for Veloz.

“I feel degraded, like people are looking at me. I feel like the stuff you scrape off the bottom of your shoes,” she said.