When a name spells trouble

Jose Sanchez, a 36-year-old travel agent, has a problem that seems inescapable.

It’s on his passport, birth certificate and the document that allows him to live here as a permanent, legal resident.

Sanchez’s problem is his name.

Being called Jose Sanchez wasn’t much of an issue until 2007, about the time U.S. authorities required everyone entering the country by plane to carry a passport.

Up to then, Sanchez had traveled freely between his Southern California home and Mexico, the land of his birth.

Then, returning from Guadalajara in 2007, he stood before the Customs and Border Protection agent at LAX for what had always been a routine inspection.

The agent saw something of concern on his computer screen and his expression quickly turned from bureaucratic boredom to official concern. He ordered Sanchez to “please step over here and wait.”

Another agent arrived to take Sanchez’s Mexican passport and led him to a room with a handful of chairs. He then was placed in the custody of a third agent who asked a series of questions that suggested the government believed he was up to no good.

“It’s like they’re trying to trip me up to get me to admit I did something wrong,” he told me.

Sitting in that “little room,” all sorts of crazy thoughts went through Sanchez’s head. “I thought I was going to be deported,” he said. “I thought about my family waiting for me outside and how I’d have to explain to them what happened.”

He’d lived in the U.S. so long, speaking a native’s impeccable English, that he’d taken it for granted he’d always be let back in. Why would they deport him? For that misdemeanor disturbing the peace conviction he got after getting too rowdy at the racetrack?

That first time, he was let go after about an hour. Then it happened again and again, he said -- on nine of the last 11 trips he’s made abroad.

He’s been detained against his will for as little as 15 minutes and as long as two hours, without ever being told the reason why. “The only thing I’m told is that it’s because I have a common Hispanic name,” he said.

There are close to 100 Jose Sanchezes with listed phone numbers in the Greater Los Angeles White Pages, and a few hundred people with that name registered to vote in L.A. County. Each one, apparently, has a small cloud hanging over his head.

When I first heard Jose Sanchez’s story, I thought I would write about his brief, Kafkaesque encounters at LAX as an allegory about good immigrants paying for the sins of evil ones.

After all, there is a “bad” Jose Sanchez out there -- or maybe several. One or a number of them have been red-flagged by U.S. Customs and Border Protection as the kind of guy we don’t want to let back in the country.

Good Jose Sanchez has lived in the United States for 30 years without causing many problems. He’s married to a U.S. citizen and is the father of two sets of twin boys and one girl, all U.S. citizens too. He even got security clearance to work at the airport once, he told me.

The Bad Jose Sanchez or Sanchezes could have been convicted of violent felonies here or involved with a nefarious cartel poisoning our country with drugs.

Over at Customs and Border Protection, they won’t say.

The agency has no obligation to divulge to air travelers why they’ve been pulled out of the immigration line for additional questioning, said spokeswoman Cristina Gamez.

CBP monitors the interagency anti-terrorist “watch lists” -- the same ones that failed to keep that Nigerian bomber off the flight to Detroit -- and also its own databases of people labeled as “inadmissible.”

A lot of things can make you inadmissible --for example, being convicted of a crime of “moral turpitude,” Gamez said. If you have a green card and have lived outside the U.S. too long, they might not let you back in either. “Being a permanent resident . . . is not a permanent thing,” she told me.

Of course, this sort of airport hassle doesn’t just happen to the Jose Sanchezes of the world or even just to people with common Latino surnames.

In 2006, “60 Minutes” interviewed a dozen men named Robert Johnson who’d been put through travel hell.

For the Robert Johnsons, as for the Jose Sanchezes, there is now a remedy, Gamez told me.

It’s an online form called the Traveler’s Redress Inquiry Program (TRIP for short) on the website of the Department of Homeland Security.

In that form, I believe, lies the true moral of Jose Sanchez’s story.

Several times during his detentions at LAX, Sanchez has sat in that little room with other people like him and looked up at a poster featuring a phone number and other information for filing a complaint.

“I thought if I complained, it would only get me in more trouble,” he told me. Better to lay low, he thought, in the hope that one day the problem might simply disappear.

No, Jose, the United States of America doesn’t work that way.

In this country, they respect you more if you make a stink. You have to act like you have rights -- because, in fact, you do have them. We live in such a great country, it even grants many protections to people who aren’t citizens.

The Jose Sanchez I met has to learn to start thinking like he really belongs in the country he’s called home since he was 6 years old. He has to start thinking, in other words, like a citizen.

Applying for U.S. citizenship wouldn’t hurt either -- he’s been eligible to do so since he was 18. Like many longtime immigrants, he’s viewed it as an unnecessary headache.

“I thought it would be too much hassle,” he told me. “Or that it would just take too much time.”

Being a citizen not only gives us the full protections enshrined in the Constitution, it also allows us to shape the system to serve and protect us better, I said.

It isn’t cheap -- there’s a $675 filing fee -- but what you get is priceless. And getting started is easy.

Like the complaint form, the application for U.S. citizenship is available online.

hector.tobar@latimes.com