ON DECEMBER 11, 2001, two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, federal officials began a nationwide sweep of illegal immigrants employed at airports. Dubbed "Operation Tarmac," the project has so far led to the arrest of 356 immigrants in such disparate places as Salt Lake City; Phoenix, Arizona; Las Vegas; Seattle; Atlanta; Sacramento; Charlotte, North Carolina; Portland, Oregon; Washington, DC; and Boston — though none of the arrestees has been linked with terrorist activities. Still, the sweeps have broad public support, perhaps because the dramatic arrests satisfy our demand for action. At a February 27 press conference held at Logan’s Terminal A, Massachusetts District US attorney Michael Sullivan said: "This initiative is a major step in closing those gaps in security that may have still existed post–September 11." On April 22, US Attorney General John Ashcroft described Operation Tarmac as a way to ensure that people who have access to sealed airport areas "are worthy of the trust granted to them."
But a look at the local impact of Operation Tarmac, in which 20 current and former employees of Logan Airport were arrested, shows just how politically — rather than practically — motivated the effort has been. If Operation Tarmac’s true goal was to make us more secure — as opposed to making us feel more secure — the people and firms who hired the now-suspect immigrants would also be facing charges. But they’re not.
Each of the "Logan 20," as those arrested in Boston have come to be known, had been employed at one time or another by private companies that contract with the Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs the airport. Six operated baggage-screening equipment for Argenbright Security; four cleaned terminals for Precision Cleaning Company; the rest worked as airplane fuelers, janitors, and food servers. Caught up in the sweeps are immigrants like Martin Gonzalez, 34, a gentle, mustachioed man from Mexico. His journey to this country represents the typical immigrant’s tale; in 1990, he fled his dirt-poor family farm in Guadalajara for Los Angeles, where he worked as a janitor while sending money to his parents and 11 siblings. In 1995, he arrived in Boston. He got a job as an airport custodian. He met his wife, Iris, a Chilean immigrant. Last year, after six years of scrubbing toilets for $9 an hour, he bought a modest home in Revere. "I am settled here," says Gonzalez, who speaks Spanish, through an interpreter.
But on February 27, his vision of America as the land of opportunity crumbled. Gonzalez, who had never been arrested before, woke early to bring his wife to the airport in time for her to catch a flight to Chile. When he returned home, he learned from his wife’s son that police had shown up at 5:30 a.m. with an arrest warrant. He turned himself in. "I am not a criminal," says Gonzalez, who enjoys temporary legal status and a work permit.
Yet it wasn’t long before he would be made to feel like one. No sooner had he surrendered to the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) than his hands were cuffed and his feet shackled. He was detained at Plymouth County House of Corrections, in a three-prisoner cell, for five days. He still cannot shake the sense of shame that comes with being caged in with hardened offenders — or, in his words, "scary people." He averts his eyes, adding, "I am hard-working. I feel very out of place."
GONZALEZ AND his fellow immigrants’ cases have drawn fierce criticism in Boston. Detractors have called attention to the fact that six of the current 19 Logan defendants have valid immigration papers. (Charges against one of the original 20, Reginald Pierre, have been dismissed, although officials decline to say why. "It’s not public record," says Samantha Martin, of the Boston US Attorney’s Office, which is handling the cases.) Seven did not work at the airport at the time of their arrests. Only one has a criminal record. More important, none of the defendants has been linked to terrorist activity. Susan Church, of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Lawyers’ Guild, which is circulating a petition calling on Sullivan to drop the charges, sums up the criticism best. "If we’re going to wage a war on terrorism, we should investigate people who pose a danger," she says.
On April 23, this complaint could be heard repeatedly outside the US District Court in South Boston, when 14 of the 19 defendants appeared at the courthouse for arraignment on identical charges. (Because the cases are being handled individually, defendants have been arraigned on different dates.) Close to 50 labor, civil-rights, and immigrant advocates turned out on the dank, brisk afternoon to protest. They held signs reading WORK IS NOT A CRIME and JUSTICIA PARA LOS LOGAN 19, and chanted, "Justicia! Justicia!" as speakers seized a portable microphone to demand an end to the attack against immigrants whose only crime has been to work in order to survive.
Inside the courthouse, the mood was sober. The 14 defendants — Latino, Haitian, and African men and women — stood side by side in Courtroom 23, as if in a police line-up. Some had red, swollen eyes. Others had furrowed brows. Each wore a solemn expression. They sat quietly, their hands folded, waiting for the charges to be translated into their native languages: one count of lying on a job application; one count of using a false alien-registration card; and one count of presenting a false Social Security number.
"How do you plead?" the court clerk asked 14 times, to which the defendants, through interpreters, replied: "Not guilty." For many, their response was barely audible, as if they felt disgraced by it all.
Samuel Mgweno, 22, a slight, unassuming Tanzanian man, cannot forget the humiliation that consumed him at his March 26 arraignment. Like a broken record, his mind keeps rehashing the events of his plight. "It is like something not real," says Mgweno, who had never before run into trouble with the police. The second oldest of five, he grew up in a quiet, industrious household in Tanzania’s capital of Dar es Salaam. He’s resided in the US on and off since June 2000, when he arrived on a student work visa to attend the Seeds of Peace, a Maine camp that recruits teenagers from war-torn countries to instill the virtues of nonviolence. Now, nearly two years later, being labeled a criminal has left him "in horror."
Mgweno’s nightmare did not begin with the February 27 raids in Boston. It took shape 48 hours later and about 1854 miles away — on March 1, in Houston, where Mgweno was studying engineering at Houston Community College. On that Friday, around 11 a.m., he started his day with a shower. While bathing, he heard noises in the two-bedroom apartment. Within minutes, someone was banging on the door.
"A voice called out, ‘Samuel, we want to talk to you,’" Mgweno recalls. Befuddled, he grabbed a towel and opened the door — only to find four INS agents peering at him. The agents, he says, inquired about his name. They asked if he’d ever worked at Logan and if he’d ever worked for Argenbright Security.
"I had no idea what was going on," Mgweno says. He remembered the now-embattled security firm, based in Atlanta. After camp had ended in August 2000, he traveled to Boston to stay with a Tanzanian friend until his visa expired in October. At that time, he worked as a screener at Logan for four weeks. But more than a year had passed. In the interim, he’d gone back to Tanzania then returned to the US after receiving a student visa in August 2001, which he used to attend college. Why, wondered Mgweno, who was arrested by INS agents that morning, would such agents appear at his door now?
It would be nearly four weeks before Mgweno discovered, at his March 26 arraignment, that he’d been charged with making one false statement on Form UA-1, an application completed by employees whose jobs require access to secure airport areas. According to the criminal complaint filed against him, Mgweno allegedly responded affirmatively to a Form UA-1 question — "Are you a US Citizen or do you have an Employment Authorization or Resident Alien Card?" — while knowing his answer "to contain materially false" information. Until his arraignment, he’d been shuttled from jail to jail, in Houston, Oklahoma, Georgia, and in Central Falls, Rhode Island, where he was held at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Center until his release on April 8. All told, he spent 38 days behind bars, his hands and feet shackled, his self-respect shattered. On March 21, he hit an all-time low when he celebrated his 22nd birthday in prison.
"I was waiting for a miracle," says Mgweno, whose middle name, ironically, is Innocent. Now out on bail, he lives with fellow Tanzanian immigrants in Weymouth. He reports twice a week to the federal courthouse, where he must prove to court officers that he hasn’t fled the state. He speaks with his court-appointed attorney almost daily. The situation has made him realize how immigrants in the US — who simply came here for a better life — can get caught in the hysteria that’s swept the nation since September 11. Mgweno, his voice cracking, asks, "Why doesn’t the government go for people who are really responsible for terrorism?"
