by Ted Genoways
We stepped into the new kitchen of their home, empty except for the two bar stools the Ostroms left at the island in the kitchen. Rafael paced while he talked, searching for the words to explain the source of his ambivalence. When he was eleven years old, he came to the United States with his brother from the Dominican Republic. By then, the boys had been separated from their mother for seven years while she worked to save up enough money and thread the bureaucracy of the immigration system to bring them to be with her in Brooklyn, New York. “Being honest with you,” he said, “I did not want to come here.” He could barely remember his real mother, and his grandmother was the only mother he knew.
But one day, after school, his grandmother told him, “You’re going somewhere.”
“I want to stay here with you,” Rafael protested.
A black car pulled up to the curb, Rafael’s brother already inside. “I jumped in,” Rafael told me, “going I-don’t-know-where, and we just went to the airport.”
His eyes turned toward the ceiling and then toward the sidewalk out the kitchen window, as he struggled to regain his composure, but he couldn’t do it. He broke into a quiet sob. “Let me tell it,” April said gently, and Rafael went outside. She explained that Rafael had never been able to get over the double loss—first of his real mother when he was four, and then of his grandmother when he was eleven. He blamed the glacial pace of the immigration process and couldn’t help but think that his wait might not have been so long, so painful, if there hadn’t been so many illegal immigrants flooding into the country ahead of him. When the ordinance was proposed, Rafael thought, “Good,” he told me later, “they should have to play by the same rules as me.”
But then, Rafael started to notice a change in Fremont. After a night of drinking and dancing, a friend of his from work was stopped by a sheriff’s deputy; he failed a field sobriety test and was put on probation for driving under the influence. Cruisers were always positioned at the western edge of town, picking up cars as they came in from the Mexican dance hall there—never outside the bars frequented by white Fremonters in town. Later that same friend’s Habitat for Humanity home was one of those vandalized before the immigration vote in 2010. Most importantly, when Rafael and April applied for a home loan, they were initially denied because they didn’t have any credit history. To build credit fast, Rafael bought a BMW sedan, but driving around Fremont in 2011 he had been repeatedly stopped by police demanding to see proof of ownership. When he was stopped a third time—this time on the pretext that his tinted windows were too dark—and police officers again asked to see proof of ownership, Rafael objected. He began “yelling and swearing at the officer,” according to the Fremont deputy chief, and was arrested for disorderly conduct.
Rafael had grown quiet and withdrawn after that, but in the weeks after taking possession of the house, he was back to his old self. For Easter Sunday, April invited Rafael’s friend from work and his family to come over for an egg hunt in the grass. April conceded that she wondered what the neighbors were thinking, watching a group of Hispanics out in the yard, grilling and playing with their children, but suddenly a thought occurred to her: “This was exactly what Kristin was fighting for.”
At the end of October 2013, a daylong fog turned to light rain as the city council in Fremont convened for its monthly meeting. In chambers, a crowd packed into tight rows of folding chairs or stood at the back of the room, spilling out into the hallways. They’d been drawn by news that council member Todd Hoppe had asked the city attorney to draft an amendment repealing sections of Ordinance 5165, requiring renters to prove their citizenship in order to acquire occupancy licenses, and making it a crime for landlords to rent to undocumented immigrants. Hoppe, a manager at All Metals Market who also holds multiple rental properties in Fremont, was visibly wary as he took his seat. Craig Corn, an unsuccessful candidate for mayor in 2012, couldn’t resist needling him. “You sure know how to draw a crowd, Todd,” Corn called from the front row. Hoppe managed only a cautious smile.
The tone soon turned from tense to contentious. As Mayor Scott Getzschman opened with a pro forma resolution to thank third-grade students at Washington Elementary School on Fremont’s largely Hispanic south side for inviting him to their classroom, Cindy Hart, the sister of petitioner Jerry Hart, called out from the second row, “How could you understand them?” (Later, at the lectern, she explained unapologetically, “I don’t want Spanish in my schools.”) It was the recommencing of a now-familiar refrain: that Fremont has been overrun by Hispanic immigration, that those immigrants are overwhelmingly in the country illegally, and that they create a drain on the city’s resources—by requiring it to provide instruction in schools for English as a second language, by failing to pay for emergency care at the local hospital, or by collecting public assistance for food and housing.
But the facts about the Hispanic presence in Fremont were less cut-and-dried than the rhetoric. Proponents of the ordinance point to Washington Elementary as evidence that overwhelming numbers of Fremont preschoolers arrive unable to speak English, but the school’s former principal told me that by the time those students are fifth graders, they score highest among the city’s elementary schools on statewide reading comprehension exams. Similarly, the CEO of the Fremont Area Medical Center said that while it’s true Hispanics account for roughly half a million dollars in unpaid medical bills each year, uninsured Hispanics actually pay up at a higher rate than uninsured white patients. By now, these well-worn points were less about mounting an argument than giving vent to the outrage at having to revisit a battle ordinance backers thought they had already won with 57 percent of the vote—and seen upheld despite repeated legal challenges.
In June 2013, a three-judge panel from the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Smith Camp’s finding that the housing portions of the ordinance violated federal fair-housing laws. Then, just weeks before the city council meeting, the court rejected a petition by the ACLU and MALDEF to have the full Eighth Circuit court rehear their challenges. With that loss, opponents of the law seemed to be left only with the possibility of an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which all parties agreed was unlikely with Congress promising to take up the immigration issue itself.
However, in October, Tim Butz, assistant director of the Fair Housing Center of Iowa and Nebraska, warned the city that there was a high risk that enforcement of the ordinance could be viewed as a violation of the Fair Housing Act. If so, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) could deny future Community Development Block Grant funding—and even demand repayment of millions of dollars in federal grants awarded to the city for downtown revitalization since the passage of the ordinance in June 2010. “I’m here to tell you that you need to act,” Butz told the city council. “You cannot ignore this thing. You’ve got to do something to counteract the effect of the ordinance on the Hispanic population of this city.” Following this meeting, Hoppe requested that an amendment be drafted to remove the potentially problematic sections of the ordinance. Supporters of the law, who had been celebrating their court victory and now expected the occupancy licensing provisions to be enacted at last, were enraged to learn that the council was instead exploring the possibility of repealing those sections.
As he opened the public-comment period of the meeting, Mayor Getzschman emphasized that the council had drafted the amendment so that it could better weigh its options and solicit the opinions of Fremont’s citizens. Bob Warner stood at the lectern breathing impatiently into the microphone as the city clerk read the text of the amendment. By the time the clerk was done, Warner could barely contain his anger. “You already know what the people’s wish was because they told you in a voting booth,” he said, his voice so loud that his words were distorted by the speakers.
John Wiegert echoed Warner’s outrage. “You’re totally going against the will of the people and the decisions of the courts,” he said to the council. “To think that you would use one of the best lawyers
in the nation to represent us—and he’s won every court decision—and then turn around and you stick it to him and the citizens of Fremont who voted for this, it’s despicable.” Wiegert went so far as to speculate that council members were “in cahoots” with attorneys from the ACLU and MALDEF. “We have a crooked government,” he said. “You guys should be ashamed of yourselves.”
But the most pointed criticism of the night came from Jerry Hart. “When you talk about the HUD grants,” he started calmly, “what you forget to take into account is that the courts have already looked at this ordinance.” He explained that the courts had ruled that the ordinance did not conflict with federal law and did not constitute discriminatory practice; if it came down to a struggle between HUD and the courts, Hart predicted, the courts “would have more say-so.” He then straightened his papers on the lectern and turned to address Hoppe directly. “My opinion, based on the houses that you have: you’re nothing but a slum landlord.” Others, too, had asserted that Hoppe was pushing to repeal the housing provisions in order to keep his low-rent tenants, but Hart was more explicit. “You’ve got a house down on South Pierce that’s inhabited by multiple families of Hispanics,” he said. “Most of those, I understand, are illegal.” The amendment, he added, was “underhanded, unscrupulous, backroom, immoral, unethical, Chicago-style politics.”
Charlie Janssen, who was now seeking the Republican nomination for governor of Nebraska, rose to suggest a compromise. “This, to me, at this point isn’t about illegal immigration anymore,” he said. “It’s about listening to your constituents.” Repealing an ordinance that voters in sixteen of twenty precincts had approved was “just not right,” he said. “If you want to do something, throw it back to the people. See where they’re at.”
It was after nine o’clock by the time the crowd spilled out onto the side streets along Military Avenue. The rain was picking up, but many people lingered, still talking under the streetlights, heedless of the shower and the cold. Most were loudly complaining about “illegals on food stamps” or “José in his lowrider.” I stopped Hoppe as he was coming out of the building. He seemed circumspect, even shaken, by the anger he had unleashed. “That’s just emotions, and I understand it; it’s an emotional issue,” he said. “It may seem that we’re at opposite ends, but we’re not. We want to take care of the illegal-alien issue in this community, and I believe everybody, when they voted, voted to take care of the illegal aliens. But sometimes they don’t know what price tag is attached to that.”
After seeing what he called “the ferocity” in chambers, he said he was inclined to heed Janssen’s advice and put the issue to a ballot measure. “Honestly, I couldn’t feel right passing it through the council,” he said. “We need to look at a special election, making sure everybody can vote on whether they want to keep this part in the ordinance—asking everybody, before we go ahead, ‘Are you sure you want to pull these purse strings?’”
A month later, the Fremont City Council met for a second reading of the amendment. But before the reading could even begin, council member Jennifer Bixby introduced a resolution to call a special election that would put the decision before voters. Another heated public-comment period followed, in which ordinance supporters pointed out that four thousand citizens had already cast their ballots in favor of it in 2010. Former council member Bob Warner demanded of Mayor Getzschman, “Do you represent the four thousand? Or do you represent Hormel?”
After comments closed, Bixby’s resolution passed by a vote of 7–1. There would be a special election on February 11, 2014, to decide if the citizens of Fremont still wanted to implement the ordinance.
In the weeks before the vote, everything looked positive for ordinance opponents. An anti-ordinance group, called Fremont YES, raised $71,000 for signs and advertising compared to just $8,000 brought in by ordinance supporters. In the run-up to the special election, Mayor Getzschman appeared in a pro-repeal TV commercial. A slate of ads ran on local radio. The editors of the Fremont Tribune endorsed the yes vote. The owner of a billboard at the far end of the overpass crossing the Union Pacific tracks—the most visible spot in town—donated the space to Fremont YES.
By the day of the special election, old tensions were again nearing a boil. Poll workers at the Precinct 3C voting station—relocated to the frozen foods section of Brady’s Meats & Foods just before the election, because it was the only handicapped-accessible building on Fremont’s poor south side—told me that they had been forced to ask several people to leave. One woman, upon discovering that her home was technically outside the city limits, disqualifying her from voting, pointed at lined-up Hispanic voters waiting to cast ballots and demanded to know, “Why do they get to vote, and I don’t?”
But by the time the polls were set to close, the wind had picked up outside and temperatures plummeted, cooling tempers and reducing the flow of voters to a trickle. Bryan Lopez, who worked gutting cattle on the kill floor at Cargill Meat Solutions in Schuyler, filled out his ballot at a table next to refrigerator cases filled with ice cream, then dropped the form into the locked box. “I voted yes,” he told me, but he wasn’t optimistic about the vote’s outcome. “People who want this, I hope they’re making an educated decision, instead of just being on the bandwagon.”
His hope echoed the message pushed by Mayor Getzschman and several city council members: that the ordinance would do considerable financial damage to the city but resolve none of the underlying problems. Before the 2010 ballot measure many people didn’t know that the Hormel Foods plant and the Regency II trailer park both fell outside the city limits and therefore would be exempt from employment and housing portions of the ordinance. People didn’t know that the city would have to lay off employees and raise taxes to fill coffers for a $1.5 million legal defense fund. They didn’t know the potential threat to federal block grants being used to redevelop the downtown. Now, with benefit of hindsight and knowledge of these factors, the majority of the city leaders hoped Fremonters would vote to repeal the ordinance. Instead, as soon as the polling stations closed, early results showed not only that voters had upheld the ordinance, but that the margin of victory had actually widened.
Blake Harper, the landlord who had joined the ACLU suit, was disappointed by the outcome but not surprised. “I’m embarrassed and ashamed, but I’m not shocked that Fremont has enough closet bigots to carry the vote,” Harper told me when I reached him by phone in Pennsylvania, not long after the election results were posted. Then he sighed. “Well, maybe not so closeted.”
In fact, on the east side of town, pro-ordinance group Our Votes Should Count, founded by John Wiegert, held a loud celebration at the Gathering Place, complete with an impassioned address by Charlie Janssen. There were cheers and applause as the final tally—60 percent opposed to the repeal, 40 percent in favor—was held up on poster-board signs. A big band struck up, and people started dancing. Janssen slipped into the icy quiet outside to field a few phone calls from reporters. “It is pretty rocking inside,” he told one. “They’re enjoying an evening that culminated several years of hard work.” Emboldened ordinance supporters were vowing to ride the momentum of their victory into efforts to recall Mayor Getzschman and all of the city council members who had brought the repeal to the ballot.
Harper didn’t dismiss that possibility, but he said that the problem in Fremont would only grow now—as more and more young people move away to Omaha and Lincoln and more and more immigrants arrived in Fremont to work. “As long as Hormel is processing thirteen hundred hogs per hour,” he said, “there will continue to be high demand for low-wage, unskilled labor. This is a demand that cannot be filled by the local workforce and cannot be stymied by silly ordinances.” I asked Harper what his next move would be. He paused a moment, then laughed. “You want to buy some duplexes in Fremont?”
Later that same evening, Jonathan Chavez, one of Harper’s renters at those duplexes, returned home from a twelve-hour shift at Midwest Manufacturing in Valley, Nebraska,
about ten miles down the highway from Fremont. His girlfriend, Kayla Jacquart, patted and burped their five-week-old son, Jameson. The previous July, when Jacquart found out she was pregnant, they started looking for a larger apartment. She spotted the FOR RENT sign here, and after Chavez talked to Harper at length, they were convinced that this was the place for them. “It’s two bedrooms—so he has his own room,” Jacquart said, bouncing Jameson on her knee. “It’s perfect for us right now.”
They were both hoping to return to school in the fall. Jacquart was completing a degree at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, and Chavez, who had recently graduated from Midland College, was hoping to pursue a master’s in business management. He worked as a shift manager for the moment and figured that an advanced degree would help his chances of becoming a plant manager one day. When that happens, he said, breaking into a broad smile, “we can get out of here, and get our own place. Get out of Fremont.” He hoped eventually to buy a home in Omaha where they could settle down.
It’s a far cry from Chavez’s beginnings in Guerrero, Mexico. Like so many people in Fremont and Schuyler, he was born in the mountain town of Chichihualco and came to the United States when he was still a toddler. After his parents split, his mother bought a trailer in Regency II and went to work on the line at Hormel. It was a hard life, he said. His mother had recently had her whole arm crushed by a machine at work, requiring multiple surgeries, and he wasn’t sure how she was paying the doctor’s bills. But he took issue with the way that the trailer park has become a stand-in for Fremont’s ills. “If you come here and don’t have documents and only Hormel is going to hire you, that’s all you can get,” he said. “Obviously, it’s trailers. It’s not nice fancy homes. But people are people.” He said that he had a happy childhood there, held down a 3.75 grade point average in high school, and received academic and soccer scholarships to Midland. “I lived there, and I’m okay,” Chavez said with a smile.