n increasing numbers, Hispanic immigrants are putting down roots in the Roanoke Valley. They're pouring concrete, opening hair salons and filling classrooms. Some employers, meanwhile, are attributing their success to this new labor pool. In this occasional series, The Roanoke Times explores the local impact of the national debate about immigration.
During a busy Friday night dinner waiter Jesus Malaga serves an armload of food to their Anglo customers. Malaga came to America four years ago from Mexico and, like many Mexican immigrants in Roanoke, first landed a job at El Rodeo.
Risking it all
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On Aug. 9, Nohemi Cedillo (left) and Vivian Sanchez-Jones, her Refugee and Immigration Services caseworker, left the Harrisonburg immigration office with a sense of relief. “It’s in God’s hands now,” Nohemi said of efforts to find her missing son.As the months wore on, Nohemi and her husband tried to focus on the four daughters living under their roof. In their two-bedroom trailer, the girls sleep in the same room, two of them sharing a twin bed and the other two sharing a double. The eldest, 15-year-old Vanessa, helps manage the home after school, cleaning and preparing dinner, including tortillas, which she makes by hand.
The girls try not to mention their brother, Vanessa said, because it makes their mother sad. They try to be especially sensitive on the 17th of every month — the date, in June 2005, when she lost contact with Melvin.
This spring, Nohemi scrimped to give Vanessa a quinceanera, an elaborate coming-of-age ceremony marking a Hispanic girl’s 15th birthday. Friends and family packed every row of Iglesia de Dios, the Honduran-run Pentecostal church in Northeast Roanoke. Video cameras whirred as Nohemi walked Vanessa down the aisle in her $500 pink dress.
Weeks later, family snapshots from the event were placed amid photos of Melvin in the living room. Nohemi feared the only way she’d see her children together again was through pictures.
If Melvin was alive, he had just turned 17.
By early summer, Nohemi had heard the coyote was back in Honduras, still in operation, and she wanted justice.
In her prayers, God had told her it was time, she said. If she risked it all, he would protect her.
Sanchez-Jones made contact with Harrisonburg-based ICE agents, who said they would try to find Melvin — if Nohemi told them everything she knew about the coyote.
At first, Nohemi balked, remembering the threats against her family. An initial phone conversation with one of the agents didn’t bode well, with Nohemi refusing to divulge the coyote’s last name and the agent bringing up the matter of her outstanding deportation-court hearing — a “notice to appear” she’d been given when she was caught leaving Eagle Pass, Texas, in 2000.
When she got off the phone, Nohemi prayed for help. She knew she would never have peace unless she found out what happened to her son.
Fifteen minutes later, the ICE agent phoned back.
The agency could help her, but she would have to come for an interview at the Harrisonburg office and agree to cooperate fully. It was possible, the agent added, that Nohemi might qualify for a U Visa, created for crime victims who help the government prosecute traffickers, Sanchez-Jones said.
Although ICE spokeswoman Ernestine Fobbs acknowledged that one stepped-up priority of the agency is apprehending smugglers, she declined to comment on the ongoing investigation.
Roanoke FBI director Kevin Foust said that ICE agents don’t hesitate to investigate cases involving child abuse, even if the victim is an illegal immigrant. “They’re great agents doing a fantastic job,” he said of the Harrisonburg ICE agents.
Still, as Sanchez put it shortly before the trip: “They’ve said repeatedly that they want to help her, not arrest her. But taking an illegal immigrant to la Migra?”
Who would have thought? Sanchez-Jones was having trouble sleeping herself.
On Aug. 8, the night before their departure, Nohemi dreamed she’d returned to Honduras — but this time Melvin wasn’t there.
Nohemi woke up more convinced than ever: She was on the right track.
Nohemi had taken off work the previous week to prepare spiritually. She went to church four times in as many days. She fasted the entire day of the trip.
Before Nohemi and Sanchez-Jones left, they held hands with Nohemi’s daughters, forming a circle outside the trailer and praying “for God’s protection and wisdom and for his will to be done.”
Three hours later, Sanchez-Jones and Nohemi arrived at ICE, an unmarked office in a Harrisonburg strip mall. Nohemi was still fasting and declined Sanchez-Jones’ lunchtime attempts to get her to drink something. But when ICE agents offered her a bottle of water, she accepted it and followed them into an interviewing room, alone.
For more than an hour, Nohemi answered questions about Melvin and the coyote. She told them everything she knew: the coyote’s full name, last-known whereabouts, phone numbers, addresses.
The agents took her DNA sample and sent it to a lab, where they would run it against a database of unclaimed remains.
When it came time to leave, Nohemi had thought she’d be in a panic. But when she left the interviewing room and saw Sanchez-Jones waiting for her , a calmness came over her, and she said, “I just knew: They’re going to let me leave.”
The agents said they’d be in touch.
Nohemi felt a new door opening as she left the office: the possibility of closure and, with it, immense relief. Finally, she had done all she could do.
The two women walked to the car, Sanchez-Jones’ arm wrapped tightly around Nohemi’s shoulders.
“It’s in God’s hands now,” Nohemi said.
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