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Sunday, January 31, 2010

How did dozens of illegal immigrants end up shoveling snow at Gillette?

By Karen Lee Ziner
The Providence Journal
Journal Staff Writer
January 31, 2010

Four days before the New England Patriots’ playoff game against the Baltimore Ravens, 60 Guatemalan day workers headed in a caravan from Providence toward Gillette Stadium, prepared to shovel out the world-class home of one of the most valuable football franchises in the country.

The team’s road to the Super Bowl — and nearly 70,000 seats — had to be first cleared of snow.

But early on Jan. 6, federal immigration agents targeting “specific fugitives from deportation” stopped the work crew in Foxboro. Nine were taken into custody. The rest were told to show up at future immigration proceedings, and then cleared to go to the stadium. In fact, the agents drove them there.

On a day that never got above freezing, some were ill equipped for the cold — and the rigors of the job.

They shivered in sweatshirts and hoodies and frozen sneakers as they hurled the snow into giant chutes.

One woman was pregnant. Seven workers were minors. The youngest was a 14-year-old boy.

That Sunday, the Patriots got crushed in a snow-free arena. Their Super Bowl chances melted away.

Back in Providence, community groups and the Guatemalan Consulate were organizing legal and humanitarian aid. And the workers began describing a word-of-mouth, “ask no questions,” cash-only network that led them from Rhode Island to Gillette.

How did dozens of undocumented Guatemalans end up shoveling snow at the home of a $1.4-billion football team?

The answer may lie with the now-vacated “office” of Legal Pro-Temps in Dorchester, and a job pipeline from Providence.

Two days after the immigration road stop, Patriots spokesman Stacey James said the Patriots had severed its contract with the agency that he said had provided the workers. In an e-mail, he later told The Journal that the agency was Legal Pro-Temps; a company he said the Patriots organization had contracted with since January 2008.

Before that, he said, the Patriots used a different temp agency, All Stars Labor, also of Dorchester, from July 2007 through December 2007. Workers performed the same jobs: shoveling snow and picking up trash.

If the workers were undocumented, ill-equipped or exploited, that was the vendor’s fault, James said.

The Patriots insisted on a signed contract that called for qualified workers “dressed appropriately for the job.” They paid Legal Pro-Temps “an hourly rate, well in excess of minimum wage for each day-hire worker for the entire time they are on the site,” James said.

An on-the-job Gillette supervisor gave the workers morning breaks, with hot chocolate and bottled water, said James, and hour-long lunch breaks. And “as a courtesy,” workers who did not bring lunches got hot dogs, soup and hot chocolate.

“This doesn’t involve us. We’re not involved. If anything, we’re upset at the vendor and they’ve got to be held responsible,” James said when he announced that the Patriots would no longer be doing business with Legal Pro-Temps.

“We require all third-party vendors to abide by all state and federal labor laws. The failure of Legal Pro-Temps to do so resulted in the Patriots terminating our relationship with them,” James said.

He said the Patriots organization is considering safeguards to avoid such situations in the future.

The brick building where Legal Pro-Temps conducted business is just off the Southeast Expressway in Dorchester, at 79-83 Freeport Ave. The company’s name on a brass mailbox provided the only exterior locator for anyone unfamiliar with the business.

But the single room that Legal Pro-Temps maintained within a second-floor accountant’s office was cleared a week or so after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents stopped the workers on Jan. 6 in their “targeted” search for specific deportable immigrants.

The accountant, Thanh Tham, who said he did the payroll for Legal Pro-Temps, said the company’s owner, Xuong Phu La, had rented the small space from the landlord, until he reportedly left for Vietnam last November. The owner left his son, Elburke Lamson, in charge, Tham said. (The landlord confirmed that Xuong Phu La paid $400 a month for the space.)

Tham said La worked three days a week, for two hours a day. To Tham’s knowledge, no job-seekers ever came to the office.

“He filled out invoices,” Tham said of the owner.

Tham said that before Elburke Lamson took over his father’s business, he worked for All Stars Labor — the company the Patriots previously used to clean the stadium.

Tham said he came to work one morning several weeks ago — after the January incident — and discovered that someone — he assumed it was Lamson — had cleared out the Legal Pro-Temps office space.

Lamson invited a reporter into his condominium in Chelsea, Mass., two weeks ago.

A woman Lamson introduced as his girlfriend translated the reporter’s questions. Lamson replied in broken English: he answered many questions without requiring translation.

Lamson said that when the stadium asked for day laborers, he called the phone number of a Providence man that his father had provided for him. Asked how his father had located the man, Lamson said, “Through a friend.”

Lamson said he instructed the man who assembled the snow-shoveling crew to make sure they had identification. Lamson said the man told him that ‘It was an emergency’ — that’s why he didn’t get [the] papers” from the workers who went to the stadium.

The Providence man who organized the crew called on the morning of Jan. 6, a Wednesday, Lamson said.

“He said police stopped them,” Lamson said, and “it was nothing.” Later, Lamson said, the man told him “the people he took to work — a few of them got arrested.”

Lamson confirmed that he had subsequently cleared his desk and files at the Dorchester office. He added, “I sold the computer.” He didn’t say why.

The workers were more familiar with raising corn or chickens in the K’ichĂ© region of Guatemala than hoisting plastic snow shovels. Catarina Castro, 24, told her story Thursday at the Providence storefront office of Immigrants in Action Committee, one of several advocacy groups helping the workers.

Castro came to the office in sandals and bare feet, and a fleece sweatshirt with “Alaska” stitched on the front that, she said, is identical, all but in color, to the one she wore to the stadium. She said she does not own a winter coat.

Castro said through a translator that she crossed illegally through the desert into the United States eight years ago so she could support a child she left in her mother’s care. She picked up trash at Gillette Stadium several weeks ago, she said, but had never shoveled snow until Jan. 6.

On that day, her sneakers froze, “and my pants were all wet … they were soaking wet up to my knees, and my fingers were frozen as well.” When she returned home that day, “My body hurt.”

She and her friend, Roberto Poel Castro (no relation), 20, said they were given just one half-hour break between 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m., and were each provided a hot dog and hot chocolate for lunch.

They said they had time for “only a few sips” of water, because their “American” supervisor “would yell” if they took too long, or talked too much. Workers snuck toward the back of the stadium to drink water “when he [the supervisor] wasn’t looking,” Roberto Castro said.

Guillermo Ramos, another of the workers, said on Friday, “The gringo said, ‘Hurry up, you are here to work, not to drink.’ ” He said the supervisor wore a Gillette jacket.

Ramos said his socks got clotted with ice as he shoveled in snow nearly up to his knees. He said he does not own a heavy coat or boots.

He added, “If you stop with your shovel, they say, ‘Hey, what happened?’ ”

None of the workers had heard of a company called Legal Pro-Temps, nor had they ever filled out a job application. Workers who crowded into the office of the Guatemalan Consulate in Providence the week after the incident gave similar accounts.

Some of the workers said they were paid $5 to $7 an hour, below minimum wage, and were charged up to $7 a day for transportation, according to members of the Central Falls advocacy group Fuerza Laboral who interviewed them.

The workers’ situation sent shock waves through a Providence Latino community well acquainted with immigration raids, and replayed a familiar theme: of workers in a widespread underground economy.

In July 2008, ICE agents rounded up 32 janitors who scrubbed floors and toilets at Rhode Island courthouses. In 2007, Rhode Islanders were among more than 350 undocumented factory workers detained during an ICE raid at the Michael Bianco Inc. plant in New Bedford.

The courthouse workers also described word-of-mouth hiring without background checks. Their pay stubs reflected no benefits, insurance or tax deductions.

Catherine Ruckelshaus, legal codirector of the National Employment Law Project, in New York City, said undocumented workers have legal rights intended to protect them against exploitation. But as the use of temp agencies grows, she said, “The temp firms often act as a shield between employers with means and resources” to hire full-time workers.

The Gillette snow-shovelers’ case represents “a perfect storm of failed immigration policy; no enforcement of labor standards; and the stadium subbing out more intensive pieces of labor,” Ruckelshaus said.

Whether the Jan. 6 incident is under investigation beyond the immigration aspects is unclear. Tom Connell, spokesman for Rhode Island U.S. Attorney Peter F. Neronha, said he “will neither confirm nor deny” an investigation. John Chavez, spokesman for the U.S. Department of Labor in Boston, said he also “can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation by the [Boston] wage and hour division into this matter.”

An ICE spokeswoman last week said six of the nine individuals initially arrested during the “targeted fugitive operation” remain in custody. Two were charged with immigration violations and released pending court hearings. One other individual was released for humanitarian reasons, pending deportation.

Roberto Gonzalez, an East Providence attorney who is among those providing legal aid, said some of the workers are considering asylum claims. Legal aid is being organized in Rhode Island and in Boston. Gonzalez said the people with deportable offenses have agreed to leave the country, rather than fight their cases. Most are expected to be deported within the next month.

Meanwhile, workers have begun presenting themselves at the Warwick ICE office for processing, and will appear before an immigration judge in Boston between now and the end of March, said Carlos Escobedo, the regional Guatemalan consul general. Escobedo added, “All the people are following the process. Nobody disappeared. Everybody is following the process.”

http://www.projo.com/news/content/GILLETTE_IMMIGRANTS.1_01-31-10_KLH973K_v46.398871c.html#