By Thadeus Greenson
The Eureka Times-Standard
EUREKA, Calif. — Stan Wickham sees ghosts.
As the immigration liaison for the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, it’s Wickham’s job to identify the 450 to 650 foreign-born people who are booked into the county jail every year. For some, it’s an impossible task.
“We deal with a certain population that I call ghost people,” Wickham said. “They don’t exist in any database we have. Sometimes, they’re just not identifiable.”
Born in Peru and educated in Santiago, Chile, Wickham speaks Spanish and has been through a number of trainings on identifying foreign nationals. He is uniquely qualified for the job but is one of only three corrections officers assigned to identification tasks at the jail, and all have other primary duties.
Still, Wickham seems to have his finger on the pulse of undocumented immigrant issues more than most locally. He knows why and how undocumented foreign nationals come to Humboldt County. He knows many simply come seeking opportunity and, though here illegally, lead law-abiding lives while here. He also knows some are involved with large criminal organizations that have a strong foothold locally.
He also is keenly aware that he is forced to play a high-stakes identification game that involves frequent judgment calls that weigh the perceived risk that an undocumented foreign national poses against the time and resources it would take to positively identify and deport them.
“So far, I’ve been really lucky,” Wickham said, adding that he’s never had someone he’s released for a low-level offense tied back to larger crimes or criminal enterprises.
Nonetheless, Wickham isn’t one for pushing his luck and said he’d love to have some federal immigration help, which has historically been limited in Humboldt because it is so far from the border.
As of 2009, there were about 10.8 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, according to the Department of Homeland Security, with about 30 percent of them living in California. The majority of the undocumented foreign nationals — 55 percent — come from Mexico, according to the statistics, with the balance hailing from all over the world.
No statistics are available for Humboldt County, but Wickham said the majority of those that he sees come from Mexico or Central or South America. But Wickham said he sees immigrants from all over the globe in the Humboldt County jail, noting that he’s dealt with people from Palau, Laos and all over.
Wickham’s job starts the moment a suspect is booked into jail and their citizenship is in question. First, Wickham said, he comes in and conducts an interview with the suspect before running their fingerprints and information through a variety of databases, including the California Department of Justice, the FBI and Secure Communities, a database set up by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
Wickham said it’s very common for a foreign national to give a false name to arresting officers, and it’s his job to determine a true identity. If he does, and he’s able to catch someone in a lie, he said he generally sits down for a second interview. That’s often when he learns the most.
Wickham said that when time permits, he asks suspects about how and why they came to the United States and Humboldt County.
He said almost all the people he comes across say they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border on foot with the help of a coyote, someone who charges money to guide immigrants across the border, usually through the desert.
Wickham said coyotes generally charge prospective immigrants up front for their services. He said the going rate is about $1,000 to get the average immigrant into the country without documentation, but noted the price goes up quickly based on the perceived risks to the coyote.
For example, Wickham said, for someone with prior deportations or, worse, prior criminal convictions, a coyote will charge between $2,500 and $5,000. For a known sex offender, they will charge more than $15,000, Wickham said, adding that the coyotes believe that if they get caught smuggling a criminal into the United States they are more likely to be prosecuted themselves.
In some cases, coyotes won’t charge up front but will deliver undocumented immigrants to a kind of clearing house on the U.S. side of the border, Wickham said. From there, he said, family members can pay for the release of their loved ones or the undocumented immigrants will be sold for illegal labor, often to drug trafficking organizations.
“These people then have to work to pay that $2,000 or $5,000 back (to the organization),” Wickham said. “Well, that may be working up in the hills growing marijuana.”
Sheriff’s Sgt. Wayne Hansen said the complexion of marijuana grows in Humboldt County has changed drastically in the last handful of years, and there is plenty of evidence suggesting that large-scaled drug trafficking organizations are operating on timber and park lands in the county’s eastern stretches.
The mere scope of the operations suggests larger organizations, Hansen said, adding that they need the infrastructure to scout the land, pack in supplies and ready gardens, all in swaths of wilderness where there are no trails and no roads.
As an example, Hansen pointed to a bust a couple of years ago when officers removed 133,000 plants. He said it took them 12 officers and three days to remove the plants, and that’s with the use of a helicopter to haul them out.
“How many days and how many guys did it take to haul that stuff in there?” Hansen asked. “Also, with 133,000 marijuana plants, you need a network to distribute that. It’s an astronomical amount.”
The labor side of things represents a significant investment as well, Wickham said, adding that it’s an indication of just how large these organizations are.
“There’s some serious money involved,” he said. “If you have 10 Guatemalan laborers that cost $3,000 apiece, that’s an investment right there.”
Wickham said that oftentimes after an undocumented immigrant has worked off their debt to an organization they are let go.
The immigration officer said he also believes drug trafficking organizations import their own people and have moved from Humboldt County’s hills to some of its cities.
“It’s definitely different than it was five years ago, when a group (associated with an organization) would just show up here and then disappear,” Wickham said. “Now, they don’t leave.”
A series of recent busts — one by the Eureka Police Department and several by the Humboldt County Drug Task Force — have shed a light on what authorities allege are big-time drug trafficking organizations operating locally. Task force Cmdr. Daniel Harward said he believes his organization’s investigation uncovered at least one organization that is shipping at least two pounds of black tar heroin into the county every week at an estimated value of more than $1 million a year.
From Wickham’s end, he said the challenge now is determining who is who at the jail. Sometimes it’s easy, he said, noting that some people’s fingerprints return a history of multiple deportations — he’s seen folks with as many as nine prior deportations — but sometimes people just have no documented history and no documented identity.
Currently, Wickham said, the Sheriff’s Office doesn’t have the time, resources or will to try to deport every undocumented foreign national who shows up at the jail. If, say, one is brought in on suspicion of being drunk in public or another minor infraction, Wickham said he will do everything he can to get at true identity for the individual but can dedicate only so much time to the task.
There comes a point when he has to make the judgment call: Is this person someone who, though here illegally, is generally following the law, or is this person engaged in dangerous criminal activities or possibly even tied to a criminal organization?
“We can only do so many (immigration) cases a month,” Wickham said, adding that he uses his best judgment and will often release people — after documenting their prints and their assumed identity — and hope they show up for their court dates down the line. “It’s just done by associated risk.”
With the landscape steadily changing, and evidence mounting that big-time drug trafficking organizations are alive and well in Humboldt County, Wickham said he’d like to see some more federal help. He said he works with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent based in San Francisco who is great, but he would like to see a full-time agent placed in the county.
Wickham was clear that he doesn’t want an agent here to do enforcement, to raid work places and whatnot. He wants help identifying people in the jail and assessing risks. He wants someone to help him navigate the gray areas of immigration law and to be available to the task force agents and other local detectives when they run into immigration issues out in the field.
“I just hope Humboldt will get a little federal support in this situation,” Wickham said. “I think there’s a lot more underground now that we’re seeing the tip of the iceberg. We need more assets like other communities to fight what we’re facing.”
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