Mom's crime: Seeking a better life

For a criminal who is barred from holding a job, Zenaida Lopez sure works a lot.

Like at Head Start, where she volunteers and served for a few years on one of its local boards. Or at her kids' school, High Point Elementary, where she helps in classes.

Or with Camp Fire USA, where this summer she's volunteering at one of its Seattle boys and girls camps.

Lopez, 36, isn't paid for her work. She can't be. She's an illegal immigrant from Mexico — one of the millions the U.S. House of Representatives recently decided ought to be either jailed or shipped back where they came from.

I talked to Lopez last week in her White Center home. After months of listening to politicians and pundits portray illegal immigrants as derelicts sucking up tax money, I thought readers might like to actually meet someone who sneaked into our country.

So here's Zenaida Lopez. Her story puts the immigration debate in Congress in a different light. At the very least I hope she makes people realize it's more complex than the "round 'em up and ship 'em out" crowd is saying.

Lopez came to America 10 years ago, after her then-husband paid a professional "coyote" $900 to smuggle them across the border near San Diego.

After arriving in Seattle, the couple had two children. Her husband began beating her, hitting her in the face on multiple occasions, according to family-court records. Twice she was hospitalized.

Though she knew almost no English, she left him and fled to a battered-women's shelter in Issaquah.

Since she last saw her husband, in 1998, Lopez has been consumed with three things. Raising her children. Learning English. And trying — but failing — to get a green card.

"I want the people and the government to know that illegal people don't come to make problems," she said in the clipped English she's picked up in night ESL classes. "Yes I am illegal. But I'm part of the Seattle community now. And my kids — aren't they part of it, too?"

At the mention of her kids, she starts weeping. Denise, 9, and Orlando, 8, are giggling at me from the stairs, but stop and look at their mom with concern.

Here's the thing about this family. The kids are U.S. citizens. The mom is illegal. Does it make any moral or practical sense to declare her a felon and potentially jail or deport her?

Yet that's precisely what's called for in the ill-named "immigration reform" bill the U.S. House passed, HR 4437. Two of our local congressmen, Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Lake Stevens, and Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Auburn, voted for it.

That's also the bill that would criminalize people or institutions that help illegal immigrants.

Such as, potentially, Zenaida's brother. He's a U.S. citizen and gives Zenaida money so she doesn't have to go on welfare. (She also baby-sits for cash and gets public assistance for her housing.)

Or Shannon Payne of Renton, a friend who buys Zenaida groceries and clothing.

"My husband and I have decided we're willing to go to jail over this, if that's what it comes to," Payne said.

It won't come to that, right? And yet here we have supposedly reasonable congressmen such as Larsen and Reichert, voting to turn single mother Zenaida Lopez, and possibly her friends and family, into felons.

Zenaida's is just one story. But I wouldn't tell it if she were somehow unusual. There are more than 2 million immigrant families in the U.S. in which some members are legal and some illegal, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Are we going to make it national policy to split these families apart?

Much more sensible, and compassionate, is the plan in the U.S. Senate to give illegal immigrants already in the country a chance to work, pay fines and learn English in exchange for citizenship. That's roughly the course Zenaida already is following, without anyone telling her to do it.

Or we can take the simpleton approach. It was summed up last week by Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., who dismissed the Senate proposal by saying this: "Why would we let criminals become citizens of the United States?"

Next time you hear a politician say something like that, visualize who they're actually talking about.

They're talking about Zenaida Lopez.

Danny Westneat's column appears Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.