Police documents show that at least one of the suspects involved in a home invasion and homicide were active members of the Mexican Army.

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A top member of a Phoenix police union is standing by reports that at least one of the men involved in a Monday morning home invasion and homicide was an active member in the Mexican Army.  Click Here for the update.

"Even if you put aside the Mexican military, you have illegals in the country...they're protected with tactical gear using tactical strategies in police uniforms willing to ambush police officers.  I think that's bad enough," said Mark Spencer, President of the Phoenix Police Enforcement Association.

While on the J.D. Hayworth show Tuesday, Mark Spencer announced that the suspects were hired by drug cartels to perform home invasions and murders.

The incident at 8329 W. Cypress St. resulted in the death of the homeowner.  Between 50 and 100 rounds were fired at the house.

Spencer said a police officer told him that one of the men captured said they were completely prepared to ambush Phoenix police, but ran out of ammunition.

He added that all were all dressed in military tactical gear and were armed with AR-15 assault rifles.  Three other men involved in the invasion escaped.

 Click Here to listen to Spencer's interview on the J.D. Hayworth show.

However, Phoenix Police have not confirmed the men were Mexican Army members.

Sgt. Joel Tranter said one suspect revealed that he had "prior military training," but "no credible evidence" that any of them were active in the military.

Click Here for more from Sgt. Tranter with KFYI reporter Bob Bennett. 

 

From Dreams of My Father:  'I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.'

 

From Dreams of My Father :  'I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mothers race.'

 

From Dreams of My Father:  'There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.'

 

From Dreams of My Father:  ; 'It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.'

 

From Dreams of My Father:  'I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa , that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.'

 

From Audacity of Hope:  'I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.'

 

If you ever forwarded an e-mail, nows the time to do it again.  Send this to everyone you know, regardless of their political disposition.  This guy is an extremist...  http://www.theobamafile.com/ 

 

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11252.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/21/AR2008062101470_pf.html

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/29cff8ec-3ef4-11dd-8fd9-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080622145305.ul30erug&show_article=1

Anybody remember this one?  Let's keep the pressure on the oil companies and OPEC!

 

Dollar Gains Most Since 2005 as Bernanke Says Growth Risk Fades By Bo Nielsen and Ye Xie June 10 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar headed for the biggest two-day gain against the euro since 2005 after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said economic risks have faded, spurring traders to boost wagers interest rates will rise. The U.S. currency rose to a three-month high against the yen after Bernanke said late yesterday that the central bank will ``strongly resist'' any waning of public confidence in stable prices. ``Strong'' economic fundamentals will translate to dollar strength, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said today in a Bloomberg Television interview in Washington. Policy makers are trying to ``dispel this notion in the market that the U.S. has a policy of benign neglect to the dollar,'' said Sophia Drossos, a currency strategist in New York at Morgan Stanley, in an interview on Bloomberg Television. ``They are making it very clear that the benefits of a weak dollar are far outweighed by the costs.'' The dollar climbed 1.3 percent to $1.5448 at 2:53 p.m. in New York from $1.5646 yesterday, bringing the two-day gain to 2.1 percent, the most since Nov. 4, 2005. The dollar rose to 107.37 yen, the highest since Feb. 27, from 106.31 yesterday. Japan's currency traded at 165.98 per euro from 166.33. Futures on the Chicago Board of Trade show a 52 percent chance the Fed will raise its 2 percent target rate for overnight lending between banks by at least a quarter point at its Aug. 5 meeting, compared with 31 percent the previous day. The contracts show a 96 percent chance the Fed will increase the rate by December, up from 67 percent odds a week ago. Crude Oil Drops The dollar has fallen 11.6 percent against the euro and 7.3 percent versus the yen since September, when the Fed began to lower borrowing costs from 5.25 percent. Crude oil today climbed to $137.98 a barrel in New York before falling more than $6 to $131.35. The price more than doubled in the past year. The U.S. dollar climbed to 94.42 cents per Australian dollar, the highest since May 16, before trading at 94.54 cents. Against the New Zealand dollar, the U.S. currency gained to 75.02 cents, the strongest since January. The British pound slid to $1.9551 from $1.9751 after data showed U.K. house prices dropped in May. ``The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so,'' Bernanke said in a speech at a Boston Fed conference. ``The Federal Open Market Committee will strongly resist an erosion of longer-term inflation expectations.'' The Fed is ``aware'' that the weak dollar boosts inflation, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher said in response to questions after a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York today. Paulson repeated comments made yesterday that currency intervention is a tool for policy makers. He also urged China to loosen government controls on energy prices and the value of the country's currency. Chinese Yuan The yuan traded near the highest level since a dollar peg was scrapped in 2005. The currency was little changed at 6.9255 per dollar in Shanghai, compared with 6.9230 on June 6, according to the China Foreign Exchange Trade System. A report today showed that the U.S. trade deficit widened in April as the surging cost of oil boosted imports to a record, overshadowing the biggest gain in exports in four years. The gap grew 7.8 percent to $60.9 billion the Commerce Department said. The two-year U.S. Treasury yields rose 17 basis points to 2.88 percent. The yield advantage of a German two-year bund over a comparable Treasury has narrowed to 1.76 percent from 2.26 percent on June 6. ``You are going to see the dollar rally over the next 12 months,'' said Michael Aronstein, chief investment strategist at Oscar Gruss & Son Inc. in an interview with Bloomberg Television. ``Global investors are quite underweight the U.S. You could see the beginning of a real reversal of that'' Group of Eight The U.S. dollar index traded on ICE futures in New York rose 1.16 percent to 73.702, the biggest one-day gain since Dec. 14. The index tracks the dollar against six major trading partners including the yen, euro and pound. Finance ministers of the Group of Eight industrialized countries may consider joint action to deflate the price of oil and prop up the dollar at their meeting June 13-14 in Japan, said DBS Group Holdings Ltd. in a report to clients. The last time the major industrialized countries intervened was on Sept. 22, 2000, when they bought the euro after it tumbled 27 percent from its 1999 debut. They last propped up the dollar in 1995, when it sank almost 20 percent in four months against the Japanese yen to a post-World War II low of 79.95 yen. The greenback dropped 1.4 percent against the euro last week, the most since March, after European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said on June 5 that policy makers may raise borrowing costs in July to contain inflation and the U.S. Labor Department reported the next day that the jobless rate increased the most in May in more than two decades. The European Central Bank needs to act in a ``forward- looking'' manner in order to ensure price stability, said council member Axel Weber at the University of York today. To contact the reporters on this story: Bo Nielsen in New York at bnielsen4@bloomberg.net; Ye Xie in New York at yxie6@bloomberg.net Last Updated: June 10, 2008 14:55 EDT

OPEC chief appeals for calm over oil

By Alex Lawler

LONDON (Reuters) - OPEC's Secretary General on Tuesday appealed for calm, saying the record-high crude oil price was unbearable and did not reflect any shortage of supply in the market.

Abdullah al-Badri also called for measures to curb market speculation, a factor OPEC says is sending prices to unjustified levels. Oil hit a record $139.12 a barrel on Friday and was trading near $136 on Tuesday.

"I ask through you, through Reuters, really we need some calm. We are panicking too much," Badri told the Reuters Global Energy Summit.

"The situation is unbearable as far as we are concerned. I want to say, there is no shortage now and in the future."

The comments are the latest to underscore the view of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries that it is pumping more than enough oil and high prices reflect factors beyond its control.

"We are not happy with the current level of price for one reason. It has nothing to do with the fundamentals," he said.

"Speculators are playing a big role in high oil prices. Also there are other considerations, the value of the dollar and the geopolitical situation."

Saudi Arabia, the world's top exporter and OPEC's most influential member, said on Monday it would soon call for a meeting to discuss what it called unjustified rises in prices.

Badri supported holding such a meeting, which he said might happen before the next scheduled OPEC gathering on September 9.

NO DEMAND FOR MORE

OPEC, source of two in every five barrels of oil, is pumping 32.2 million barrels per day (bpd), more than estimates of demand for its oil in 2008, Badri said.

The International Energy Agency, adviser to 27 industrialized countries, on Tuesday raised its forecast for the need for OPEC oil this year by 300,000 bpd to 31.6 million bpd -- still below OPEC's output.

In support of his point that prices are being driven by factors other than supply, Badri said world consumption of 87 million bpd is smaller than the value of trading in oil-related financial instruments.

Badri said the "paper market" equaled about 1.36 billion bpd and he was critical of investment banks, some of whose forecasts for rising prices have been partly credited for sending oil to new peaks.

"Their practice at this time is not in favor of producers and consumers," he said. "We really cannot be guided by one or two speculators."

OPEC, which currently has 13 member-countries, was willing to raise production if needed, although there was no demand for extra barrels.

"Nobody is asking for oil at this time. We are checking with our member countries. There is no queue for oil," he said.

The IEA on Tuesday cut its forecast for world oil demand growth in 2008 by 230,000 bpd to 800,000 bpd, citing the impact on consumption of fuel subsidy cuts in Asia.

Demand remains robust despite rising prices and Badri said OPEC would not make as large a reduction in demand when it publishes its latest forecasts.

"Maybe we would reduce by 40,000-50,000 barrels per day in the next report, but not more," he said, referring to OPEC's Monthly Oil Market Report for June scheduled to be published on Friday.

"With the high price, there will be a slowdown in demand. There's no doubt about it, but I don't think it's as much as the IEA forecast."

(Additional reporting by James Jukwey, Barbara Lewis and Jane Merriman, editing by William Hardy/Peg Mackey)

© Thomson Reuters 2008. All rights reserved.

PARIS: The president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, on Monday called on oil producers and consumers to learn from past mistakes if Western economies were to avoid a repeat of the high inflation and unemployment that followed the first global oil shock in 1973.

That year is widely acknowledged as an economic watershed, a time when an OPEC oil embargo led to a spiral of higher prices, recession in Western economies and a wrenching contraction in the early 1980s that finally put an end to a decade of sharp inflation.

No one, whether Western consumers or oil suppliers, should want to repeat that history, Trichet said. "There is a joint interest in behaving as properly as possible," he said.

Trichet spoke at the Forum for New Diplomacy, a series of periodic discussions organized by the International Herald Tribune and the Paris-based Académie Diplomatique Internationale, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the ECB.

He did not specify what suppliers might do, but some countries, including the United States, have urged oil exporters to pump more crude to bring down prices.

The U.S. Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson Jr., on Monday welcomed a call by Saudi Arabia, a top global exporter, for a summit meeting of oil producing and consuming countries to discuss what the Saudis call an unjustified rise in oil prices.

Paulson said on CNBC television that record oil prices were "a problem" for the U.S. economy and repeated his view that the rise in oil prices was due mainly to increasing global demand, output that has not expanded and recent volatility in supplies, Reuters reported.

Despite rising energy and food prices, Trichet said it was vital for workers in Western countries to moderate wage increases, which economists regard as the best way to avoid an inflationary spiral.

Speaking less than a week after the ECB surprised financial markets with likely plans to raise interest rates in July, Trichet strongly emphasized the need to keep expectations of inflation under control. Such expectations influence future prices because they feed price-setting decisions in the present, and the ECB fears companies will anticipate greater inflation by raising both prices and wages.

"A very solid anchoring of inflation expectations is essential," he said.

In celebrating the euro's achievements over the past 10 years in recent days, Trichet has emphasized the ECB's determination to preserve its independence, guaranteed in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty that laid the ground rules for monetary union.

But some people who negotiated the treaty have cautioned that the relationship between the ECB and governments of the 15-nation euro area could turn increasingly fractious as the bank attempts to tame record inflation by raising borrowing costs.

The Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, on Saturday called on Trichet to exercise "a bit more prudence" in ECB decisions.

"We all respect the independence of the European Central Bank but we all expect the European Central Bank to behave responsibly," Zapatero said while traveling in the city of Léon.

Zapatero, who is grappling with a sharply slowing economy and crippling strikes by angry truckers, also blamed Trichet for higher oil prices because crude, which is priced in dollars, becomes more expensive when the dollar weakens. After Trichet spoke Thursday, the price of a barrel of oil exploded by $16 to nearly $140 a barrel, although it fell back a bit Monday.

As on previous occasions when French officials criticized the ECB, Germany reacted unambiguously.

"The independence of the ECB against attempts to exert political influence is indispensable" for the German government, said a German government spokesman, Thomas Steg.

Trichet brushed off the unusually pointed criticism from Zapatero, saying the ECB would make its decisions without undue influence from politicians.

"Everybody knows that we are independent," he said. "Everybody knows that this independence is totally guaranteed by the treaty."

The coming decade is likely to see a greater international role for both the euro and the ECB, central bankers and analysts believe, and the bank's actions over the last week have highlighted the strains that can result.

The chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, managed to talk up the dollar last week - one of the few times U.S. officials have had such an explicit, immediate effect on exchange rates. But the dollar fell back after Trichet hinted that the ECB would raise interest rates because of inflationary pressures in Europe.

ECB plans to raise borrowing costs effectively trumped Bernanke's message, since higher interest rates make euro-denominated assets more attractive. Soon after the ECB's indication, the dollar weakened sharply against the euro before recovering somewhat Monday to around $1.57 to the euro.

By DAMIEN CAVE

MILTON, Fla. — Three months after the local police inspected more than a dozen businesses searching for illegal immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers, this community in the Florida Panhandle has become more law-abiding, emptier and whiter.

Many of the Hispanic immigrants who came in 2004 to help rebuild after Hurricane Ivan have either fled or gone into hiding. Churches with services in Spanish are half-empty. Businesses are struggling to find workers. And for Hispanic citizens with roots here — the foremen and entrepreneurs who received visits from the police — the losses are especially profound.

“It was very hard because the community is very small, and to see people who came to eat here all the time then come and close the business,” said Geronimo Barragan, who owns two branches of La Hacienda, Mexican restaurants where the police arrested 10 employees.

“I don’t blame them,” Mr. Barragan added. “It’s just that it hurts.”

Sheriff Wendell Hall of Santa Rosa County, who led the effort, said the arrests were for violations of state identity theft laws. But he also seemed proud to have found a way around rules allowing only the federal government to enforce immigration laws. In his office, the sheriff displayed a framed editorial cartoon that showed Daniel Boone admiring his arrest of at least 27 illegal workers.

His approach is increasingly common. Last month, 260 illegal immigrants in Iowa were sentenced to five months in prison for violations of federal identity theft laws.

At the same time, in the last year, local police departments from coast to coast have rounded up hundreds of immigrants for nonviolent, often minor, crimes, like fishing without a license in Georgia, with the end result being deportation.

In some cases, the police received training and a measure of jurisdiction from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under a program that lets officers investigate and detain people they suspect to be illegal immigrants.

But with local demand for tougher immigration enforcement growing, 95 departments are waiting to join the 47 in the program. And in a number of places, including Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, police officers or entire departments are choosing to tackle the issue on their own.

State lawmakers, in response to Congressional inaction on immigration law, are giving local authorities a wider berth. In 2007, 1,562 bills related to illegal immigration were introduced nationwide and 240 were enacted in 46 states, triple the number that passed in 2006, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A new law in Mississippi makes it a felony for an illegal immigrant to hold a job. In Oklahoma, sheltering or transporting illegal immigrants is also a felony.

It remains unclear how the new laws will be enforced. Yet at the very least, say both advocates and critics, they are likely to lead to more of what occurred here: more local police officers demanding immigrants’ documents; more arrests for identity theft; more accusations of racial profiling; and more movement of immigrants, with some fleeing and others being sent to jail.

“It is a way to address illegal immigration without calling it that,” said Jessica Vaughan, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports intensified local enforcement. She added, “They don’t just have to sit and wait for Washington.”

Community Complaints

Police officers here in a handful of Gulf Coast counties from Pensacola to Tallahassee said they started hearing complaints about illegal immigrants last year. With the national debate raging and the local economy sagging, many residents began to question whether illegal immigrants were taking Americans’ jobs.

It did not show up in statistics — the unemployment rate in Santa Rosa County was 3.6 percent in 2007, below state and national averages — so the arguments focused in part on unfair competition.

Donna Tucker, executive director of the Santa Rosa County Chamber of Commerce, said illegal immigration “creates havoc within the system” because businesses that used illegal labor often did not pay into workers’ compensation funds and paid workers less.

“Those businesses can survive a lot longer than the ones that are trying to do things right,” Ms. Tucker said.

Some of the frustrations also veered into prejudice.

George S. Collins, an inspector in charge of the illegal trafficking task force in Okaloosa County, said many people wanted to know “why we weren’t going to Wal-Mart and rounding up the Mexicans” — a comment Mr. Collins said was racist and offensive.

Usually though, the complaints were cultural and legal.

Interviews with more than 25 residents and police officers suggest that the views of Harry T. Buckles, 68, a retired Navy corpsman, are common. Outside his home in Gulf Breeze, Mr. Buckles said the main problem with today’s Hispanic immigrants was that they did not assimilate.

Even after hundreds flowed in to rebuild Santa Rosa County, Mr. Buckles said: “They didn’t become part of the community. They didn’t speak the language.”

Echoing the comments of others, he said he became irritated when he heard Spanish at the Winn-Dixie and saw a line of immigrants sending money home at the Western Union. Mr. Buckles said he feared his community would lose its character and become like Miami, with its foreign-born majority and common use of Spanish.

“We see things nationwide and we know that we could be overwhelmed,” he said.

In fact, only about 3 percent of the population of Santa Rosa County is Hispanic, according to census figures compiled in 2006. As a proportion of its population, the Hispanic community here is less than half the size of what is in Omaha or Des Moines — mostly white cities where the Hispanic population is still below the national average.

Santa Rosa is hardly the only place to use a tough approach against a small immigrant population. In Mississippi, where strict laws on false documentation recently passed, only about 1.7 percent of the state’s 2.9 million people were born abroad and more than half of them are in the United States legally, according to estimates from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tightening restrictions on immigration.

But here, the result is a divide often marked by a lack of in-depth interaction.

On one side are longtime residents like Sheriff Hall, who said immigrant laborers were not involved in fixing his office or home after the hurricanes, and Mr. Buckles, who said his relationship with Hispanics was based mainly on seeing them at stores or construction sites.

On the other side are a smaller number of immigrants and employers who use immigrant labor.

Some of the immigrants are newly arrived, sticking mostly to themselves. But the group also includes Antonio Tejeda, 38, a roofer and naturalized American citizen from Mexico who wears an N.F.L. jersey to church and speaks English with a slight drawl; and Ruben Barragan, 19, one of the workers arrested in one of the La Hacienda restaurant raids who, though illegal, spoke English and called his infant son Eric because he wanted him to have an American name.

When told about such men, Mr. Buckles said perhaps the government could find ways to create exceptions. But he was not convinced they deserved to stay.

“They got here illegally,” Mr. Buckles said. “They broke the law as soon as they came.”

The Raids

The half-dozen officers involved in the Santa Rosa operations did not announce their arrival. They detained 13 workers at Panhandle Growers. At the two branches of La Hacienda the police quietly detained 10 workers without resistance. And at Emerald Coast Interiors, a boat-cushion factory, the police arrested a handful more.

Sheriff Hall said that his department received tips that led him to all the locations he visited and that he was responding to a steep rise in complaints about illegal immigration. He said he had been frustrated a year ago by a lack of response from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And this time, customs officials said, he did not contact the agency for input before forming a multicounty task force that led to the February operation.

Sheriff Hall said his men were focused on identity theft and did not need special training because “it’s the same thing we do every day.” He insisted that the officers treated everyone fairly. Unlike Bay County officers, who surrounded construction sites last year and arrested immigrants who ran, “we didn’t chase anyone,” he said.

And at many locations witnesses said the police treated all workers equally.

Managers at the restaurants Okki, El Rodeo, China Sea and La Hacienda said police officers checked all employees’ documents, regardless of their ethnicity.

But other business owners, employees and residents said the police focused disproportionately on Hispanics or the foreign born and seemed determined to scare immigrants out of the area. In many cases, employers said, the officers did not even mention identity theft, narrowing their scope to immigrants.

“They were targeting all the places with Hispanic workers,” said Elvin Garcia, 26, a waiter at El Rodeo.

At Red Barn Barbecue, witnesses said that skin color clearly influenced police procedure. When several officers visited and saw no one who was Hispanic in the kitchen, they moved on. “We offered to give them records, and they said, ‘No, it’s not necessary,’ ” said Randy Brochu, whose family owns the business.

Meanwhile, at Emerald Coast Interiors, three employees — one black, one white, one Hispanic — independently said the police did, in fact, chase a handful of Hispanic employees who ran. Three women, they said, were caught in a ditch behind the main building.

Luis Ramirez, the plant’s operations manager, said the officers asked to see documentation only for the workers who fled. “It was racial profiling,” Mr. Ramirez said.

His company has not filed a lawsuit, so his accusations have not been tested. But Florida courts have repeatedly held that flight alone is not enough to justify a suspicion of criminal activity or arrest. In Bay County, officials said they tried to avoid chasing people now because prosecutors have warned that it undermines their cases.

Even without a chase, immigrant advocates say that local efforts to track down illegal immigrants undermine community safety by scaring immigrants from reporting violent crimes.

“It’s a dangerous route to take,” said David Urias, a staff lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, which sued Otero County in New Mexico this year after the police raided Hispanics’ homes for minor violations like an unleashed dog. “What you’re going to see,” Mr. Urias said, “is more people pushed into the shadows.”

The Aftermath

Indeed, three months after the sweeps, nearly everyone agrees that the fabric of this community has changed. Hundreds of Hispanic families, both legal and illegal, seem to have disappeared.

John Davy, a co-owner of Panhandle Growers, said some employers “treated their guys humanely” by helping them flee to other areas. “What we’re victims of is a system that’s broken,” he said.

Many residents said they felt torn between competing loyalties to compassion and the law.

“On one hand, I’m sitting here thinking when Ivan was here, you could not get enough people to do the thing that needed to get done,” said Mrs. Tucker at the Chamber of Commerce. “And these illegal aliens, people welcomed them with open arms because they were working hard, they were helping our community. But from a chamber standpoint, you’re operating on the side of the law. It’s a hard thing.”

In the immigrant community, fears now cloud the most basic routines. Many Hispanics said they avoided being seen or heard speaking Spanish in Wal-Mart, even if they live here legally. Others detailed their habit of meticulously checking their cars’ headlights, blinkers and registration to avoid being pulled over.

The message many Hispanics have taken from the raids is simple. “We’re Mexican — they don’t want us here,” said Erika Barragan, 20, whose husband, Ruben, came here illegally roughly six years ago and was one of 23 people scheduled to be deported after the February raids. She said she would go back to Mexico this summer.

Her husband’s employers, Geronimo Barragan (no relation) and his wife, Guilla, are trying to remain positive.

They are citizens and parents of four American-born children, ages 2 to 16. They have lived in Santa Rosa County for more than a decade, founding a Baptist church here and working 16-hour days, six days a week to build two restaurants known for their affordable food and Christian atmosphere, which extends to a ban on alcohol.

They said the raids came as a shock.

“We love the community, and we always tried to do our best,” Mr. Barragan said.

Mrs. Barragan put it more bluntly. “This,” she said, “is like our promised land.”

The Barragans said they did not know their workers were illegal because they provided Social Security numbers and other information that was required. Like most employers, they asked for nothing more.

They have not publicly opposed the sheriff’s actions, and in their effort to move on, they have distanced themselves from his critics. Mr. Barragan even visited Sheriff Hall at his office to tell him he had no hard feelings and would do everything he could to comply in the future.

And yet, the cost has been significant. Both of the restaurants were closed for more than two months. Only one has recently reopened.

Unable to find people in the area who can cook Mexican food, Mr. Barragan, 41, has been scouring the nation, recruiting in Houston, Chicago and Baton Rouge. He has yet to find all the workers he needs, relying on a handful of new hires with work visas that expire in November. He said he wished that Congress could find a way to bring more foreign workers to America legally.

For Mrs. Barragan, 39, a warm, thin woman with hair to her waist, the consequences have been more personal. On a recent Wednesday night, her church’s prayer service was half-empty. Many of her friends have left. And many of the employees that her family mentored in the ways of America are gone, taken away by the police.

“That’s what had the most effect on our lives,” Mrs. Barragan said, speaking in Spanish so she could be more specific. “Not closing La Hacienda, or ‘we’re not going to make money,’ or ‘how are we going to pay our bills?’ I personally didn’t think about that. It hurt me more to see them there — handcuffed. The way they went out.”

Her husband agreed, explaining between bouts of tears that some of the deported workers’ families had become victims of more violent crime. “One of them has a small daughter and someone robbed their house while he was in jail,” Mr. Barragan said. “Twice.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company