Romana's Mojados

There is nothing new, or even particularly secret, about the hundreds of thousands of Mexican "wetbacks" (mojados, as they are known to their Chicano cousins), who have swum the Rio Grande or simply walked into the U.S. at some point along the hundreds of miles of largely unpatrolled border. Nor is there much that the badly undermanned U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service can do about keeping the immigrants out. The "illegals" who are caught--some 320,000 during the last fiscal year--are simply sent back across the border. The people who employ, encourage and often exploit them, are, for all practical purposes, beyond the reach of the law.

Last week, acting on a tip, immigration agents raided Ramona's Mexican Food Products Company, a food processing firm in suburban Los Angeles. According to federal officials, Ramona's is "an indiscriminate employer of illegal aliens." Five times in the last four years the company had been raided, and each time agents had turned up illegal aliens. They were not disappointed the sixth time. After half a dozen immigration men burst through the door, the plant's largely female work force shrieked and started scattering. Eventually, 36 of them were cornered, most of them in the women's rest room. Perhaps an equal number managed to scramble out the exits to freedom.

Political Conspiracy. There the matter would have ended, except that the proprietor of Ramona Foods happens to be Mrs. Romana Banuelos, a Mexican-American businesswoman whom Richard Nixon had just nominated to be the 34th Treasurer of the U.S. George K. Rosenberg, director of the Immigration Service's Los Angeles office and the man who called the raid, said he did not know Mrs. Banuelos' identity until after the raid was over. In any case, noted Rosenberg, he had sent a routine letter to Ramona Foods in August 1969, warning the company to stop employing illegal aliens.

Mrs. Banuelos, who began by making tortillas 22 years ago and has built her operation into a $6 million business, saw the affair quite differently. She claimed never to have received Rosenberg's letter; her workers were well treated, she said, although she admitted that she never inquired into their nationality. The whole thing, she insisted, was "part of an attempt by Democrats to block my nomination as Treasurer of the U.S."

Mrs. Banuelos' bland assertion that she had been the victim of a political conspiracy seemed preposterous. But TIME's Eleanor Hoover learned that the choice of Mrs. Banuelos' plant was no accident. The tipster, Hoover reports, was Harry Bernstein, the respected labor editor of the Los Angeles Times and a recent crusader against illegal aliens. The day before the raid, Bernstein phoned Rosenberg and told him of the aliens at the Banuelos plant. Bernstein did not tell Rosenberg who the president of the company was, or where he himself had received his information. Gratefully, Rosenberg invited Bernstein along on the raid, and allowed him to bring a Times photographer.

Insubordination. Bernstein's tipster was Noel Doran, a 15-year employee of the Immigration Service, who is also vice president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. American Federation of Government Employees. Doran had singled out Mrs. Banuelos' plant because a raid there would get national attention. That way, he says, "the American people could really know the facts about the illegal alien situation in this country." When Rosenberg learned the story behind the raid, he upbraided Doran for insubordination. Later the Immigration Service revealed it had received another tip that there were as many as 100 more mojados still working for Banuelos. But any further raids were being postponed for "lack of manpower."

Mrs. Banuelos disclaimed any intention of withdrawing her name from consideration for U.S. Treasurer, nor did the White House seem ready to change its mind, despite rumblings from Capitol Hill. Richard Nixon had good reason to be annoyed with the FBI, which had looked into Mrs. Banuelos' background and apparently failed to find out about the previous raids. But the President, of all people, knows how easy it is for a mojado to go undetected. Before he was nabbed by FBI men, Francisco Martinez Llamas, an illegal Mexican alien, worked for two days last summer as a gardener on the grounds of the Western White House at San Clemente.

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