Mattawa Target: Government Waste or Poor Hispanics?
Cecilio Morales

While nationally caregivers of children are increasingly viewed as performing a critical function in developing the human resources of the future, the state of Washington, home to Microsoft and other high-tech industry, seems stuck in the anti-Latina stone age.

That at least might be the conclusion of a dispassionate observer upon reading documents in a suit filed last month.

The story starts in the southwestern Washington town of Mattawa, a far cry from high-tech Redmond.

In early May 2002, according to documents filed in court, officials from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, accompanied by police and a federal immigration agent purportedly acting as a “translator,” entered the homes of 47 Latina caregivers during business hours, demanding papers.

A separate report by the Oakland, Calif.-based Applied Research Center asserts that the officials detained at least one of the women in jail.

Those events have snowballed into a state class action suit, a federal civil rights suit expected to go to court by April 2006, and a federal criminal investigation.

Here’s the kicker. Although a number of officials in Mattawa and Seattle have been quoted by local television voicing accusations concerning “illegal aliens” supposedly bilking the U.S. taxpayer of child care money, all of the Latina caregivers who are suing are either U.S. citizens or perfectly legal immigrants.

The “wetback” alarm in the addled brains of officials who prompted the whole fracas just weren’t working right. In fact, the whole raid sounds like Keystone Cops slapstick.

To get a sense of the enormity of the mistake, consider the town of Mattawa, described by ARC, which has produced a report on the events in question, as “one of the poorest towns in Washington.” The locality’s housing consists primarily of stationary trailer and prefabricated homes.

Since the 1980s, the town of roughly 3,000 residents, 80 percent of whom are of Hispanic descent, regularly swells to about 7,000 people, when mostly Mexican migrants arrive to work on the apple, pear, grape, hops and alfalfa harvests.

However, unlike California’s city of Nuestra Señora la Reyna de Los Angeles, where a Hispanic mayor was just elected for the first time since 1872, there does not appear ever to have been a Hispanic elected leader in Mattawa, despite the demographics. Instead, a tiny group of old-timers has continued to control all political offices as if the 1965 Voting Rights Act had never passed.

They reported what they “suspected” was misuse of taxpayers’ money in the locality’s Latina-run home-based day care centers. The day care workers make between $10,000 and $18,000 a year, caring for children whose parents perform agricultural piecework to earn, at most, $60 a day.

The funding for the day care, which subsidizes agricultural activity and the general welfare — how else would you be able to eat that shiny red apple, if the pickers had to stay home with their children? — comes from the federal government through the DSHS.

Ty Duhamel, the Legal Services attorney in the class action, told me that the raids were launched well after there was evidence that there was no fraud in performing child care service contracts, as alleged by some Mattawa civic boosters.

DSHS had dispatched investigator James Ditzel who, in a memo of February , 2002, reported that there was “no evidence” of inappropriate billing. In a subsequent memo, Duhamel added that, contrary to charges, Ditzel reported the children served did exist.

That’s when, Duhamel said, DSHS officials “switched the focus of the investigation.” Instead of looking into three homes, they focused on all 47.

Also, instead of seeking documentation from the intermediary agencies that handled the paperwork, DSHS’s own Working Connections and the Diocese of Yakima’s Catholic Family Child Services, in meetings with municipal officials the investigators decided to go to the caregivers themselves.

Keep in mind that people who look after children in Mattawa, as anywhere else, are not usually MBA program graduates from the Fletcher School of Business. They are, for the most part, warm and tender women whose nurturing has a decisive effect on the intellectual and physical development of preschoolers at a crucial time in their lives.

For that reason, DSHS, like many state agencies, hires as middlemen certain agencies that have experience administering paperwork and keeping the business records required for such programs to remain in federal compliance.

If there had been any real doubt as to the propriety of their billing, the agencies were the ones with the logs and the records and the vouchers; not the frightened Latina women who were being bullied to produce papers or go to jail.

(Cecilio Morales has covered federal policy as a journalist in Washington, D.C., since 1984 and is editor-in-chief and publisher of the periodicals Employment and Training Reporter and Welfare To Work. He may be contacted by e-mail at Cecilio@miipublications.com.)

© 2005, Hispanic Link News Service
06/05/05
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