Mi Casa Is Not Tu Casa

What about the old saying, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em?" How about heading over to meet the neighbors with a six-pack of Corona? Perry scoffs. He'd rather beat 'em.

Elliott's across-the-street neighbor, Diane Mondun, 59, has lived in the neighborhood since 1973. She says the man next door is a slumlord who crams in too many tenants. The house, she says, has rats and plumbing problems. Another neighbor — an immigrant — is always working on cars. Oil could contaminate the ground.

Mondun says Jupiter is such a magnet for immigrants that strange men have showed up on her doorstep asking, "Friend? You speaka English?" When she looks puzzled, they go to the next house. She says that, since people need proof of residence to register at El Sol, they have stolen her water bill to get her address. (Pascarella says he has never heard of a stolen-water-bill racket.) In spite of the center, contractors pick up workers in the neighborhood, honking at 6:30 a.m.

"To be honest, the families are fine," Mondun says. "It's the young single guys I'm worried about — drinking, fighting, doing whatever they want to do." Mondun fears potential sexual assaults. "Three girls live down the street. You see the guys check them out." She has encountered drunken men in the alley. "One of them asked me if I wanted a cigarette and a beer." She decidedly did not appreciate the gesture.

"We don't want them out; we just want everybody to abide by the laws," she says, frustrated. "People say it's cultural. Don't we have laws here?

"Jupiter was never like this," she laments. "It started out as a nice, quiet, peaceful place." Well, a nice quiet place for "rednecks," she adds. Those guys all moved to Jupiter Farms, though. "But you felt safe around them."

She sighs. "Some people have guns. I don't want to see guys shot."

Jupiter's town spokesperson Kate Moretto says that the whole conflict began when "there was slowing traffic because of the hiring practices going on. It was a large quality-of-life issue." The town passed an anti-solicitation ordinance that prevents people from soliciting jobs on the street. It effectively drives the day labor hiring process to El Sol.

"As you imagine, we can't single people out" to check their background, Moretto says. But "it is our policy to I.D. anyone who is arrested for a felony who they believe may not have documented status." The jails, she says, "have a procedure once that person is booked. Our police department doesn't necessarily get involved in that."

Charlie Elliott says policemen give him thumbs up but won't go on record against El Sol for fear of losing their jobs. El Sol Director Mike Richmond says the opposite: Just the other day, he had a retired cop stop in and write a check for $1,000.

Although it's not an official designation, the town is sometimes denigratingly called a "sanctuary city" — a place where illegal immigrants will not be rounded up by municipal officials. Local police have reached out to workers at El Sol by lecturing on topics like bicycle safety and how to avoid being victimized.

One former Jupiter policeman, John Banister, took illegal immigration enforcement into his own hands. "There is no official word on what to do with illegals," Banister says. During the years he was with the department — 2002 to 2007 — he might arrest suspects for theft or assault, but "we were told specifically we weren't allowed to pick them up just for being illegal." He suggests that the town was afraid of accusations of racial profiling or discrimination lawsuits. "So you would play in the gray."

Banister says that he found himself arresting the same guys five, seven, eight times. "Nine out of ten never had I.D. They gave us the wrong name. It would not be uncommon for a guy to have ten aliases."

When he encountered a chronic troublemaker, he would go to a private phone and contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency responsible for enforcing immigration laws. He would fax his arrest reports or probable-cause affidavits. In many cases, he says, an ICE agent would show up to take custody of the offender and take him to Krome Detention Center in Miami for a deportation hearing. Eventually, Banister says, he was ordered to stop the practice. He later left the department over a separate internal dispute and is now suing it.

Sgt. Pascarella disputes Banister's tale about turning in illegals and being reprimanded. He adds that if ICE asked for assistance, Jupiter police would offer "whatever we need to do to be in full compliance."