“If you want to exploit the anti-immigrant rhetoric that exists out here, it’s easy,” Steve Bellone, the Suffolk County executive—the county’s equivalent of a mayor—told me, one afternoon last summer.
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The arrival of immigrant laborers from Mexico and Central America in the past few decades exacerbated the social tensions, and, in the late nineties, a white backlash emerged. Mexican workers in Farmingville were beaten and murdered by white vigilantes in a string of hate crimes that gradually spread across the county. Levy, who assumed office in 2004, called for mass arrests of the undocumented, and advocated conducting raids to evict immigrant workers from their homes. “We’re going to stand up for the people of this county who have been exploited in their neighborhoods,” he said. The more he attacked Latinos, the better he did at the ballot box: in 2007, he won reëlection, receiving ninety-six per cent of the vote.
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A year later, in Patchogue, a group of teen-agers attacked and murdered a thirty-seven-year-old Ecuadoran named Marcelo Lucero. Immigrants there had been complaining for months about increasingly violent altercations with white residents, but the police had ignored them. After Lucero’s killing, the U.S. Department of Justice found that for years the county police had been racially profiling Latino residents during traffic stops and discouraging them from reporting crimes.
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Bellone, who succeeded Levy in 2012, signed an agreement with the D.O.J. to reform police practices, but the Suffolk County Police Department was slow to change. In 2014, a sergeant with twenty-five years on the force was arrested for extorting money from Latino drivers. Undocumented-immigrant motorists, who receive their salaries in cash and drive without licenses, are easy targets. Latinos make up twenty per cent of the county’s population, but they represent almost fifty per cent of the cases in traffic court.
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Violent crime has steadily declined across the county since the late nineties, but MS-13 makes for a convenient anti-immigrant talking point. Gang crime is a symbol of the changes that people see around them—the Spanish they hear at the grocery store and the crush of new students at their children’s schools. And the large and conspicuous population of unaccompanied minors has allowed residents to connect an abstract threat to a concrete phenomenon. “This sort of thing is about a feeling,” Bellone told me. “You don’t feel that crime is down. Acts like these murders aren’t supposed to happen in the suburbs.”
