48 MOTHER JONES |^ SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019
HOLD THE LINESpector helped with her papers, a new-
comer refugee—yelling, “¡Abogado! ¡Abo-
gado!”—Lawyer! Lawyer! Many people still
recognize him from the early 2000s, when
his firm rented an hour of TV time on a
cross-border station, between the tele-
novelas, answering immigration questions
for free. “If you want to throw your money
away, give it to me,” he’d joke. “At least I’ll
tell you the truth.” The program gener-
ated steady clients, as well as the cases he
craved: those that would force the United
States to accept the violent realities immi-
grants were fleeing.
But by the time Donald Trump’s “Build
the Wall!” campaign was barreling toward
Election Day, it was clear the ground wasshifting beneath Spector’s feet. For the
first time in its 49-year history, the Border
Patrol union had backed a presidential can-
didate in a primary. The local Immigration
and Customs Enforcement office stopped
taking meetings with Spector. Five days
after Trump’s inauguration, he ordered
the construction of a border wall, signing
an executive order to reshape the immi-
gration system.
So Spector, then 62, waited. Tongue
cancer and chemotherapy in 2012 had di-
minished him by 50 pounds, thinned his red
beard, and for a time hushed his voice to a
whisper. But the thought of challenging the
new administration invigorated him. Ten
days after Trump swore the oath of office,
Spector’s paralegal opened an email that
read: “Good afternoon, my name is Martín
Méndez Pineda, from Acapulco, Guerrero,
Mexico, and a few months ago I was threat-
ened by the federal police of the gendar-
merie division for my work as a reporter
with the newspaper Novedades Acapulco.”
The next week, Spector met Méndez
Pineda on a chilly Sunday morning in
Ciudad Juarez. Méndez Pineda was 25,though he looked like a teenager. Soft
cheeks. Dimples. “I don’t know what’s
going to happen,” Spector told him as
they approached the American side of the
border. “But you may be locked up. Are you
going to be able to withstand detention?”
Méndez Pineda nodded.
When they arrived at the glass bank of
windows at the Customs and Border Pro-
tection building, Spector called to an agent
to see which line was for asylum seekers.
“What country is he from?” the agent
asked. When Spector gave the answer,
the agent questioned why any Mexican
would fear to return. “Look,” Spector said,
“I don’t want to get into a political discus-
sion with you.”
The agent studied his face.
“I know who you are,” Spector remem-
bers him saying. “Spector, the great Amer-
ican hater.”spector calls himself a “pocho,” an Amer-
icanized Mexican. He was born in El Paso
back when there were virtually no fences.
Each summer he played near cotton fields
along the Rio Grande in his mother’s home-
town of Guadalupe, Mexico, where the cus-
toms building was a small kiosk. She’d met
his father, a Jew from Brooklyn, when he
got in a car accident near the border while
driving cross-country with friends to mine
for gold in the Sierra Madre mountains.
In Mexico, Spector was the red-headed
American. In El Paso, his friends pantsed
him because they’d never seen a circum-
cised penis. He was always proud of his
Jewish heritage, and after he served in the
Air Force, Spector lived for a year in Israel.
When he thought of the division between
the Israelis and the Palestinians, he told
me, he was reminded of home.
He met Sandra after he returned to El
Paso in the early ’80s. Sandra came out of
the Chicano rights movement and orga-
nized migrants with the International
Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. But it
took Spector a while to find his place. He
was rejected by every law school he applied
to except Texas Southern University in
Houston, where he enrolled with his
father, a postal inspector with a geology
degree who’d always dreamed of becoming
an attorney. In school, Spector worked for
a member of Congress, then was fired after
he and Sandra shouted legal advice to mi-
grants during a workplace raid. He couldn’thack it as a county prosecutor, either. He’d
get a case, maybe a truck driver who blew
a couple points over the legal drinking
limit, and he’d think of how a dui could
destroy the guy’s life—or, worse, his fami-
ly’s. “My heart wasn’t in it,” he says.
Spector crossed to Juarez often, and
he remembers seeing Central Americans
crowding the bridge—mostly poor families
escaping US-backed dictators and civil wars.
When he was a child, his father’s friends told
stories of fighting in World War II and of the
atrocities they witnessed. “My father’s great-
est lesson to me was that it was important to
defend the other and the weak,” Spector says.
Eventually, something clicked. He started
an immigration radio program, then the TV
spots modeled on Sandra’s “know your
rights” campaigns from her union work. He
rented an office. But notoriety had its costs.
A local conservative radio host took an in-
terest in Spector, riling listeners by com-
paring the rising number of undocumented
immigrants to an infestation of cockroaches.
One day, Spector arrived at work to find his
wooden porch half-destroyed. He moved to
a larger office, with an iron railing and a
barred front door.
In 1989, Spector met Ernesto Poblano,
whose case would become his first big
break. The Mexican mayor had escaped
death threats from his opponents in the
Institutional Revolutionary Party (pri),
which by then had ruled the country
uninterrupted for six decades. Spector
convinced a legislator from the state of
Chihuahua to testify in US immigration
court, a tactic that was unheard of at the
time. “I’m convinced,” the lawmaker said,
that if Poblano ever returned to Mexico,
“we would be attending his funeral.” Spec-
tor would win the case in what the New
York Times later proclaimed “a major shift
after many years in which virtually all
asylum applications from Mexicans were
routinely rejected.”
Poblano’s claim was successful because
Spector tied a direct threat to corrupt powers
in the government, which fit the American
interpretation of asylum. The 1980 Refugee
Act allows people who have been persecuted
based on their race, religion, nationality, po-
litical opinion, or membership in a partic-
ular social group to remain in the United
States as long as they can prove they have a
well-founded fear of returning to their home
countries. But the application of asylum law“Many of the agents treat
immigrants as animals, not
as human beings. For them,
we are only a product.”