You don’t have to be at the border to experience The Devil’s Highway; deportations can be just as frightening inside our borders.

“You read about people swimming to their death in a sea of sand,” said Aaron Fishbone, a graduate student in the Evans School of Public Affairs, who read the book this summer. “They make this journey because they have to feed their families.”

The University of Washington hopes to create discussion regarding this year’s undergraduate common book, The Devil’s Highway, a true story about author Luis Alberto Urrea, who followed immigrants across the Mexican-U.S. border and spoke extensively with government officials on both sides.

The book doesn’t paint border patrol as the ultimate bad guys, Fishbone said.

“It discusses the issue from all perspectives involved,” said Lisa Devine, also an Evans School graduate student. “From the lives of the people who decide to cross, to the lives of the guides who take them, to the perspective of the border patrol, to the hospitals that treat them and the government officials in the United States and Mexico that have to deal with the dead bodies.”

Immigrant rights advocates and government officials propose different strategies to address immigration, just as students have different opinions. Advocates — and some economists — argue that immigrants build and sustain the U.S. economy, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials have increased deportations in an attempt to address national security issues.

ICE plans to deport all undocumented immigrants by 2012 through Operation Endgame. Endgame uses tactics comparable to the 1990s ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts Web site. The document itself disappeared from DHS’s Web site after the ACLU began publicly questioning it. However, the ACLU made it available online.

Nonetheless, undocumented immigrants commit crimes such as fraud and identity theft and take jobs from lawful workers, according to the DHS Web site. However, more than half — 55 percent — of those apprehended are non-criminals, according to the ICE. Regional DHS officials were unavailable for comment.

“These people are just considered profit,” said Eric Gonzalez, a former employee at Custom Apple Packers, Inc. and summer legal assistant at Columbia Legal Services. “They’re considered disposable.”

As an employee at Apple Packers, Gonzalez tried telling his supervisor about the lack of proper equipment and how workers manually turned box after box, but his supervisor didn’t seem to care, he said. “He told me, ‘They don’t have to work here if they don’t want to,’” Gonzalez said.

Workers were expected to run 20,000 boxes of fruit in 10 hours, when normally it would take 15 hours at slower speeds, Gonzalez said.

“Turning the boxes manually felt like mindless work,” he said.

Employees worked seven days a week, 10- to 15-hour days.

“He ran them full-speed ahead as if there’s no tomorrow,” said Gonzalez of his former supervisor. “They expect them to accommodate to the speed to produce that profit within the day.”

Immigrants may be vulnerable to exploitation, but some are also fighting back.

A $2 million class-action lawsuit against the State of Washington was settled in August after much investigation, accusation and complaint. In the small town of Mattawa, Wash., Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officials accompanied Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) investigators as translators while investigating possible fraud and identity theft among childcare providers who run the businesses from their homes.

However, all but one didn’t speak Spanish, said Ty Duhamel, a lawyer who represented nine of the childcare providers in the suit. All but one DSHS investigator were former law enforcement officers not trained in state licensing, and the case was treated as a criminal investigation, he said.

DSHS officials confirmed that INS officials acted as translators, but refused to comment on how many spoke Spanish. One of the more than 50 caregivers eventually pleaded guilty to identity theft, according to Steve Williams, a DSHS public information officer.

Court documents related to this incident could not be accessed by press time.

It began in 2002, when DSHS accused the providers of receiving $2 million in overpayments from the state. One Latina childcare worker was incarcerated, and separated from her children: an 8-month-old baby girl and 5-year-old daughter with Down’s syndrome.

The lawsuit arose from a mass raid on more than 50 Latina providers in Mattawa. The DSHS seized numerous original business records and personal documents without a judicially-reviewed warrant, according to Columbia Legal Services. The INS officials acting as translators asked childcare providers for their social security numbers, their children’s social security cards, and other citizenship documents, which intimidated workers, according to an article in Color Lines from 2003.

“[DSHS] had no evidence of any wrongful activity other than a complaint from the mayor asking them to investigate childcare workers in Mattawa,” said Duhamel. “Their fourth- and 15th-Amendment rights were violated.”

One local official did request that DSHS initiate the investigation, said Williams. INS officials did accompany DSHS officials as translators but that practice has been banned since, he said.

“This case had nothing to do with immigration,” said Williams. “We agree with the outcome of the case and have made some changes.”

The terms of the settlement changed policies on inspections by requiring new guidelines for DSHS, which include: the state must agree to notify providers of an investigation beforehand wherein they have a right to refuse entry, inspections in private homes where childcare is provided will be limited and only occur during business hours and the state will pay $2 million to settle individual civil rights violations against 30 Mattawa childcare providers.

“The state has a right to inspect the childcare home to make sure children are properly being cared for,” said Duhamel. “But they used one complaint to investigate all [childcare workers].”

The number of mass work raids has increasingly left both legal and illegal immigrants afraid to go about their ordinary lives.

“Just over half of all Hispanic adults in the U.S. worry that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported,” reported a Pew Hispanic Center nationwide survey.

ICE has increased the number of fugitive apprehension goals, with teams working together to reach the ultimate goal in 2012, according to a DHS report. Work raids are one method ICE has used to apprehend and detain undocumented immigrants, but sometimes mistakes are made and those detained are left with scarce legal help.

“There’s an opportunity to understand the laws and rights that are being eroded,” said Arielle Rosenberg, a workers rights advocate at Casa Latina. “Immigrants pay taxes and citizens are workers.”

Reach reporter Marissa Beach at features@dailyuw.com.