Julio Ledezma had been chief of police in La Junta, a town of 8,700 in northern Mexico, for barely three months when a pair of strangers paid him a visit.
They said an aide to the mayor had sent them, and they bore gifts: a briefcase stuffed with cash and a truck for Ledezma's personal use.
In return, the new chief was to distract federal police at security checkpoints with fake calls for assistance. The diversion would allow drug traffickers to drive through the area without inspection.
Ledezma could refuse -- and be killed.
He could take the bribe -- and be owned by the Juarez cartel.
He chose to stall. He told the men he had to talk to his boss first. He approached civic leaders, trying to rally support. Word got back to the traffickers, and on Ledezma's 45th birthday, six men with military rifles surrounded his home while he was out buying steaks and jalapenos for his birthday dinner.
The gunmen told his wife that they would find him and kill him, no matter where he went in Mexico. They waited about 20 minutes, then left.
When Ledezma returned, he realized that resistance was not an option. He drove to Juarez with his wife and their 15-year-old daughter and crossed the Bridge of the Americas into El Paso. There, they asked for political asylum.
Their request will probably be rejected, because asylum is reserved for people fleeing political oppression or ethnic discrimination. Police officers who stood up to drug cartels don't necessarily qualify.
Indeed, the U.S. government is aggressively fighting Ledezma's petition on the grounds that the threat that caused him to flee is inherent to police work, according to his lawyer, Eduardo Beckett. U.S. immigration officials said they could not comment because asylum cases are confidential.
As drug violence has worsened in Mexico, businesspeople, journalists and other professionals have been seeking refuge in the U.S. But few have as much at stake as law enforcement figures who defy the cartels.
No statistics are available on how many police officers have sought asylum in this country, but government sources and immigration attorneys suggest the number is increasing.
That is no surprise, because Mexican police have been "left out in the cold by the very institution they sought to protect," said Bruce J. Einhorn, a retired immigration judge in Los Angeles who directs an asylum clinic at Pepperdine University School of Law.
Police officers seeking refuge in this country face an uncertain future. If their asylum applications are rejected, they can be deported to Mexico, to face near-certain retaliation from the cartels. To avoid such a fate, they can try to strike a deal with U.S. authorities to provide information about drug trafficking in Mexico. Or they can try to remain in this country illegally.
Their plight poses a quandary for U.S. officials, who are seeking to bolster honest Mexican police to curb the influence of the cartels.
"These cases are problematic," said Kathleen Walker, an El Paso lawyer and past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. "It's like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole."
In recent months, judges have granted refuge to a few Mexicans fleeing drug-related violence, according to immigration lawyers. But none were police officers.
George Grayson, a professor of government at the College of William and Mary in Virginia and an expert on U.S.-Mexico relations, said that if immigration judges began to grant asylum liberally to people fleeing the cartels, "We'd have literally tens of thousands of police officers coming to the United States, not to mention some mayors, too."
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Cartels' long reach
In some cases, disillusioned or terrified officers simply head for a border post and ask for asylum. They are held in detention facilities while waiting for their applications to be reviewed by asylum officers and a federal immigration court, a process that can take years. More often, Mexican police enter the country on visitor visas; they then have up to a year to apply for asylum. Such applicants typically remain free while awaiting a ruling.
Through immigration lawyers, interviews were arranged with Ledezma and two other Mexican police officers now in this country. Their accounts provide a glimpse of the drug cartels' reach and brazenness.
One of the officers, a detective in Baja California, received a call seeking inside information about two jailed murder suspects linked to the cartels.
The 39-year-old detective, interviewed on condition that he would be identified only as Alvarez, said he suspected that a fellow officer had set him up for the bribery attempt.
Alvarez said he had been brash enough to ask how some of his colleagues could afford fancy clothes, new cars and expensive weapons on their $1,000-a-month salaries.
The anonymous caller wanted to know about interrogations of the two suspects. Alvarez had had the men moved from a jail cell to police headquarters so he could question them about a pair of killings he was investigating.
