 "Photo: Jose Lozano")
 "Photo: Nicolas Martinez")
"Jaime" is buried somewhere in Travis County International Cemetery under an unmarked headstone. After he died of stab wounds to the face and torso Aug. 31, 1985, efforts to identify his body went nowhere.
Jaime, who investigators say was probably an undocumented immigrant, was killed in a fight outside a three-bedroom house at 704 W. Elizabeth St. in South Austin. His assailant, a man who stood about 5-feet-5-inches tall, had gold teeth and went by the name Alfonso, according to statements to the Austin American-Statesman in the days following the murder, lived with Jaime as a temporary boarder in the South Austin house.
"It was kind of a place where people stayed two or three weeks and then moved on," said Dusty Hesskew, who led the 1985 murder investigation.
Hesskew estimated 20-to-25 residents packed into the one-story home, paying a weekly rent while working as day laborers in construction. The occupants did not know each other, so when the killer fled after the fight, clues about his identity were scarce.
"We didn't even know who the victim was," Hesskew said. "Nobody seemed to know the victim's name, and we ran all kinds of fingerprint tests and searches and stuff, and we couldn't ID the victim."
Jaime's murder made the news recently when Jose Flores-Salas was arrested attempting to cross the Canadian-American border in a freight car and confessed to several murders, including one at 704 Elizabeth in Austin in 1985. Police refuse to discuss details of the open investigation.
Jaime's death demonstrates a danger thousands of undocumented immigrants in Austin face - that they will fall victim to crime, hundreds or thousands of miles from family, friends and home. Austin's roughly 100,000 foreign-born residents make up about one-sixth of the city's population, and only about 25 percent of them have been naturalized, according to the 2000 census.
Austin Police Department efforts to protect illegal immigrants, however, often meet stiff resistance from immigrants, said Thomas Esparza, chairman of the Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
"Their biggest fear is that if they report a crime, they'll be deported," Esparza said.
Esparza said he works mostly with immigrants accused of violent crimes and engages in several forms of community outreach that attempt to explain the American legal system to Spanish-speakers.
Austin police work to convey the message that they will not inquire into an individual's citizenship status unless that person is under investigation.
Advocates of a more restrictive immigration policy argue that community outreach programs like the one used by the Austin Police Department make life too easy for illegal immigrants, thus encouraging illegal immigration.
Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., said such programs treat the symptom, not the disease.
"Unavoidably, whatever the motives of these kinds of policies are, they end up conveying the sense that, 'We really don't care about the rule of law,'" Camarota said. "It's not going to solve the problem, because tomorrow a new group of illegal aliens will arrive."
Camarota said pressure from ethnic advocacy groups, businesses who want cheap labor and local law enforcement officials who want to lighten their work loads discourage cities from enforcing federal immigration laws.
"We believe it's not an immigration issue - it should be a public safety issue," said Manuel Renteria, the APD community liaison.
Renteria coordinates publicity among Spanish-speaking immigrants, holding seminars in local schools, churches and apartment complexes. The object of his outreach programs is to increase candor between illegal immigrants and the APD by spreading the word that Austin police will not automatically investigate an immigrant's citizenship status.
"All of Austin will benefit when a certain community can feel free to call the police on issues," Renteria said. "If you were to get robbed, and nobody saw it except an immigrant, you would hopefully see that the immigrant would report it and not be fearful."
To facilitate better crime prevention among illegal immigrants, APD formed the Immigrant Protection Unit late last year. The unit concentrates on crimes involving human trafficking - the illegal transportation of undocumented immigrants into the country - as well as crimes against illegal immigrants.
Renteria said robbery reports against Hispanics increased from 47 percent in 2001 to 52 percent in 2002, a jump he attributed in part to APD's efforts to reach out to the Hispanic community.
"There's just a huge spectrum of victimization here," said Leo Anchondo, Catholic Charities' director of the Office of Immigrant Concerns, a group that helps immigrants in Austin become naturalized. Up to 40 percent of applicants have been victimized in some way, Anchondo said.
Anchondo estimated about 1,500 families receive some kind of help from the office each year.
Robbery, fraud, disputes with employers and landlords, and domestic violence are a few of the issues Anchondo said he sees repeatedly.
U.S. legislators continue to address the issue of illegal immigrants' rights. The Sept. 11 attacks, committed by individuals who had overstayed their visas, once again raised the question of whether police should investigate the citizenship status of a broader range of individuals than those under suspicion of criminal activity.
Efforts to encourage local law enforcement to more actively enforce federal immigration laws have met with mixed results. The CLEAR Act, which would have compelled local law enforcement agencies to take a more active role in enforcing federal immigration laws or risk losing certain federal funds, stalled in Congress in 2003. Another bill, H.R. 10, is working its way through Congress and would allow the federal government to abridge the appeals process for those residing in the country illegally. President Bush supports a plan that would grant temporary legal status to undocumented immigrants who are already employed.
Flores-Salas, Jaime's alleged murderer, has since recanted his confession, according to his attorney Leonard Martinez, who requested a psychiatric evaluation for his client early last week.
"He is delusional as can be," Martinez said.
Flores-Salas will probably face murder charges in court in November, Martinez said.
Twenty years after his death, little is known of Jaime's identity. His anonymous headstone is never visited. The documents detailing his autopsy are barely legible, faded with age. The houses on West Elizabeth were gentrified years ago, Austin-style, with funky paint jobs.
The house at 704 West Elizabeth, painted lavender now, with an overgrown aloe vera plant flopped toward the street, is home to three recent college graduates who knew nothing of what happened there 20 years ago and could hardly imagine so many strangers packed into their three-bedroom, one-bath residence.
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