The phone rings on the 847 area code line used by AMS Earth Movers in Highland Park. After a few chimes, Adam Savitt picks up the call amid the lush banana fields of Guatemala.
The connection is fine, but the ties to his life in Lake County are fading since he became one of thousands deported in an ongoing U.S. government crackdown against illegal immigrants.
Yes, Savitt, 44, tells a confused truck driver on the line, there are still piles of construction debris waiting to be picked up in Winnetka. No, he assures a nervous contractor, there’s nothing to worry about now that he’s out of the country.
The phone rings again and it’s his wife, Julie, 42, calling from another Highland Park line. Eyes tired during another 17-hour day as the new company owner, she briefs him on the latest work headaches and stares absently toward a pair of neglected Jewish shabbat candles that once brightened their home.
“I wish you were here,” she says.
“I wish I were there, too, baby,” he replies.
Since federal agents approached him on their porch and sent him back to Guatemala in July, the constantly ringing phone line is now what binds the Savitts’ once-thriving construction waste hauling business. It also keeps tied an unlikely marriage that shows how such arrests can touch any corner of America.
She was the Orthodox Jewish granddaughter of a once-connected Chicago developer; he fought for the government in the Guatemalan civil war, escaped, then converted to Judaism after they met in 1998.
Together with her three kids from a previous marriage, they carved out a quiet life in leafy Highland Park — until a 13-year-old denial for U.S. political asylum finally caught up to Savitt.
It came at 5 a.m. on a Saturday. As he laced his work boots, a man approached, asking to see his driver’s license. He complied. The man asked: Have you ever been called anything else?
He gave the name he used before legally changing his identity as part of his Jewish conversion: Francisco Adan Estrada.
Moments later, his wife stared in stunned silence as her handcuffed husband disappeared in an unmarked government car down a street of sprawling homes, basketball hoops and American flags.
“I couldn’t fathom everything that was happening,” she says.
Similar scenes have unfolded repeatedly across the country. Since September 2007, about 60,000 illegal immigrants previously ordered to leave the U.S. have been tracked down and deported, federal figures show.
Among them have been ex-convicts, gang leaders and other potential menaces, officials at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement say.
There are also people like Adam Savitt.
At 15, he was drafted to fight for the Guatemalan army in a 30-year civil war. Savitt said he hated his commanding officer, who forced soldiers to rob village stores.
One day, the two brawled. Savitt left the officer bloodied. Fearing he’d be killed, he fled to Mexico and, in 1994, crossed illegally into the U.S.
In 1995, while living in New York, he applied for political asylum — five months after the cutoff date for Central American war refugees. His lawyer at the time failed to show proof of rampant government persecution in Guatemala, according to his current attorney, Dana Davidson.
In 1997, Savitt was ordered to leave the U.S. He claims his lawyer never informed him about the ruling and that he learned about it three years later.
In 1998, he moved to Chicago.
He realized later why he was drawn to a janitor’s job at a shul in Skokie, he says. At the time, he only knew he liked the sweet, slightly boisterous single mother who handled the synagogue’s books.
The two fell in love. As he learned more about her religion, childhood memories rushed back of his grandfather in Guatemala reading from a Hebrew text.
“We think he is a Morano,” she says, referring to a population of Jewish descendants whose ancestors converted to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition. Many wound up in Latin America.
Before their Jewish wedding in 2004, he converted. He was circumcised at 38.
He also was required to assume a Jewish name. He chose the English version of his middle name and the middle name of his wife’s grandfather Maurice Moshe Young. He decided Savitt would be his new family name.
Young, a retired developer who helped build the headquarters for Loyola University’s law school, saw himself in his grandson-in-law, the family says. He died in 2002.
“Their beginnings were very similar,” says Julie’s mother, Sheila Savitt. “My dad came as an infant [from Poland] but belonged to an immigrant family and everything he did, he did on his own, and Adam is so similar.”
With Young’s financial help, Adam Savitt bought a construction dump truck. By then, he knew his immigration status needed resolving. The Savitts began pursuing a marriage visa, a route that they’re still pursuing that has run independently of the deportation process.
Eventually, AMS Earth Movers was born, at its peak coordinating 60 trucks a day in a lucrative, hard-nosed industry.
As they hauled concrete or clay, several AMS trucks were marked with a multiple of the number 18, a symbol of good luck in the Judaic numerological system of gematria.
Those trucks have since been sold, and the couple’s luck turned sour amid a scramble to pay bills and lighten the workload for her.
“I’ve lost a lot of faith this year,” she says while driving to monitor a hauling job. “We’ve never hidden anything. We were in the process of trying to do this right.”
Meanwhile, the AMS phone blared continuously, its ring tone set to her favorite musician, Bob Marley.
“Don’t worry, ’bout a thing …”
She needs the mantra in a day that starts at 5 a.m. and ends with a pile of invoices at about 10 p.m.
In between, she dispatches the company’s dwindling number of drivers, gets her twin daughters, 13, and son, 15, to school, chases down contractors who owe AMS money, prepares dinner and lines up work for the next day.
“She’s trying to do the work of two people,” says Alfonso Cervantes, 46, a regular AMS driver who notes that other haulers have abandoned the company since the deportation. “This company is hurting.”
Though in charge, Julie Savitt consults with her husband frequently — urging him to find extra drivers one morning, deciding how to handle a contractor the next.
The distance is taking its toll. Before saying good night, he sits in his windowless room and vents into the phone about feeling homesick and depressed, his wife says.
One day, he dispatched a truck to the wrong address, costing the company time and money.
“That can’t happen!” she says, flashing with anger. “That can never happen!”
What she can’t see is a man also rediscovering his roots.
After landing in Guatemala, he was so anxious he needed a tranquilizer to leave the Guatemala City airport. Now, in the village of Cerro Alto, he’s a local, wearing a fishing hat that droops to match his hangdog expression.
Driving past corn fields in a used pickup truck, he approaches a “chicken bus,” a colorful refurbished U.S. school bus now used for transporting people and, yes, chickens.
He honks.
“That’s my cousin,” he says, as the friendly driver waves. Only a few minutes later, another bus, another honk, another cousin.
“This is my town, man,” he says, smiling.
Here, people call him Francisco Estrada, not comprehending the Jewish faith that moved him to find a synagogue in a nearby town.
And the phone calls he gets from his wife and their clients are beginning to compete with other conversations.
Showing the entrepreneurial flair he learned in Lake County, he and a brother, Edgar, are building a storage facility behind their concrete-block family home.
He plans to sell grains and other products bought at wholesale prices from a not-so-nearby Costco store for a profit in Cerro Alto. It’s another way to help his wife until he returns to Highland Park, he explains. And when he discusses his new business, he shows a burst of excitement that seems absent when he talks about AMS.
The phone rings and it’s his wife again.
Work is slow, she says. The kids are home with the flu. No one who owes AMS money seems to be paying.
“I don’t know what to do,” she says.
“Have patience, sweetie,” he replies. “Something is going to come up. I love you.”
She loves him too, she says, and hangs up. Picking up the phone again, she calls a contractor who owes AMS several thousand dollars.
“I was wondering if you’d be able to send another check soon?” she says. “… Oh. OK. All right. All right. Thanks.”
Hanging up, she pinches her eyes to hide the fresh tears from her daughter Tali.
“Are you OK?” Tali asks, as Bob Marley’s voice chimes in again.
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60,000: Number of illegal immigrants previously ordered to leave the U.S. who have been tracked down and deported since September 2007
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aolivo@tribune.com
oavila@tribune.com
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