by Jeremy Arias | Staff Writer

A racist fax sent to three Casa of Maryland workers centers disgusted and disturbed employees of the nonprofit immigrant rights advocacy group.

The fliers arrived Thursday morning at Casa's workers centers in Silver Spring, Langley Park and Wheaton, as well as at the nonprofit's Baltimore employment center and Shady Grove training facility, said Fernando Garavito, a manager at Casa's Silver Spring center on University Boulevard, who was present when the flier arrived there.

"It's something I'm very proud of about living in this country; that we can express our rights and our opinions," he said from his office at the center Friday. "But some people choose to express themselves in such a violent, hateful way. Why so much hate?"

The flier itself, written in a mixture of English and Spanish, depicts a pickup truck with an American flag on the door dragging a cartoon image of President Barack Obama's head in a noose tied to the back bumper and reads, in part, "It is illegal to be illegal!" The flier also includes numerous racist words and messages.

After entering the return fax number on the document into an Internet search engine, Casa employees linked the sender to a similar message that was faxed to the office of U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) after the congressman supported the federal health care reform bill in March, said Casa's Director of Community Organizing and Political Action Kim Propeack, who called the FBI to report the threatening messages.

"That wouldn't usually be the agency that we would go to, but, particularly given the drawing on top [of the fax], we felt they were threatening," she said, adding the FBI is investigating the messages sent to Stupak.

Local bureau spokesman Special Agent Richard J. Wolfe declined to comment on details of the case without having had time to familiarize himself with the investigation when reached for comment Thursday.

Casa has been the target of hate mail and direct threats before, including a series of bomb threats that were called in to several workers centers in May 2008. Despite the initial tension brought about by the fliers, neither Propeack nor Garavito were seriously concerned regarding the safety of the nonprofit's workers or volunteers.

"We get a constant barrage of hate mail, emails, postcards; sometimes people come and hang things on our offices," Propeack said. "When we had the bomb threats, we actually entered into a pretty significant safety analysis of all of our office with the help of the anti-defamation league, so at that time we really significantly changed our mail-handling policy and our entering and exiting policy."

Garavito was equally confident.

"I see everything from another point of view," he said. "There are so many facts that you have to have in mind when people make these threat messages. ... it's obviously not somebody who comes in to ask us questions and find out information about what we do here; they are just hateful against us."

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