Editors note: Some last names were withheld to protect the sources’ identities.

On a dreary day in March, Leticia, an immigrant from Petén, Guatemala, got a tattered letter in the mail. She recognized the handwriting on the envelope as her brother’s and breathed a sigh of relief.

She broke the seal, slid out a thin piece of crinkled notebook paper and read 17 scribbled lines of Spanish.

Though none of the faint graphite words were ‘adios’, they added up to goodbye.

“I’m all alone now,” Leticia said in Spanish.

Just days before Leticia received the letter, Josue was arrested by the Bowling Green Police Department, she said.

Josue is one immigrant in a growing national trend of Hispanic crime. A 2009 Pew Hispanic Center study found Hispanics accounted for 40 percent of all sentenced federal offenders, more than triple their population share of 13 percent.

A previous study in 1991 stated that most of these offenses were drug-related, but the current study identifies immigration as the main offense.

But Bowling Green doesn’t fit the national trend, and police are working with immigrant communities to increase trust and communication.

Leticia, a single mother from a poor Guatemalan town, joined her older brother, Josue, in Bowling Green about eight years after he arrived. Both are illegal immigrants.

Leticia, her brother and another family share the rent of a small, three-bedroom home in Bowling Green’s Little Mexico, an area predominantly inhabited by Hispanics, she said.

Leticia makes money by picking tobacco. Josue works in roofing. The two make modest wages, but send almost $200 home each week to children they left with their mother, she said.

Leticia said it’s more than they would make in Guatemala.

According to the records from the Warren County Regional Jail, Josue was taken into custody for public intoxication and resisting arrest on March 19.

Two days later he was released to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and taken to Louisville where he’s awaiting an immigration court date in Chicago, Leticia said.

Barry Pruitt, public information officer for the BGPD, says the jail is required to report all inmates without a Social Security number to ICE. Josue has no Social Security number because he’s an illegal immigrant.

But this was Josue’s third arrest for public intoxication in four months, according to the record of his arrest. It wasn’t until his latest arrest in March that ICE stepped in.

Jailer Jackie Strode said he couldn’t explain why ICE didn’t pursue Josue after his first arrest.

“To my knowledge, they respond to all of our calls,” Strode said.

ICE was unavailable for comment.

But Pruitt said Hispanic crime isn’t a big concern in Bowling Green.

“The ones we need to worry about are white males,” Pruitt said.

Hispanics made up 0.8 percent of the 16,511 arrests recorded in the last 12 months, according to a report from BGPD quantifying arrests by race and gender.

White males made up 48 percent of arrests with nearly 8,000, according to the report.

Whites made up 78.5 percent of the population in Bowling Green, according to 2005-2007 US Census data. Hispanics made up 4.4 percent of the population.

Pruitt said he attributes Bowling Green’s low Latino crime rate to the lack of gang activity in the community. He believes larger cities, which have significantly higher gang-related crimes, are the largest contributing factor to the national trend.

“They are coming up here and they are working hard,” Pruitt said of the Hispanic immigrants in Bowling Green. “They’re honest people. They are just wanting to make a better life for their family.”

Monica Woods, international communities liaison officer for BGPD, said she’s proud of the Bowling Green international community for breaking the trend.

She said it reflects positively on Bowling Green Hispanic population.

Woods, who also serves on the board of the Bowling Green International Center, works to build relationships between the BGPD and the international community.

“Anytime you have other cultures, it only enriches our community,” she said. “It provides a global outlook and shows there is more to the world than just you.”

Woods said she tries to help others see this. Her job requires researching different cultures and passing on the information to other officers.

“When we are in uniform, we’re the most visible form of government,” Woods said. “Police officers represent government in a visual sense.”

Woods and James Robinson, director of the International Center, said the uniform rarely represents safety to immigrants.

“They’ve never seen anyone in a uniform that has respected them or not hurt them,” Robinson said.

For this reason, officers aren’t the only ones who require training, he said.

Robinson and the International Center work to arrange as many friendly encounters with police officers as possible for the immigrants they serve, he said.

The International Center offers a program called Preferred Communities which provides cross-cultural training, Robinson said. It also hosts meet and greets where it invites immigrants and uniformed police officers to social gatherings.

The program helps immigrants become comfortable with authority, he said.

Woods said she hopes programs like Preferred Communities will eventually decrease crime.

Higher trust for the police among immigrants will increase the likelihood of immigrants reporting crime, and more reporting will eventually lead to a lower crime rate, Woods said.

But services like those offered through the International Center and BGPD collaboration aren’t offered to illegal immigrants, according to International Center officials.

Although Josue has been in the United States for almost 10 years, he doesn’t speak English, Leticia said.

Josue was addressed in both Spanish and English but continued to resist arrest, according to the report of the arresting officer.

Leticia didn’t know how to help her brother until about two weeks ago when another tattered envelope arrived in the mail, she said.

She opened the envelope to find a folded piece of yellow legal paper with the same handwriting. But this time, instead of saying goodbye, her brother asked for help.

He gave Leticia his alien identification number, assigned by ICE, and asked her to contact the Guatemalan consulate to obtain his passport.

He also asked his sister to buy minutes for his cell phone so that he could make calls.

Josue asked Leticia in the letter to call his mother and his children.

“Tell them I am OK and may God bless them always,” he wrote.