The Defender

When hundreds of illegals were arrested in New Bedford, torn away from their families and sent to Texas to be deported, Robert Hildreth decided that that wasn't the America he was proud of. So he acted.

(Photograph by Yoon S. Byun)

They rounded them up in New Bedford on a chilly morning in March of last year. Hundreds of illegal immigrants who were busy making equipment for US soldiers were rousted from their work and flown, shackled, to Texas in preparation for deportation. This was one raid in a spate of them around the country, as what would become known as The Immigration Issue reached full boil in our national politics. In Boston, however, a financier named Robert Hildreth, a peppery, chatty self-made millionaire out of Melrose High School via Harvard and Johns Hopkins, decided to do more than watch, listen, and read about it.

"This started with my waking up one morning and reading about the New Bedford raid. And then I got involved in it, piece by piece," Hildreth recalls. "The first thing I did was provide emergency aid, rent and food, because this impacted a community of about 500 people, and there was nobody there." He could have stopped there, with just his money. Instead, he found himself pulled in even closer. "Then I got involved with the legal issues. About 100 lawyers showed up, and at the end of that meeting, I had a problem. These lawyers were going to be pro bono defenders for immigrants. The only problem was that the immigrants were all in Texas."

So Hildreth went out and paid bail for 40 of the New Bedford detainees who were still in custody near Houston. Originally, Hildreth proposed to pay half of the bail while each detainee's family paid the other half. "But," he says, "the bails became very high." All told, Hildreth put up more than $200,000 of his own money. "I saw it as a campaign, as a war to protect the America that I know," he says. "This is a lifelong thing that I care about. I see the main difference between the United States and China and Japan is that we accept immigrants and they don't. We win. They lose. I don't see how you can beat an immigrant nation."

If it is a war, the other side leveled its guns directly at Hildreth almost immediately.

He was not popular on talk radio. It didn't matter to Hildreth, who'd become involved with the troubled economies of Latin America while working for the International Monetary Fund in Bolivia from 1975 until 1981. He'd made his money in bond trading in that region in the 1980s and '90s.

He could have stopped after his very own New Bedford bailout plan, but instead he took it further. This year, he cofounded the National Immigrant Bond Fund (immigrantbondfund.org), which seeks to replicate his efforts in New Bedford all across the country.

Not long after he'd posted bail for the detainees, he was invited with one of them to appear on Sabado Gigante, the enormously popular Spanish-language television show that is a mixture of The Hollywood Palace, Let's Make a Deal, and Meet the Press. On their flight back from Miami, the stewardess told the detainee that there had been a mistake in booking, and she moved him to the first-class cabin. "He was flown to Houston in chains," Hildreth says, "and here he was, coming home in first class. Only in America, right?"

E-mail Charles P. Pierce at cpierce@globe.com.