Brian Pereyra was eating with some friends at the Betos restaurant in Provo last Friday.

Now, he's sitting in the Utah County jail.

How he got there is a murky tale of racial profiling and overzealous policing.

Police got a complaint the 18-year-old might have a gun. After they searched his body and car and found nothing, they followed him home. When his parents refused to let officers search their apartment for guns and declined to produce immigration documents, officers cuffed Brian and his dad, Orlando, and hauled them off to jail.

"We taught our children to respect and trust the police. But after this, they can't," says Alejandra Pereyra, through tears and an interpreter. "Instead of respecting them, they're afraid."

Pereyra's arrest seems like the final, degrading act to years of anti-immigrant Capitol Hill theatrics.

But state Rep. Mike Noel should be happy. After a week when urban police chiefs from Park City to West Valley questioned the wisdom of the Kanab Republican's legislative crackdown on undocumented immigrants, Provo put Noel's policing theories into practice. Officers jumped in with gusto to do lawmakers' bidding. Apparently, they even had an immigration agent along for the ride.

Orlando Pereyra works as a cook at a group home for disabled adults. Immigrants from Argentina, he and his wife came to the United States on a tourist visa and stayed when it expired in 2002. Now, she is trying to scrape together enough money to bail out her son and husband and pay an attorney.

Point made. Criminal apprehended. The whole family is terrified.

But that seems to be the point for lawmakers intent on thumping their chests and tacking together too-easy fixes.

"This bill is about bringing the rule of law to the state of Utah," Noel said when lawmakers debated the bill a year ago, "to not give people false hopes, to not, in any way, induce people to commit crimes. It sends a clear message that we intend to obey all our laws."

Sounds good. But life outside is always more complicated than it seems on the House floor.

"It was one of those feel-good laws. They wanted to do something," says Tony Yapias, an activist in Utah's Latino community. "They don't realize the harm they're doing. All of the sudden, all of us are being perceived as illegal immigrants."

While Ogden Police Chief John Greiner (not coincidentally, a state senator) worries about his city becoming a "sanctuary city," Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank has rejected his invitation to join Noel's immigration posse.

It's not a matter of turning a blind eye to criminal immigrants. In narcotics sweeps at Pioneer Park the past two months, Salt Lake City police, working in partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, detained 150 undocumented immigrants now facing deportation. But Burbank says harassing and intimidating law-abiding undocumented workers seems counterproductive.

"Traditionally, law enforcement has been horrible at this. We have fought so long and hard against racial profiling and everything that goes along with that," he says. "To now take a step back and treat people differently isn't going to expedite the process. All it will do is create a rift in our community and interject bias in what we do on a regular basis."

That's real world experience talking, not political hot air.

The Pew Hispanic Center just released a report debunking the lone wolf/day-laborer stereotype of America's wave of modern immigrants: They are more likely to be married and living in nuclear families than the U.S.-born population. They do 6 percent of the jobs in the country -- cleaning bathrooms and chopping tomatoes. And last year, illegal immigrants gave birth to 4 million American citizens.

Even Noel has to know: They can't all be deported.

walsh@sltrib.com