ARUN GUPTA
Francisco Dominguez says of his treatment by the U.S. government, “DACA recipients like me came out of the shadows and gave [the government] all our information. It’s being used to target us and come after us. We definitely feel betrayal. We have done everything to meet the requirements and contribute to our country and now to be treated like this.”
On the morning of March 25, at his home in Newport, Oregon, Ignacio Garcia-Pablo was placed under arrest. Minutes earlier, his cousin had barged into his bedroom exclaiming, “The police are outside!”
Ignacio, twenty-one, spotted three men prowling around the house he shared with five other Guatemalan men. At first, he thought they were local cops checking out his car, which was running and unattended. Ignacio’s cousin and brother were trying to jumpstart a van that the migrants used to drive from the Pacific Coast to the Cascade Range, where they harvested forest products six days a week.
Quickly he got dressed and stepped outside. An unmarked car with dark windows and flashing blue-and-red lights in the grille was out front. One agent in civilian clothes asked Ignacio in Spanish if he had documents for U.S. residency. When Ignacio said no, the men ordered him to raise his hands, frisked him, and handcuffed him.
“Why are you doing this to me?” Ignacio recalls asking. He says they responded: “Because of the new President. He gave us a law to grab those people who do not have legal permits to be in the United States.”
The men stuffed Ignacio in the backseat of the unmarked car, where he discovered his brother in cuffs. That’s when he learned they were agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The men stuffed Ignacio in the backseat of the unmarked car, where he discovered his brother in cuffs. That’s when he learned they were agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “My brother told me, ‘ICE got us now. But don’t be sad. We’ve not done anything wrong, we don’t have a criminal record.’ ”
Ignacio’s cousin was also seized. The other three men in the house refused to come out and were not arrested.
After five years of working in farms and forests in Oregon, Ignacio had been preparing to return to his home in Huehuetenango, Guatemala. His reason was President Donald Trump.
“I was very afraid. I don’t want to be seized by ICE and be in jail. I wanted to return voluntarily,” he says. “In Guatemala, there is a stigma if you are deported.”
Ignacio told his story a week after his arrest, sitting in the Portland home of Marta Guembes, head of the Guatemalan Honorary Consulate in Oregon. He spoke in Spanish, his second language after his native Mayan tongue of Mam. The next day, he flew home to Guatemala.
Ignacio was among the eighty-four immigrants collared by ICE in the Pacific Northwest during a three-day “operation” in late March. Nearly all were men from Mexico and Central America.
In fact, hundreds of immigrants have been similarly arrested. In his first week, Trump issued an executive order effectively criminalizing all eleven million undocumented immigrants. He also broadened “expedited removal,” which enables low-level immigration agents to bypass due-process protections for anyone who cannot prove he or she has been in the United States at least two years. Some ICE agents have described their enhanced ability to sweep up immigrants as “fun.”
In 2012, Ignacio arrived in Oregon. He was sixteen, and he hoped “to earn enough money to buy a little land and build a house in Guatemala.” He left the mountains of Huehuetenango after his grandparents died. One of seven brothers, Ignacio says, “We are a poor family. My father was all alone. He had no home, no land. He is seventy-two years old and too ill to work.”
Ignacio borrowed $6,500 from relatives to pay the smugglers who spirited him to Chiapas, Mexico. From there, it took more than a month to traverse Mexico, slip across the U.S. border, and journey a thousand miles to Newport to begin his new life.
Ignacio borrowed $6,500 from relatives to pay the smugglers who spirited him to Chiapas, Mexico. From there, it took more than a month to traverse Mexico, slip across the U.S. border, and journey a thousand miles to Newport to begin his new life. He joined a workforce of thousands of immigrants from Mexico and Central America who work in the state’s specialty forest products industry. They plant, nurture, and harvest crops that wind up as food, wine, flowers, and Christmas trees in homes across the county.
Ignacio earned about $110 a day and wired home up to $2,000 a month. It was enough to buy a few acres of land and a house for his family.
After being arrested by ICE, Ignacio and his cousin and brother were sent to the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center. He could not sleep. The other seven men crammed in his unit chatted and made other noises throughout the night, and the room’s fluorescent lights were always on. He says, “I was feeling very sad because I was afraid I would lose my plane ticket.” ICE let him go after verifying he had a ticket back to Guatemala. “I was ecstatic they were letting me go back to my country,” Ignacio says.
Emmanuel Ayala Frutos, twenty-one, grew up in the Portland area after arriving from Mexico when he was six. He is a beneficiary of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program begun by President Obama in 2012 that gave a two-year reprieve from the threat of deportation for immigrants who arrived before the age sixteen. Known as “Dreamers,” more than 750,000 undocumented youth have been approved for temporary protected status and work permits.
In January, Emmanuel was hit by a car while skateboarding. He was hospitalized for six weeks with injuries that included two broken legs. His sister, Rocio, says he had a breakdown and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. “He’s a Portlander who’s had some struggles.”
Days after Emmanuel applied to renew his expired DACA status, ICE agents showed up at his family’s house. It was the morning of March 26, a Sunday. “They said they wanted him to come with them to answer some questions about DACA,” Rocio says. Thinking he would be gone briefly, Emmanuel left his medication and the wheelchair he relied on. At the ICE office near downtown Portland, he was placed under arrest, handcuffed, and sent to Tacoma.
Tim Warden-Hertz, directing attorney of the Tacoma office of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, says ICE often employs deception to nab people. “They get folks outside saying, ‘We just want to ask you a few questions, there’s an issue with your car.’ There is a general deception where they wave around an administrative warrant, which is not a judicial warrant, demanding to go into people’s homes.”
Three days after Emmanuel’s arrest, supporters gathered at St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church in Gresham, east of the Portland city limits. “I’m worried while he is in detention that his mental state will go back to being bad,” Rocio says. “He’s better off when he’s home, doing his drawings, listening to his music.”
At the time, half of the detainees in the 1,500-bed facility were on a hunger strike to protest the conditions.
Emmanuel’s mother, speaking in Spanish as the Reverend Roberto Maldonado translated, says, “I talked to my son yesterday. He hasn’t taken a shower because he needs my help.” As she started crying, Rocio reached over to hold her. On April 13, after eighteen days in the detention facility run by the for-profit GEO Group, Emmanuel was released on bond. At the time, half of the detainees in the 1,500-bed facility were on a hunger strike to protest the conditions.
Because of delays between the time someone is detained and then deported, there is confusion over how much immigration policy has changed under Trump. The Guardian reported the number of ICE removals for early 2017 was similar to removals in early 2016, claiming, “the perception of ramped-up deportations is, for now, false.” Some of the confusion may be deliberate as ICE claims its enforcement is “routine.”
But data obtained by The Washington Post shows a leap in enforcement activity. For the first two-and-a-half months of 2017, immigration arrests by ICE jumped 32.6 percent, while arrests of immigrants without a criminal record more than doubled. The Post called it “the clearest sign yet that President Trump has ditched his predecessor’s protective stance toward most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.”
Those on the front lines are witnessing the shift. Andrea Williams, executive director of the Oregon immigrant-rights group Causa, says trying to track detentions is “like drinking from a firehose. I don’t have empirical evidence that ICE arrests are increasing, but it sure feels like it.”
“For me deportations are not a new thing,” says Guembes, of the Guatemalan Consulate. “It’s what I do for the Guatemalan community of more than 10,000 in the Northwest. But in twenty years, I have never seen this level of pain and fear.”
Warden-Hertz says his office estimates that in King County, which includes Seattle, “ICE detentions in February and March of 2017 have been close to double the rate compared to the last few months of 2016.” He believes the agency is “ratcheting up tactics.” They are now “waiting inside of courthouses. There are reports of people going into immigration to fix their status being arrested.”
In New York City, lawyers have tallied an eight-fold increase in ICE arrests or attempts at courthouses in early 2017 compared to the previous two years. In Chicago, ICE agents with guns drawn stormed a house of eight legal residents and U.S. citizens, shooting and wounding a fifty-three-year-old man. ICE is also arresting undocumented activists, people showing up for appointments at immigration offices to legalize their status, and undocumented parents previously allowed to remain as long as they checked in annually with ICE.
And when ICE agents have a detention order for an immigrant, they seize any undocumented person they find. (Ignacio and his relatives, for instance, were not the targets of the probe that led to their arrests.) This is a shift from Obama, when such arrests were discouraged, but Warden-Hertz says it is similar to Bush Administration policy from the 2000s.
The Trump Administration is also going after DACA recipients aggressively. In February a protected DACA recipient was deported to Mexico three hours after being picked up, a clear shift from the Obama Administration and Trump’s proclaimed vow not to target Dreamers. In the Portland metropolitan area, at least three Dreamers with minor charges were arrested during the ICE sweeps in March. Emmanuel Ayala Frutos was detained for allegedly possessing and displaying a butterfly knife after arguing with construction workers. Another Dreamer, Luis Gerado Zazueta, had a 2014 conviction for selling $20 worth of marijuana to a high-school classmate. And Francisco Rodriguez Dominguez was picked up because of a DUI in late 2016.
Francisco, who came to the United States from Michoacán, Mexico, at age five, was arrested outside his home. He says ICE agents were “banging on the door, yelling my name pretty loud. My family was frightened and not knowing what’s going on.” He was placed in a minivan with five other men and one woman and taken to Tacoma, where he was “held in a large hall, with dozens of beds, and two levels of cells around the room. Some people had been there for months.”
But within a day, Francisco was released on bond. That was likely due to widespread community support sparked by the Reverend Roberto Maldonado. “I just started picking up the phone and calling,” Maldonado says. Within hours, supporters flooded ICE with calls demanding Francisco’s release. Reporters jumped on the story.
Within hours, supporters flooded ICE with calls demanding Francisco’s release. Reporters jumped on the story.
Francisco, who has completed two years of community college and is saving money to attend a four-year university, juggles multiple jobs. He works at Glenfair Elementary School “mentoring kids who lack attention at home.” He coaches soccer in an after-school program, staffs a food pantry organized by the Latino Network, and works at a homeless shelter. He also completed a diversion program for his DUI arrest.
The day after Francisco’s arrest, under gray skies spitting rain, around 150 supporters and nearly a dozen clergy gathered outside the ICE facility in Portland to demand his release. Maldonado said, “Francisco is a good all-American boy who was born in Mexico.” Hours later, he was free.
Francisco is gratified by the reaction, but dismayed by what is happening to Dreamers like himself: “DACA recipients like me came out of the shadows and gave [the government] all our information. It’s being used to target us and come after us. We definitely feel betrayal. We have done everything to meet the requirements and contribute to our country and now to be treated like this.”
About a third of the nation’s undocumented immigrants have at least one child born here. A 2011 report by the Applied Research Center, “Shattered Families,” estimated there are “at least 5,100 children who are presently in foster care whose parents have been detained or deported.” Under Trump, a growing number of parents without legal residency are considering guardianship arrangements for their U.S.-born children out of fear they’ll be deported.
Many describe the new reality under Trump as akin to war. As Marta Guembes puts it, “They say we have to protect ourselves from terrorism, but it feels like the terrorism is happening here.”
Cameron Coval, who works with Francisco at the Latino Network’s food pantry, says, “Sometimes when we go to drop off food, people are afraid to open the door. They say they are scared to go outside, go to work, go to the supermarket. They are putting themselves in house arrest.”
The Trump Administration’s approach is sowing fear. After his election, he vowed to “get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers. We have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country.”
He later told Congress he was “removing gang members, drug dealers, and criminals that threaten our communities and prey on our very innocent citizens.”
There are 1.9 million “removable criminal aliens” in the United States, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Under President Obama, prosecution for immigration-related offenses expanded significantly. In 2013, more than half of those arrested for violating federal law were for immigration offenses such as reentering the country within five years of being deported. Only 300,000 undocumented immigrants have been convicted of a felony, less than half the rate of the entire U.S. population. And tens of thousands of them are already in prison and will be deported after their sentences have ended.
The result is “an awful lot of fear,” says Warden-Hertz. “Many undocumented immigrants are unwilling to go to law enforcement as either a victim or witness. There is fear of any sort of travel or movement. People are not accessing government benefits for their U.S.-born children. Employers are reporting fewer workers. Kids are afraid of going to school.”
This fear has fueled social media panics that roil communities and push people deeper into the shadows. Immigrants’ rights groups are responding with systems to verify ICE activity so as to squelch rumors before they spread wildly.
“This experience has shown me I can use my voice to help those in need. I know these are hard times right now. We want to let everyone, all undocumented immigrants, know they do have rights, they don’t have to live in fear.
At a recent rapid-response network meeting in Portland, ten people discussed how to manage a hotline for those under threat. The group developed a system to dispatch first responders who could verify if an ICE raid was underway and then potentially mobilize broader networks to witness and protest. One organizer explained mobilizing the immigrant community and supporters “creates a lot of pressure for ICE and they may leave, which has happened.”
But Francisco, whose deportation was blocked by energized supporters, is encouraged. “This experience has shown me I can use my voice to help those in need. I know these are hard times right now. We want to let everyone, all undocumented immigrants, know they do have rights, they don’t have to live in fear. That’s not what they thought about when they dreamed about coming to this country and having a better life.”