How Trump’s policies reshape the enforcement of immigration in Portorico
In Bario Oberreo, mostly in the Dominican neighborhood of Portorico, the superficial influence on unprecedented migration raids in the American region was paralyzed.
With the presence of abandoned homes and companies, a truck was with loudspeakers wandering around the streets of Al -Tabqa, working with a message.
Suddenly, in this dark, they heard: “immigrants, you have rights.”
The legal non -profitability of it, Iowa Portorico Legal, The truck, known as “Tumba Coco,“To inform people of their rights and announce the launch New hotlineGodro said that the first in Portorico provides legal support to migrants.
Gohro said that more than 300 families have already called the hotline and spoke with lawyers for free because they discover their legal options in the face of a changing migration scene.
Puerto Rico residents now fear that President Donald Trump’s efforts to carry out mass deportations will essentially change how immigration policies are imposed in an American region that has been seen long ago as a haven for migrants.
This perception was first destroyed on January 27, the same week, Trump took office. Immigration authorities raided Barrio Obero and More than 40 people were arrested. Witnesses said Telemundo Purto Rico, NBC sister station on the islandThey saw agents breaking the doors of many homes and companies. They said that the detainees were assigned by hand, placed on trucks and took away.
During the forty years in which he lived in Puerto Rico, Ramon Monuz, a Dominican immigrant, saw the authorities seized intermittently people who are not documented but ever.With aggressionShow during that raid.
It is complicated by things for migrants in Portoresto, detainees are transferred to the mainland – surrounding away from their families and their lawyers running their immigration issues – because they are There are no permanent detention centers On the island that can be detained for long periods, according to Rebecca Gonzalez Ramos, the private agent responsible for security investigations in San Juan.
“Nightmare” amid the concerns of racist stereotypes
Araly Terro, one of AT At least 732 immigrants were arrested by the federal immigration authorities in Portorico Until now this year, she spent a month in the apostasy about three different detention centers in the United States before its release last week yet The immigration judge decided that she had not been held in the first place.
Porto Rico stated that a local police officer in the coastal town of Kabo Rojo alerted the federal immigration authorities about Terro after the officer found that he sold ice cream on the beach without work permits.
Tiro was visa Her lawyer Angelis and Nate Martinez, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Puerto Rico, told her lawyer, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Puerto Rico, that her lawyer, Angelis and Nate Martinez, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Puerto Rico, was in the process of obtaining a green card when she was transferred to the detention of immigration.
Martinez said that local policies in Puerto Rico limit coordination between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.
However, the US Civil Liberties Union in Portoresto sees More cases where the local police are Dominican immigrants are suspected of racist stereotypes with the purposes of alerting federal immigration authorities, raising concerns about the revival of “discriminatory police practices” that led to this Police reforms in Puerto Rico a decade agoMartinez said.
Martinez added that the Terrero issue sheds light on the difficulty of the matter for families and lawyers to track the detainees as soon as they were sent to the United States.
“It was a nightmare,” Tiro told Telemundo Purto Rico After release. “It was a very difficult journey because I have never been arrested in my life. I have never seen myself like this, with handcuffs, like the criminal.”
A raid changes everything
Gonzalez Ramos, HSI’s private agent, said in Local radio interview Last week, her office has been preparing to intensify efforts to enforce immigration in Portorico since November. She said they started “reorganizing” resources and “transforming priorities” after Trump’s victory.
However, the big raid on January 27 was a surprise to most people. The Governor of Puerto Rico, Jennifer Gonzalez Cologne, I reassured the migrants in an interview with Telemundo Purto Rico in the same week that Trump was only “only” “Focus on what is happening in Mexico and the United States, on those borders.“
Godro said he helped create “a false sense of safety.” “These successive raids begin in the areas inhabited by Dominican residents historically.”
With immigration authorities escalating their efforts in Puerto Rico by Hotels and construction sites And the neighborhoods, More than 500 immigrants have been arrested so far She is from the Dominican Republic.
Dominicans are the largest share of Portoresto immigrants. more 100,000 Dominican is estimated To live in Puerto Rico. About a third is believed to be not documented. Godro and Martinez said that many of them are business owners or hospitality work in work, construction and the care of the elderly, which are the industries that wrestle with the lack of employment.
Gonzalez Ramos said that her office would illegally hold people in Puerto Rico, “Specifically, those whose criminal records are a threat to our societies and national security. “
But only 13 % of 732 immigrants who have been arrested this year have a criminal record, According to the data From internal security investigations in San Juan.
After a summons from the enforcement of immigration and customs, the Gonzales Colon administration, a Republican who supports Trump, delivered the names and addresses of 6000 people who obtained driver’s licenses under a friendly law of immigrants from 2013, which allowed people without legal immigration.
Gonzalez Colon said Trump’s immigration policies will not challenge So as not to risk losing federal financing.
“The ruler’s positions and their expressions were very misleading,” Martinez said, adding that local judicial states often defy and oppose federal policies in an attempt to protect the local population.
There is no place to detain
A spokesman for internal security in San Juan told NBC News that González-Ramos was not available for an interview this week. But in Local radio interview for her Last week, Gonzalez Ramos said that immigration agents periodically carry out “daily interventions” in an attempt to find more than 1,200 people who have final deportation orders “we must implement.”
“He must be arrested in raids, regardless of whether they have final orders to deport or not,” it must be arrested, regardless of what. “Now, these are the instructions.”
Martinez said in ACLU that in Puerto Rico, the arrest of immigration is a “strict worker”: These immigrants are placed on a plane and sent to detention centers on our mainland.
For more than a decade, the island lacked the working migration detention center that could include detainees permanently.
With the widespread migration arrests, “temporary detention centers” spread through Puerto Rico, according to Gonzalez Ramos.
One of them in federalism Building Public Services Department In Guinabo. It is equipped with about 20 bedsIt was called “”Do not flee“Or ice box, by immigrants who spent time there before transferring him to the United States
An old ice facility in Agodella Closed in 2012 It was recently reopened to temporarily contract the detainees, according to Judrrow and Martinez, who have heard of the immigrants who were transferred there.
Before closing more than a decade ago, “complaints were submitted at the time about the inhumane and insufficient conditions in which the detainees were held in this center,” Martinez said in Spanish.
Mayor Julio Roldan He agreed to Thursday decree To announce Aguadilla “Malaz City” for immigrants In response to the escalating enforcement efforts in the region.
When there are at least twenty detainees in temporary Holding facilities, ICE aircraft come to Puerto Rico to transfer them to permanent detention centers in different states, According to Jonzalez Ramos.
Many of them are placed in immigration detention centers in Florida and Texas. But detainees were found from Puerto Rico in the facilities in Louisiana and New Mexico.
“We see a pattern of disappearance,” Martinez said, noting that in the Tiro case, it took the American Civil Liberties Union and its lawyers to know the place of its detention.
Martinez said that the situation raises concerns about “multiple violations of human rights and civil rights,” adding that the American Civil Liberties Union continues to monitor these cases and calls for changes in local policies to ensure the protection of migrants’ rights.