{"id":289239,"date":"2017-02-14T09:05:14","date_gmt":"2017-02-14T16:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=289239"},"modified":"2017-02-14T11:18:36","modified_gmt":"2017-02-14T18:18:36","slug":"in-apparent-case-of-mistaken-identity-austin-father-caught-in-ice-sting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2017\/02\/in-apparent-case-of-mistaken-identity-austin-father-caught-in-ice-sting\/","title":{"rendered":"In apparent case of mistaken identity, Austin father caught in ICE sting"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\t\t<div id=\"slides-289239-182603856b5ffe2e4169ba64d5291476\" class=\"navis-slideshow\"><div id=\"289239-182603856b5ffe2e4169ba64d5291476-slide1\"><img data-lazy=\"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/MHN_Casos_08_jpg_800x1000_q100.jpg\" \/><h6 class=\"credit\">Martin do Nascimento \/ The Texas Tribune<\/h6><h6 class=\"permalink\"><a href=\"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2017\/02\/in-apparent-case-of-mistaken-identity-austin-father-caught-in-ice-sting\/#289239-182603856b5ffe2e4169ba64d5291476\/1\" class=\"slide-permalink\"><i class=\"icon-link\"><\/i> permalink<\/a><\/h6><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Irma Perez talks briefly on Sunday with her husband, Miguel Angel Torres, who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Also pictured are two of their three children -- Jamilet, 6 (center), and Dana, 8.<\/p><\/div><div id=\"289239-182603856b5ffe2e4169ba64d5291476-slide2\"><img data-lazy=\"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/MHN_Casos_10.jpg\" \/><h6 class=\"credit\">Martin do Nascimento \/ The Texas Tribune<\/h6><h6 class=\"permalink\"><a href=\"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2017\/02\/in-apparent-case-of-mistaken-identity-austin-father-caught-in-ice-sting\/#289239-182603856b5ffe2e4169ba64d5291476\/2\" class=\"slide-permalink\"><i class=\"icon-link\"><\/i> permalink<\/a><\/h6><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Dana Torres, 8, whose father, Miguel Angel Torres, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, leaving her mother to care for their three daughters.<\/p><\/div><div id=\"289239-182603856b5ffe2e4169ba64d5291476-slide3\"><img data-lazy=\"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/MHN_Casos_03.jpg\" \/><h6 class=\"credit\">Martin do Nascimento \/ The Texas Tribune<\/h6><h6 class=\"permalink\"><a href=\"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2017\/02\/in-apparent-case-of-mistaken-identity-austin-father-caught-in-ice-sting\/#289239-182603856b5ffe2e4169ba64d5291476\/3\" class=\"slide-permalink\"><i class=\"icon-link\"><\/i> permalink<\/a><\/h6><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Irma Perez's husband, Miguel Angel Torres, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, leaving Irma to care for their three daughters Melani, 12, Dana, 8, and Jamilet, 6.<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">With Donald Trump in the White House and rumors of widespread law enforcement raids percolating throughout her heavily immigrant community in North Austin, Irma Perez said she decided to help pay off her brother\u2019s unpaid tickets to help him<strong>\u00a0<\/strong>avoid any trouble.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">It would lead to\u00a0her own family\u2019s undoing.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">On Friday, Perez got a call from a neighbor with disastrous news: Her husband \u2014 not her brother \u2014 got picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after dropping off their three daughters at school in Pflugerville.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"module align-left half type-aside\">\n<h3>About this article<\/h3>\n<p>This article originally appeared in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.texastribune.org\/2017\/02\/14\/apparent-case-mistaken-identity-father-caught-ice-sting\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Texas Tribune<\/a>,\u00a0a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans and engages with them about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">What began as an apparent case of mistaken identity soon mushroomed into a full-blown family\u00a0crisis.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Their dreams of opening a food truck\u00a0in North Austin were dashed, and the family abandoned their home because it was now\u00a0on ICE\u2019s radar. On Monday, their girls, all U.S. citizens, were on their way to an immigrant detention facility in Pearsall, 150 miles from Austin, to see their father.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Miguel Angel Torres, who has lived in Austin for 14 years as an undocumented immigrant, worked as a cook at an Austin restaurant. Perez, his wife, is also undocumented, and so is her brother, Jose Manuel Perez.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Torres was one of an undetermined number of people detained in Texas in the past few days as part of national ICE operations that sent panic through immigrant communities.\u00a0In a written statement released to reporters Monday, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said that ICE, in \u201ctargeted\u201d operations last week, detained more than 680 individuals nationwide, 75 percent of whom had criminal records, including homicide and sexual abuse.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cThese operations targeted public safety threats, such as convicted criminal aliens and gang members, as well as those who have violated our immigration laws, including those who illegally re-entered the country after being removed and immigration fugitives ordered removed by federal immigration judges,\u201d Kelly said in the statement.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Torres&#8217; family wasn&#8217;t expecting him to get caught up in the mix.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">&#8220;[My husband] is a person who&#8217;s never done anything wrong and who complies with the law,&#8221; Perez said in her native Spanish. \u201cWe don\u2019t know why they detained him. He was driving his own car, not my brother\u2019s. He has nothing to do with my brother.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>On Friday morning, she said ICE officers wearing civilian clothes and driving an unmarked van detained Torres. She said he was on his way to deliver a box of Valentine\u2019s Day chocolates to their youngest daughter when he was stopped by agents who asked if he was Jose Manuel Perez \u2014 her brother.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">When he said he wasn\u2019t, Irma Perez said,\u00a0they forced him out of his car anyway and said, \u201cWell, we\u2019re detaining you.\u201d<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">She says four days before her husband was detained, she provided her own address instead of her brother\u2019s when submitting payment for her brother&#8217;s tickets\u00a0in Manor, a town in Travis County just northeast of Austin.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Lawyers working on her case believe ICE officers waited\u00a0outside the family&#8217;s home\u00a0thinking Torres was Irma Perez&#8217;s brother, who she said had been previously deported.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The Tribune reached out to ICE about the Torres case, and the agency said it\u00a0was still working on that request as of late Monday afternoon.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The ICE field office in San Antonio, which includes Austin, said Monday the agency detained 51 foreign nationals, 23 with criminal convictions, in the Austin area last week. The Mexican Consulate in Austin <a href=\"https:\/\/www.texastribune.org\/2017\/02\/11\/immigrants-picked-no-massive-raids-authorities-say\/\" target=\"_blank\">reported<\/a>\u00a044 Mexican citizens were picked up on Thursday and Friday in the Texas capital \u2014 a number that included a few whom Consul General Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez said happened to be \u201cin the wrong place at the wrong time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Mark Kinzler, an immigration lawyer who has helped Irma Perez, told The Texas Tribune that \u201call kind of things look wrong\u201d in the case against her husband.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cThey were looking, apparently, for someone else, and he wasn&#8217;t that person but then they took him anyway,\u201d Kinzler said.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">ICE has criticized immigrant advocates for spreading \u201cfalse\u201d and \u201cirresponsible\u201d reports of widespread raids in immigrant communities. But Kinzler said the Torres detention fits a pattern of increased enforcement that goes beyond immigrants with criminal records.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cEven though ICE&#8217;s PR campaign is that they&#8217;re picking up criminals and picking up people with prior deports, and I&#8217;m sure some of them are, it already seems like a lot of them are not those people,\u201d Kinzler said. \u201cPeople who work every day and try to take care of their families are getting swept up [too].\u201d<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">After the call from the neighbor alerting her to her husband\u2019s detention, Perez said she immediately began looking for him. She and her parents spent hours trying to track him down before she finally got a call from a toll-free number. It was her husband telling her to go pick up the car he left behind.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Ever since, Irma Perez said she\u00a0has remained close to a phone, waiting for more news from her husband.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">&#8220;I&#8217;m in shock because we always saw this in the news and it only happened to other people,&#8221; she said. &#8220;It had never happened in my family, and it feels awful because it changes your life.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Kinzler said they can expect at least two weeks of legal procedures to get Torres\u00a0out of detention. However, the timing depends on how full the court is.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\u201cBecause of the time he\u2019s been here, because he has a clean history and U.S. citizen kids, I will be able to get him out on a bond,\u201d Kinzler said.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Perez said her family will have to start rounding up money to free her husband and pay for attorney&#8217;s fees as he fights removal from the country.<\/p>\n<p>Immigration lawyers advised Perez and her family\u00a0to leave their home since ICE has their address on record. On Friday night, she moved her children and parents, who live with her, into her sister\u2019s house.<\/p>\n<p>Friday was the day Torres\u00a0was going to open his own food truck, Sabor del Rancho,\u00a0a dream his family said he\u2019d nourished for years. Now, the trailer sits empty on North Lamar.<\/p>\n<p>The family went to church Sunday and sang in the choir as they regularly do \u2014 without Torres, who was supposed to do his first solo performance at church.\u00a0After mass, Irma and her daughters returned to her sister\u2019s home. Sitting next to a candlelit altar with a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, they tearfully retold how quickly their lives had been turned upside down.<\/p>\n<p>Torres\u2019 12-year-old daughter Melani \u2014 who is part of a college readiness program and hopes to become a computer engineer one day \u2014 said her father would always drop her off and pick her up from school, so she was surprised when her mother picked her up on Friday.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I saw her with teary eyes, and she said, &#8216;You have no idea what happened,'&#8221; Melani said, speaking in both Spanish and English during the interview. &#8220;I thought she was kidding because my dad would never be caught by ICE, but then our neighbor confirmed the news, and my sisters and I started crying.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Undocumented immigrant Miguel Angel Torres was on his way to deliver Valentine&#8217;s Day chocolates to his daughter last week near Austin. Now, in what his family calls a case of mistaken identity, Torres is in an immigration lock-up near San Antonio.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":289245,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[140,3307,2260,116],"class_list":["post-289239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-border-and-immigration","tag-donald-trump","tag-texas","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}