{"id":561324,"date":"2018-04-15T20:00:43","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T02:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=561324"},"modified":"2018-04-16T09:23:54","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:23:54","slug":"in-pennsylvania-its-open-season-on-undocumented-immigrants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2018\/04\/in-pennsylvania-its-open-season-on-undocumented-immigrants\/","title":{"rendered":"In Pennsylvania, it&#8217;s open season on undocumented immigrants"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_561342\"  class=\"wp-caption module image alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 771px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-561342\" src=\"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/20180412-ice-pa-franco-wedding-3x2-771x514.jpg\" alt=\"Anne and Ludvin Franco\" width=\"771\" height=\"514\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/20180412-ice-pa-franco-wedding-3x2-771x514.jpg 771w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/20180412-ice-pa-franco-wedding-3x2-336x224.jpg 336w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/20180412-ice-pa-franco-wedding-3x2-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/20180412-ice-pa-franco-wedding-3x2-1170x780.jpg 1170w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/20180412-ice-pa-franco-wedding-3x2.jpg 2000w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 771px) 100vw, 771px\" \/><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Courtesy of Anne Franco<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Anne Franco and her husband, Ludvin Franco, on their wedding day.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>QUAKERTOWN, PA \u2014 From the time they first flirted at a party, Anne and Ludvin Franco were inseparable. It did not matter that Anne, a waitress, was Pennsylvania Dutch going back generations, while Ludvin, a cook, had grown up in the scrublands of eastern Guatemala.<\/p>\n<p>It also did not matter to Anne or her open-armed family that Lulu, as they called him, was undocumented. At their wedding in 2013, the Americans and the Guatemalans danced the night away with Latin DJs imported from Queens.<\/p>\n<p>On lawyers\u2019 advice, the Francos waited to start legalizing his status through their marriage until late 2016, after he had lived a productive, crime-free decade in the United States. They never anticipated that President Trump\u2019s promised immigration crackdown would be so swift, and so ruthless in their region.<\/p>\n<p>By last spring, when Pennsylvania roads were starting to feel like a dragnet for immigrants without papers, Ludvin Franco had mostly stopped getting behind the wheel of a car. Often he relied on his wife to drive him, their twin toddlers buckled into the backseat. But the night his soccer team faced a rival in the semifinals of an indoor league, his wife was in the queasy first trimester of a second pregnancy. He headed out alone.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"module align-left half type-aside\">\n<h3>About this article<\/h3>\n<p>This article comes from\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.propublica.org\/article\/pennsylvania-ice-undocumented-immigrants-immigration-enforcement\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ProPublica<\/a>, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom.\u00a0Sign up for their\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.propublica.org\/forms\/newsletter_daily_email\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p>As Franco drove north on Route 309, a Hyundai pulled out of Bubba\u2019s Pot Belly Stove Restaurant and crossed into his lane. He swerved to avoid hitting it, he later said, but failed. Nobody was injured. Franco got a couple of tickets.<\/p>\n<p>A few weeks later, as Franco was leaving for work at dawn, lights flashed. Men in police vests approached: federal agents from the ICE section that normally pursues violent criminals. They knew about the crash.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOh, God,\u201d Franco thought. \u201cI\u2019m done.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By October, when his wife gave birth to their baby girl at an Allentown hospital, Franco had already been deported. He was 3,200 miles away, forced to watch the delivery on the tiny screen of his cellphone from his mother\u2019s sweltering house in Zacapa, Guatemala.<\/p>\n<p>Since Trump took office, deportation officers have been unshackled, as the White House describes it, from an Obama-era mandate to focus limited enforcement resources on deporting immigrants with serious criminal convictions. Across the country, they have been rounding up people like Franco who have sunk roots in this country, living for years, if not decades, with little fear of apprehension.<\/p>\n<p>Nowhere, however, have federal agents more aggressively embraced their newfound freedom than in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Delaware, an investigation by ProPublica and the Philadelphia Inquirer found.<\/p>\n<p>In 2017, the Philadelphia office of ICE, with agents fanning out into communities across its three-state region, arrested more undocumented immigrants without criminal convictions than any of the 23 other ICE offices in the country.\u00a0This is especially striking given that Pennsylvania\u2019s undocumented population ranks 16th\u00a0in the country, with West Virginia\u2019s and Delaware\u2019s far behind that.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The reception\u00a0has been decidedly mixed. In Pennsylvania, as across the country, many officials see undocumented immigrants as lawbreakers who burden the American economy, and they heartily applaud the way in which deportation officers here have worked hard to turn Trump\u2019s campaign pledge of mass deportations into a reality.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cObviously those numbers reflect that ICE in Pennsylvania is doing their job; they\u2019re doing the work they\u2019re supposed to do,\u201d said U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta, a Republican known for a hard line against illegal immigration. \u201cPeople here in Pennsylvania realize illegal immigration is a problem and it\u2019s not only a threat to our national security, but it\u2019s also a threat to families\u2019 jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At the same time, with 11 million undocumented immigrants nationwide, the government has to choose whom to pursue. And as deportation officers increasingly venture outside jails and prisons \u2014 where the majority of their arrests still occur \u2014 they are making choices that can seem random, unfair or sometimes unlawful, not only to immigrants but also to some officials inside the immigration system.<\/p>\n<p>Many of the immigrants arrested in this region last year were simply hapless: They lived in buildings or worked in restaurants or traveled on rural roads that ICE was staking out. They were mushroom pickers in vans that got pulled over without cause; dishwashers in pizzerias that got raided without warrants; Latino men who loosely resembled other Latino men who were ostensibly ICE\u2019s intended targets.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAt-large\u201d arrests like theirs are the ones that terrify the immigrant community, break up families, disrupt workplaces, and drive people further into the shadows. And it is in carrying out these kinds of arrests that Philadelphia ICE appears to be an outlier, or perhaps, the statistics suggest, a harbinger.<\/p>\n<p>For this series, reporters obtained and analyzed unpublished data showing monthly at-large arrests in each of ICE\u2019s 24 regional offices in 2017. The analysis showed a large majority \u2014 64 percent \u2014 of the immigrants arrested in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Delaware had no criminal convictions. That compares with a minority \u2014 38 percent \u2014 in the country as a whole, though the national percentage trended upward over the course of last year.<\/p>\n<p>To understand these arrests and their effects, reporters set out to track down as many regional cases as possible in a system that is notoriously opaque. There are no public records akin to police blotters in criminal cases. The names of ICE arrestees, and the circumstances of their arrests, are not released. Court records, too, are confidential, purportedly to protect immigrants\u2019 privacy, though the policy protects the immigration system from scrutiny, too.<\/p>\n<p>Reporters ended up examining more than 175 immigration arrests, which occurred\u00a0during three large, multiday enforcement operations last winter, spring and fall as well as during routine, daily apprehensions.<\/p>\n<p>Together, these cases paint the picture of an ICE region emboldened by a new commander-in-chief to disregard previous norms that distinguished among undocumented immigrants based on their family ties, work records, and conduct in this country. They reflect an organization that valued high arrest numbers and sometimes skirted the law, with little accountability in a system that rarely scrutinizes arrests.<\/p>\n<p>Reporters found that ICE officers under the jurisdiction of the Philadelphia regional office:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Routinely swept up immigrants they encountered by chance when they set out to arrest somebody else, with what they called \u201ccollateral\u201d arrests becoming the mainstay of their crackdown.<\/li>\n<li>Informally expanded their definition of \u201ccriminal alien\u201d to include immigrants who got traffic tickets or committed minor infractions like loitering.<\/li>\n<li>Revived cases that they previously disregarded, using addresses in their database to pick up immigrants they had once deemed harmless, sometimes sending carloads of armed officers to arrest them.<\/li>\n<li>Took advantage of state and local officials\u2019 willingness to conduct <a href=\"https:\/\/www.propublica.org\/article\/pennsylvania-immigration-ice-crackdown-cops-free-for-all\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">their own informal immigration investigations<\/a>, call ICE and detain immigrants for hours until federal agents arrived \u2014 despite the questionable legality of these practices.<\/li>\n<li>Occasionally stepped over the legal line themselves, according to interviews, sworn affidavits and court filings, by trespassing, conducting warrantless searches, engaging in racial profiling, fabricating evidence and even soliciting a bribe.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In a statement, agency officials said: \u201cICE and its employees have been given the honor of a special public trust. In keeping with this trust, ICE\u2019s enforcement activities are conducted with integrity and professionalism.\u2019\u2019 They added: \u201cICE conducts targeted immigration enforcement in compliance with federal law and agency policy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>All told, the crackdown bombarded a system already overwhelmed. There were 11,643 cases pending in Pennsylvania\u2019s immigration courts on March 1 \u2014 a 62 percent increase over the end of fiscal 2016.<\/p>\n<p>Immigration judges staggered under their growing caseloads. After his retirement in December, Walter A. Durling, a veteran immigration judge in York who took a relatively hard line on the bench, questioned the wisdom \u2014 and cost-effectiveness \u2014 of an approach that no longer puts \u201cmore serious aliens\u201d first.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhy take into custody an individual who has been here for 15 to 20 years, has U.S. children, and one arrest for harassment, public intoxication or some such piddling infraction?\u201d he asked. \u201cOr aliens with no arrest record but who were arrested by ICE looking for someone else?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In 2016, the government would have considered it a waste of limited resources to track down, arrest, detain and deport a taxpaying family man like Ludvin Franco just because a traffic accident brought him to its attention.<\/p>\n<p>The Springfield Township Police Department in Bucks County, where Franco\u2019s accident occurred, did not report him to ICE, Chief Michael A. McDonald said. Rather, it was ICE that called Springfield, seeking to confirm that citations had been issued to Franco for careless driving and driving without a license.<\/p>\n<p>Deportation officers also took the additional step of interviewing the driver and passenger of the other car.<\/p>\n<p>That interview provided a dollop of innuendo to the deportation officers\u2019 arrest report. As if to bolster their case that Franco warranted removal, the officers wrote that the driver\u2019s wife suffered a stroke approximately two weeks after the accident.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was unknown if this traffic accident caused his wife\u2019s stroke,\u201d the report said.<\/p>\n<p>But Lisa Knedler, the driver\u2019s wife, told reporters that her doctor did not think her seizure, as she called it, was in any way related to the crash, in which she was a passenger.<\/p>\n<p>She added that she was nonetheless glad Franco had been deported.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLet\u2019s hope he doesn\u2019t come back,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<h3>Came out swinging<\/h3>\n<p>Shortly after his inauguration, President Trump issued an executive order called \u201cEnhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States\u201d that greatly expanded the population of undocumented immigrants who could be deported.<\/p>\n<p>While immigrants with serious criminal convictions would still \u201ccome first,\u201d any unauthorized immigrant would become fair game, Thomas Homan, acting director of ICE, told Congress: \u201cIf you\u2019re in this country illegally and you committed a crime by entering this country,\u201d he said, \u201cyou should look over your shoulder.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Still, in their first big enforcement operations under the new rules, ICE offices in Los Angeles and New York effectively operated under the old rules. L.A. arrested 161 immigrants over five days, 94 percent of whom had criminal convictions, and New York arrested 41 over three days, 93 percent with convictions.<\/p>\n<p>Philadelphia\u2019s ICE office, in contrast, came out of the gates swinging. In an \u201cops plan\u201d submitted to Washington, it proposed a 12-day arrest blitz named Operation Cross Check that would take aim at 255 targets, 70 percent of them \u201ccriminal aliens,\u201d according to agency e-mails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.<\/p>\n<p>By the 12th day, agents had located only 92 of their intended targets but made up almost all the difference by arresting other immigrants they encountered along the way. In the end, they rounded up 248 people; only 35 percent had a conviction record.<\/p>\n<p>And a pattern was established. By year\u2019s end, Philadelphia ICE would arrest three times as many \u201cnoncriminal immigration violators,\u201d in the agency\u2019s term, as either Los Angeles or New York.<\/p>\n<p>In a statement, ICE noted that \u201cimmigration violators without criminal convictions include aliens who have been charged but not convicted with crimes, immigration fugitives, and repeat border crossers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Each ICE field office has its own culture, and sometimes its own policies and procedures. Each office, too, has a different regional context, some working in urban centers under the watchful eye of established immigrant communities, others in more rural or suburban areas newly grappling with the immigration issue.<\/p>\n<p>Philadelphia ICE\u2019s region runs the gamut. It faces resistance in Pittsburgh and especially in Philadelphia, where most of the region\u2019s undocumented immigrants live. But it has found allies in its rural and Rust Belt zones, where anti-immigrant sentiment runs hotter and where some local economies benefit from federal immigration detention contracts. (ICE paid York County $19.65 million in fiscal 2017 to house immigrant detainees in its prison.)<\/p>\n<p>Getting direct insight into the Philadelphia ICE office itself has been difficult. The agency denied reporters\u2019 requests to interview those who have run the office during the Trump administration. The National ICE Council, which represents 7,600 agency employees, declined to talk. Individual deportation officers, reached on their personal phones, declined too.<\/p>\n<p>As best as could be determined, behind the office\u2019s aggressive immigration enforcement lies some synergy of national, state, local and ICE office politics. But the critical context is clearly an antagonistic relationship between ICE and the city of Philadelphia that predates the Trump administration.<\/p>\n<p>Like other major cities, Philadelphia does not let ICE agents into its jails and declines to provide ICE advance notice of a suspect\u2019s or inmate\u2019s release without a judicial warrant.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSome jurisdictions shut the door in our face: San Francisco was one, Philly was another,\u201d said Sarah Salda\u00f1a, ICE\u2019s national director for Obama\u2019s two final years.<\/p>\n<p>This posture made it harder for Philadelphia\u2019s Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, to produce high arrest numbers when the emphasis was on criminals. And high arrest numbers are the yardstick of ICE\u2019s success, given that Congress judges the agency by how many detention beds it fills, Salda\u00f1a said.<\/p>\n<p>Catherine Schack, who retired last year as an ICE lawyer in Philadelphia, said she instantly perceived a tougher mind-set there when she transferred from the Los Angeles office during the Obama era.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe first thing I noticed was, \u2018Holy mackerel, this town is supposed to be the City of Brotherly Love? Good grief,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cWhat I always saw in Philly was distinctly, \u2018We need to bump up numbers.\u2019 But after Trump took over, it was like somebody gave them an injection of testosterone. It was ERO on steroids.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the last year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has singled out Philadelphia for special denunciation as a so-called sanctuary city, and Philadelphia has sued Sessions over his attempt to withhold federal grant money in retribution.<\/p>\n<p>In response to questions about the Philadelphia ICE office\u2019s high volume of noncriminal arrests, the agency portrayed the city itself as partly responsible.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen cities do not honor ICE detainers, ICE officers are required to arrest aliens at large and may be more likely to encounter other removable aliens,\u201d said Jennifer D. Elzea, a spokeswoman for the agency.<\/p>\n<p>Still, noncriminal arrests did not soar equivalently in other sanctuary cities last year. A third of the arrests in the San Francisco ICE region, for instance, were immigrants without criminal convictions, compared with 64 percent for Philadelphia.<\/p>\n<p>Also, only 33 of 248 arrests in Philadelphia ICE\u2019s first big operation last year took place in Philadelphia proper, an analysis of internal records shows. Most of the collateral arrests, it appears, did not in fact result from searches for criminal immigrants whom the City of Philadelphia declined to hand over.<\/p>\n<h3>Defenseless<\/h3>\n<p>On a cold, dark morning early last year, Guillermo Peralta huddled in the entryway of a small, aluminum-sided apartment house on a modest residential street in York Springs. He was waiting for a ride to his job, packing eggs on a farm.<\/p>\n<p>Peralta is short and stout, with a shy, ready smile for whomever crosses his path.<\/p>\n<p>That morning, it was two federal agents named Joe Vankos and Chad Noel. They were on a mission to capture a 29-year-old convicted cocaine dealer from Mexico.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, they stumbled across and arrested Peralta. Though regional ICE agents had picked up bystanders in the past, they were not supposed to. But in a new era where every undocumented immigrant is a potential target, Peralta was one of the first \u201ccollaterals\u201d to be taken into custody. And one of the most defenseless.<\/p>\n<p>It should have been immediately apparent that Peralta, who has difficulty speaking, had serious cognitive disabilities. A neuropsychologist who later examined him wrote in an assessment for the court that Peralta cannot read, write or identify colors and that he is not competent to give informed consent \u201cor to understand any but the simplest instructions, requests or commands.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Yet ICE maintained in its arrest report that Peralta not only willfully engaged with Vankos but confessed his undocumented status, stated he was 46, and claimed he had a child in Florida.<\/p>\n<p>Peralta, however, is childless and does not know his age, his pro bono lawyer, Craig Shagin, said. He was abandoned as a youth in rural Pennsylvania and has for decades made ends meet as an apple picker, pumpkin harvester and construction worker in the Gettysburg area.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI don\u2019t think he knows what deportation is, what it is to be a national or a citizen of a place,\u201d said Shagin. \u201cSo how was he answering the ICE officers\u2019 questions? Either they made it up or maybe he was just saying, \u2018<em>S\u00ed,<\/em>\u2019 to everything they asked. It\u2019s easy to do when somebody has a gun and handcuffs in front of you.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>While Shagin is trying to get Peralta\u2019s arrest thrown out, ICE is rarely willing to let anybody go without a fight. Prosecutorial discretion, encouraged during the Obama years partly as a way to show leniency where merited, has been all but eliminated.<\/p>\n<p>In Peralta\u2019s case, ICE lawyers argued that \u201ceven diminished intelligence does not necessarily mean that the respondent is incompetent.\u201d Still, the government doesn\u2019t seem in a terrible hurry to deport him; the next hearing in his case is not until January 2020.<\/p>\n<p>After two months behind bars, Peralta was granted bail and returned to his home: a narrow room in a basement apartment, outfitted with a twin bed and a makeshift shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Visited there by a reporter, he was welcoming but unable to respond to even rudimentary questions.<\/p>\n<p>Asked his birth date, he said, \u201cOne, two.\u201d Asked his address, he answered in halting Spanish, \u201cI just live here.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>Rural impact<\/h3>\n<p>On another morning last winter, also in the darkness before dawn, a van made its way through Reading, stopping every few blocks to pick up the Latino immigrants heading to work at a mushroom farm in Southeastern Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n<p>After the last of 14 workers had boarded, the red and blue lights of a patrol car flashed behind them. A man wearing a police vest asked the driver for his license and registration, as if he were a local law enforcement officer. But he was with ICE.<\/p>\n<p>ICE says in its press releases that it does not do indiscriminate sweeps and that reports of such sweeps are \u201cfalse, dangerous and irresponsible.\u201d While \u201cadditional suspects\u201d are frequently encountered and arrested, its enforcement operations are targeted, it says.<\/p>\n<p>But several times last year, federal immigration agents pulled over full vanloads of Hispanic workers in rural Pennsylvania without justification, immigrant advocates say.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNobody in that van was a target,\u201d said Bridget Cambria, the driver\u2019s lawyer. \u201cIt was not a proper stop.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The driver and six passengers were arrested. Within minutes an ICE van arrived to cart them away.<\/p>\n<p>Pennsylvania is the top mushroom producer in the country, and the industry is dependent on Mexican and Central American laborers. Pickers work long, hard days on farms that stink of steaming compost. Despite Trump\u2019s assertions that such immigrants are stealing jobs, few Americans are willing to do that kind of labor, farm owners say.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat argument doesn\u2019t hold any water in agriculture,\u201d said Mark O\u2019Neill, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau.<\/p>\n<p>The raid on the van, like subsequent arrests in mushroom country, frightened the mushroom pickers, their supervisor said in an interview. Two dozen quit, and they were hard to replace, forcing others to work even longer shifts.<\/p>\n<p>There and at neighboring farms, workers were offered referral bonuses for new hires. Posters said, \u201cAny employee referring a new employee will receive a $150 bonus AFTER the new employee completes their 90-day probationary period.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In April, ICE moved on to another industry in rural Pennsylvania. Sweeping past \u201cNo Trespassing\u201d signs, five officers stormed a poultry transport company and blocked the exits with their vehicles. They said they were searching for a man named Alix who worked at a company called MainJoy Unlimited. The agents were told: This is not MainJoy, and nobody named Alix works here.<\/p>\n<p>So the officers turned their attention to those who did work there, according to interviews with the workers and a company spokesperson. They lined up all the Latino employees \u2014 seven chicken catchers \u2014 with their faces against a wall. They made no move against some 14 non-Latinos standing nearby; instead they asked the coworkers to lead officers to any other Hispanic employees on the premises. (There were none.)<\/p>\n<p>Under duress, the chicken catchers admitted they were undocumented. And off they went to jail.<\/p>\n<p>Afterward, Luke Brubaker, a prominent dairy farmer from their region, mentioned the poultry transport raid in a meeting between Trump and agriculture-industry representatives. The president maintained that his immigration crackdown was not aimed at their farms, but Brubaker said he told the president that ICE had nonetheless been arresting essential workers in Pennsylvania agriculture.<\/p>\n<p>While the poultry workers were detained, their company hired legal workers in their stead. But chicken catching is grueling, filthy work inside vast, sweltering coops where dust, feathers, and the stench of feces clog the air.<\/p>\n<p>The new workers didn\u2019t last more than an hour.<\/p>\n<h3>Held without warrants<\/h3>\n<p>Given what ICE\u2019s Philadelphia field office saw as the City of Philadelphia\u2019s recalcitrance, it looked elsewhere for assistance.<\/p>\n<p>Early last year, it reached out to local law enforcement leaders in a concerted effort to make them \u201cforce multipliers,\u201d emails obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in Pennsylvania show.\u00a0 No departments signed formal agreements with ICE, but they understood that a new day had dawned.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSome of the state troopers had incidents in which they were quite shocked when they called ICE and they got an immediate response,\u201d said Thomas L. Day Jr., the police chief in Mount Holly Springs, Cumberland County.<\/p>\n<p>In their eagerness to collaborate, some state troopers and local police officers took it upon themselves to question drivers and passengers about their immigration status during traffic stops, to make \u201ccourtesy calls\u201d to ICE after car accidents, and to detain immigrants without warrants until ICE arrived for the handoff, which sometimes took hours.<\/p>\n<p>Traffic cops were not the only locals willing to give ICE an assist. Early last year, a magisterial district judge in Camp Hill preempted the wedding of a Tajik couple by calling ICE on the groom and his best man, who were led away in handcuffs.<\/p>\n<p>The judge, Elizabeth Beckley, also called ICE after Alexander Curtis Parker and Krisha Amber Schmick showed up at her courthouse last May.<\/p>\n<p>Sweethearts since high school, they had always dreamed of a glamorous wedding venue, but, impatient to tie the knot, they settled on District Court 09-1-02, a squat, uninspired structure with mirrored windows, sandwiched between a car wash and a paint store.<\/p>\n<p>When the constable announced he would be detaining Parker for ICE, the couple was stunned. Though born in Guatemala, Parker, 21, had been adopted by American parents when he was 8 months old. At that moment, he was technically undocumented, with his green-card renewal being processed. But he does not speak Spanish or consider himself an immigrant, much less a deportable one.<\/p>\n<p>Philadelphia ICE was in the midst of its second big enforcement operation of 2017, and federal agents rushed to the courthouse with their biometric identification device. At about the time Parker had hoped to be slipping a ring onto his wife\u2019s finger, he was reluctantly putting his own hand into a fingerprint machine.<\/p>\n<p>But in this case, as rarely happened last year, ICE backed off. The judge, who did not respond to calls, emails or visits to her courthouse, apologized and offered to proceed with the nuptials. Having already paid the $45 fee, Parker and Schmick uncomfortably allowed the judge to marry them, and celebrated afterward at a LongHorn Steakhouse.<\/p>\n<p>A few months later, expecting a child, the Parkers decided to put the whole unsettling experience behind them. They left Pennsylvania and moved to Kissimmee, Fla., where Parker said he feels \u201csafer from people like the judge that would try to do anything to have me deported.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>Rounding up traffic violators<\/h3>\n<p>In press releases about its enforcement operations, ICE highlights \u2014 without naming \u2014 those with the worst criminal records, portraying its crackdowns as public safety measures intended to rid the country of the \u201cbad hombres\u201d Trump excoriated in his campaign speeches. Operation Cross Check, for instance, yielded \u201ca 34-year-old male citizen of Guatemala with criminal convictions for sexual abuse of a minor.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But most immigration arrestees with criminal records did not commit crimes against children or crimes of violence; the most common single offense in Operation Cross Check was driving under the influence. And in contrast with previous years, ICE rounded up new categories of offenders.<\/p>\n<p>Rather than focusing solely on those convicted of crimes, ICE\u2019s Philadelphia office apprehended immigrants who had been arrested for criminal offenses but had not yet had their day in court.<\/p>\n<p>Regional officers also arrested immigrants with little prospect of deportation because their homelands habitually refuse to accept deportees. Last winter, they picked up Cho Van Le, a 65-year-old Vietnamese refugee who was serving one year of house arrest for helping his nephew run a marijuana grow house in Berks County. Because Le entered the United States before diplomatic relations resumed with Vietnam in 1995, he cannot be repatriated under an agreement between the two countries.<\/p>\n<p>Nonetheless, he has been held for 14 months in immigration custody, longer than his criminal sentence, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars to taxpayers. And he is not alone. Vietnamese refugees\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.advancingjustice-la.org\/sites\/default\/files\/Habeaus-Petition-Complaint-Vietnamese-Detainees.pdf?eType=EmailBlastContent&amp;eId=75d6d364-95f2-409d-b4c7-ef0ec1ff1768\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit<\/a>\u00a0in February claiming that dozens like Le have been picked up over the last year and are being subjected to prolonged and pointless detention.<\/p>\n<p>ICE officers in Pennsylvania also aggressively pursued immigrants for traffic violations, or infractions too minor to qualify as misdemeanors, or offenses both minor and dated.<\/p>\n<p>One Mexican man who lived in York was interviewed by immigration agents during the George W. Bush administration after he was sentenced to a weekend in jail for his third driving-without-a-license offense. They let him go, and left him alone. For a decade.<\/p>\n<p>Early one morning last February, however, four armed agents from ICE\u2019s violent criminal alien section seized the man, now 42, as he left his house. He spent three weeks behind bars, until he scrounged together $10,000 for bail.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cICE had his address for 10 years and he didn\u2019t even bother to move,\u201d said his lawyer, Stephen Converse. \u201cThis is a flight risk?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As with that man, ICE Philadelphia began making muscular shows of force to take into custody people who\u2019d been checking in regularly with immigration authorities for years.<\/p>\n<p>Almost from the day that Adriz Iboy de Chich\u00e9, 23, crossed the border into Texas in 2015, with her baby, Sheynnon, in a sling on her back, ICE knew precisely where to find her: at a Doylestown apartment complex that is home to scores of other undocumented Guatemalan immigrants.<\/p>\n<p>After Trump was elected, Chich\u00e9 was ordered to wear an electronic monitor, and relinquish her passport and her son\u2019s. Knowing their days in the U.S. were numbered, she tried to arrange for a departure on her own terms.<\/p>\n<p>On July 25, however, as she, her son, and her husband settled into her sister\u2019s car for their biweekly drive to the ICE office in Philadelphia, they were surrounded. One ICE officer removed the keys from the ignition, and the others pushed the Chich\u00e9s onto the ground to be handcuffed. Inside the car, 2-year-old Sheynnon wailed.<\/p>\n<h3>On the run<\/h3>\n<p>Over the course of 2017, across Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Delaware, immigrants seemed to vanish into thin air. Dishes piled up in the kitchens of Mexican restaurants, apples rotted on orchard grounds, stables went un-mucked.<\/p>\n<p>One restaurant owner in Bucks County likened their dizzyingly abrupt disappearance to the sudden, Rapture-like departure of a sliver of the population on the television show\u00a0\u201cThe Leftovers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And indeed, the leftovers felt the absences achingly.<\/p>\n<p>For weeks after her husband\u2019s apprehension last spring, Anne Franco would wake up without remembering, reach over to his side of the bed and confront the emptiness anew.<\/p>\n<p>She took the twins, Maximiliano and Javier, to visit their father at the York prison. \u201cPapa, papa!\u201d they shouted through the plastic partition, behind which Franco sat in an orange jumpsuit, trying to hide his shame.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHe just kept telling me, through that phone, \u2018I\u2019m sorry,\u2019 \u201d\u00a0 his wife said.<\/p>\n<p>ICE refused him bond, calling him a potential menace to public safety because of \u201cyour Careless Driving and Driving without a License convictions.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After her husband\u2019s deportation, Anne Franco, seven months pregnant, took the twins to Guatemala. All three of them found it hard to adjust to the intense heat, the winding drives behind exhaust-belching trucks, and the lack of running water. Returning to Pennsylvania, the boys had diarrhea for a month, and Ludvin Franco felt as if his homeland had made them sick.<\/p>\n<p>Once their daughter, Valentina, was born, Ludvin knew he had to take some kind of action to reunite with his family. And while his wife set about researching third-country options \u2014 Canada? Costa Rica? \u2014 Ludvin could think of only one solution.<\/p>\n<p>At 4:30 one morning in mid-March, Anne was fast asleep in Quakertown when her phone startled her awake. It was Ludvin, hiding in a tree somewhere in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. He had decided to take the risk of one more journey north, and it had been rough. He was jailed in Mexico for a week, and later robbed at machete point after his release. Now, having made it across the border, he had the Border Patrol on his tail.<\/p>\n<p>He was cold, and he was hungry, and he was thirsty, he whispered to his wife. And then the call cut off.<\/p>\n<p>For four days, Anne Franco heard nothing further. Calm and even-keeled through much of their ordeal, she finally got scared, imagining him lost in the desert.<\/p>\n<p>But he had been captured. And almost as soon as he surfaced and made contact, he was sent by plane back to Guatemala yet again.<\/p>\n<p>And then, as fate and bureaucracy would have it, Anne got a letter granting the initial interview to get her husband legalized through their marriage. It was 16 months after they first applied &#8212; and one president, and car crash, and deportation too late.<script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"http:\/\/pixel.propublica.org\/pixel.js\" async><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ICE\u2019s Philadelphia office is fanning out into communities across its three-state region and making more arrests of immigrants without criminal convictions than anywhere else in America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":561342,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[140,116],"class_list":["post-561324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-border-and-immigration","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561324","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=561324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/561342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=561324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=561324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=561324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}