By Kristina Cooke, Ted Hesson and Kevin Moffatt
ATLANTA/WASHINGTON/AURORA, Colorado (Reuters) – Venezuelan migrant Yessenia and her husband Maikol awoke last week to loud footsteps and knocks in their apartment building in Aurora, Colorado.
“Police, open the door. Policia, abra la puerta.”
Rumors had swirled for days that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would soon arrive to detain migrants at their building, which was thrust into the national spotlight after then-presidential candidate Donald Trump described it as controlled by Venezuelan gang members, an assertion city officials disputed.
As the knocks grew nearer, the couple became scared. They knew from civil rights briefings that ICE needs a judicial warrant to enter people’s homes without being invited in.
Still, the couple – who are in the process of applying for asylum – panicked and moved the couch in front of the door. A Reuters photographer was present as they stood in frozen silence in the living room as officers banged on the door and demanded they open it. A few minutes that felt like hours later, the officers moved on. Reuters is withholding the couple’s last names to protect their identity.
Trump, a Republican, kicked off a wide-ranging immigration crackdown after taking office on January 20, allocating federal resources to track down, arrest and deport immigrants without legal status. While the Trump administration has highlighted arrests of people charged or convicted of crimes, the aggressive enforcement has also swept in people with low-level offenses or no criminal record, U.S. citizen spouses and children, and even some with valid deportation protections.
The enforcement ramp-up has sparked fear in immigrant communities around the country, with some people avoiding unnecessary outings and keeping children home from school, according to interviews with migrants and advocates. Hospitals, schools and libraries have adopted new policies to limit cooperation with ICE.
Among those caught in the enforcement dragnet: Riyer, a 27-year-old Venezuelan man detained by ICE in the Atlanta area. He fought back tears as he worried about how his 22-year-old partner and their 5-month-old son would survive without him.
“I keep thinking of them alone,” he said while detained in Atlanta shortly before being transferred to Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia.
Riyer, who is in the process of applying for asylum, was taken into ICE custody after a traffic stop, he said, during which police found he was driving with a suspended license.
His partner, Itaily, was waiting for him to come home for dinner when he was picked up, she said. “It’s just the three of us, and he was the one who was working,” she said, while rocking their baby. “I have a lot of fear about what is going to happen.” ICE did not comment on Riyer’s case.
ICE RAMPS UP
The vast majority of people detained by ICE are referred by state and local police or are recent border crossers. The Trump administration has taken steps to make it easier to deputize local law enforcement to aid the deportation effort.
They have also pulled in other federal law enforcement agencies to help with immigration work.
Reuters reporters embedded with ICE near Atlanta and Washington, D.C., last week to see operations firsthand. ICE asked reporters not to approach the scene until the suspect was secured or photograph officers’ faces without their permission; further conditions were not attached to reporting.
In the early hours of February 5, about a dozen officers from ICE and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives met in a strip-mall parking lot south of Atlanta. The officers, in several unmarked cars, then waited in and around the trailer park in which their target lived for him to leave for work.
As the clock crept past his usual wake-up time as documented by the surveillance team, the Atlanta ICE field office deputy director, Kristen Sullivan, wondered whether or not they might have to come back another day. Door-knocking had not been particularly effective recently, she said, as she listened to updates from officers on her radio.
“It’s been in the media that we are out targeting individuals, and that’s definitely had an effect on the community,” she said.
Forty-five minutes later, their target – a 47-year-old Mexican man with three convictions in the U.S. for driving under the influence – left his trailer. He drove to a nearby gas station, where he was quickly boxed in by the agents’ cars. The ATF agents found a gun in his car, which they processed at the scene.
The man declined to comment. He was later taken to the Stewart Detention Center. Reuters was not able to establish his immigration history or if he had legal representation.
ICE stepped up arrests in late January, picking up 800-1,200 people per day nationwide, far above the 311-person daily average last year. Enforcement tapered off in February as detention space tightened and officers flown to target cities returned home, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
“There’s definitely been a pressure to increase our enforcement numbers and to have more teams and more officers out on the street,” said Sullivan, without specifying where the pressure was coming from.
“These cases take a lot of resources and a lot of time, look how many officers are sitting out here, and how much legwork went into this,” she added, in reference to the arrest of the Mexican man.
A day later in Rockville, Maryland, a short drive outside Washington, another ICE operation sought out immigrants charged or convicted of crimes with support from ATF and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
ICE officers began by scouting out a home just after 5 a.m. as freezing rain fell in a darkened suburban neighborhood.
After someone let them into the house, they took custody of a 68-year-old Filipino man who had entered the U.S. legally but violated the terms of his status when he pleaded guilty to sex abuse of two children, according to ICE and court documents. The man was a lawful permanent resident, said an attorney who represented him in the sex abuse case. “He is now facing deportation and has accepted responsibility for this case,” he said.
Later that morning, ICE officers entered an apartment building to look for a Honduran man they said was convicted of brandishing a machete in Virginia in November but said they were denied entry and told he was not home. The officers had an administrative warrant that authorizes the arrest of someone violating immigration laws, not a judicial warrant that would allow them to search a home, they said.
ICE’s operations tend to start off with a list of targets with criminal records but, since Trump took office, they are also increasingly picking up “collaterals” – people they encounter without legal status in the same area.
“Any individuals that we come across, we are going to check them and then bring them into custody,” said Nikita Baker, deputy field office director for ICE enforcement in Maryland.
CAUGHT IN THE DRAGNET
On January 26, Choe Blaiss Che had just returned from his Sunday morning shift as a food delivery driver when immigration agents showed up at his door in Arlington, Texas.
The 31-year-old Cameroonian man wasn’t worried – he had Temporary Protected Status, valid through June, and no criminal record. He asked to get his documents to show them, but the officers reached through the open door and pulled him out of his house before he could, he said. Under TPS, individuals are allowed to live and work in the U.S. for a set period.
At the field office, a supervisor noted that his TPS was valid and told him he would be released, he said. But as he waited for a taxi, another officer said he needed to stay longer for processing. He was not given further detail, Che said. Che overheard an officer saying they needed to hit arrest numbers for the day and to just send him to the detention center and figure it out there, he said in an interview.
ICE did not reply to a request for comment on Che’s assertion.
On the Sunday that Che was arrested, the agency sent out an email to staff telling them the White House was “demanding” 1,200 arrests, Reuters reported that week. Reuters could not establish if the arrest of Che related to that directive.
“It is egregious to detain someone with a valid TPS,” said Michelle Mendez, director of legal resources and training at the National Immigration Project, who is providing technical assistance with the case. Under U.S. law, an immigrant with TPS cannot be detained for being in the country illegally.
Che was released on February 5, after 10 days in a detention center. ICE did not provide him or Reuters with a reason for his arrest or his release. His lawyer, Eugene Delgado, said he plans to sue ICE for damages.
Baker said her Maryland ICE office was detaining more migrants with final deportation orders when they appeared for check-ins, a group Trump has prioritized but who may have clean criminal records, years of residency, and U.S. citizen spouses and children.
Final orders of removal are generally issued when judges rule against an immigrant in their deportation case. ICE has traditionally allowed some of those with such orders to remain free if they have pending appeals or are from countries to where they cannot be easily deported, as long as they attend regular check-ins. But those once-routine visits have become increasingly fraught for immigrants.
Jose, a Salvadoran man who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in 2016, had a final order of removal after his asylum claim was denied, as did his 16-year-old son.
Jose, who declined to give his last name, received a text message on January 29 telling him to present to the ICE office in Austin, Texas, with his son on February 4.
The two were taken into custody at the check-in and deported to El Salvador the following day in the early morning hours. His wife and 6-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, remain in Texas.
The teenager needed a jaw surgery due to a debilitating condition following a childhood motorbike accident and his attorney tried to request an emergency deportation reprieve but said ICE rejected the filing three times.
Jose, a former police officer who said he received death threats in El Salvador, had never been charged with a crime in the U.S. or missed an ICE appointment, the attorney said.
ICE did not reply to a request for comment on Jose’s case.
Speaking from his brother’s house in San Salvador, Jose sobbed as he recounted trying to explain the deportation to his son, who has few memories of El Salvador.
His son was devastated at being separated from his mother and brother and didn’t understand why the U.S. government was not letting him finish high school or have the surgery.
“He said, ‘Papi, if only you had a magic wand and you could just send us back there,'” Jose recounted.
(Reporting by Kristina Cooke in Atlanta, Ted Hesson in Washington and Kevin Mohatt in Aurora; Editing by Mary Milliken and Rosalba O’Brien)
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