U.S.
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Just after dawn, a line of
officers marched to the gate outside Fidel Delgado’s home here with guns
drawn, one holding a rifle. Mr. Delgado emerged barechested from his
home and with a look of confusion.
“¿Qué necesita?” he asked: What do you need?
About 20 minutes later and 10 miles away,
Anselmo Morán Lucero sensed exactly why officers had come. He spotted
them as he was returning from a night out, and turned his truck around.
But an unmarked S.U.V. pulled in front of him and another flashed its
lights behind him, blocking his escape.
They asked his name. They asked if he knew why he was being arrested. Mr. Lucero nodded.
Every day around the United States, from before
sunrise until late into the night, people like Mr. Delgado and Mr.
Lucero are being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, the front-line soldiers in President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Fidel Delgado is led away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times
More than 65,000 people have been arrested by
the agency since President Trump took office, a nearly 40 percent
increase over the same period last year and as sure a sign as any that
the United States is a tougher place today to be an undocumented
immigrant.
But I.C.E. is in some ways operating in enemy
territory in California, home to more than two million undocumented
immigrants and hostile to the idea of mass deportations. Because local
law enforcement often will not turn over undocumented immigrants in
their custody, I.C.E. must make most of their arrests at homes, at
workplaces and out on the street, which is more complicated than simply
picking people up from jails — and potentially more dangerous.
So when a team of immigration agents gathered
at 4:30 on one already warm morning in June, their chief, David Marin,
warned them to stay away from any sign of danger.
After going over notes on each of the men they
were after, the team pulled off in their unmarked S.U.V.s. Eight hours
later, five men would be in custody, awaiting the start of deportation
proceedings.
The New York Times followed the team for a day
as it navigated the streets and politics of Southern California, and
spoke with some of the men they arrested and the families they may soon
be leaving behind.
An Unplanned Arrest
As the sun crept above the horizon, the
officers gathered on a hill just a few yards away from Mr. Delgado’s
home. But it was not Mr. Delgado they had come for; it was his son
Mariano.
Mariano Delgado, 24, had returned to Mexico in
2011 after he was convicted of drunken driving. Since illegally
re-entering the United States, he has been arrested four times for
assault with a deadly weapon.
Immigrants like him are called “criminal
aliens,” and there are so many of them in Southern California that Mr.
Marin says it is effectively impossible to go after anyone else. But
under President Trump, agents are encouraged to also arrest undocumented
immigrants without serious criminal records, a break from the Obama
administration’s policy of mostly leaving those immigrants alone.
So here and across the country, agents now make
more “collateral” arrests — undocumented people they come across while
looking for someone else. That was about to happen.
When officers, guns out, approached the
chain-link fence surrounding the home, the dogs began barking loudly,
joining the squawking chickens. Fidel Delgado emerged.
The elder Mr. Delgado, 46, and his wife, María
Rocha, told the officers that their son had moved to Texas months ago.
They readily admitted to being in the country illegally, but added that
they work. Their youngest son, 16, is an American-born citizen. When the
agents shook him out of bed, he began to sob.
After taking Fidel Delgado’s fingerprints, they
ran them through a database. Within minutes, they learned that he had
once crossed the border illegally, twice in the same day, and had been
sent back to Mexico.
A couple of officers debated what to do: Should
they take both parents and call Child Protective Services for the boy?
Did they believe that Mariano Delgado was no longer living there, even
though they thought he was home as recently as the week before?
“If he doesn’t give up the son, we’re going to take him,” one officer said.
They left the wife behind and led Mr. Delgado to a van, where he was soon shackled. The handcuffs would leave marks.
Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times
Later that morning, Ms. Rocha, 50, leaned against the chain-link fence that surrounds their home, bleary-eyed and in shock.
“My husband, they had no reason to take him,” she said. “They weren’t searching for him.”
The family has lived in the three-bedroom white
house in a blue-collar, semirural enclave of Riverside for three years,
paying $1,300 a month in rent. Ms. Rocha, who cleans offices in nearby
Corona, a more upscale community, said she brings home about $1,200 a
month. Her husband, who milks cows at a dairy, earns about $12 an hour.
The couple married in Mexico 24 years ago, just
before heading north. “We came here for a better life,” she said. In
all her years in the United States, she said, she had never had problems
with “la migra,” as the immigration agency is known.
By the afternoon, Mr. Delgado had been released
by immigration agents, who decided that he was not a threat to public
safety. He was given a notice that he must comply with any orders from
immigration agents and returned to work the next day.
Agency Under a Microscope
Before heading out to their targets for the
day, the I.C.E. team gathered in the darkness in the parking lot of a
small hardware store. Mr. Marin, the enforcement supervisor, quizzed his
officers:
What time will this man start to leave his
home? Which way will that one turn when he pulls out of his driveway?
When will the other one arrive back from his night shift?
The officers had been watching the men they were after for days, learning their habits so they could capture them easily.
Mr. Marin, 48, has worked in immigration
enforcement for more than two decades, starting when the agency was
called Immigration and Naturalization Services. In the 1990s, he said,
officers would spend much of their time rounding up immigrants in front
of home repair stores, routinely arresting people so many times that
they would know them by sight. Within hours of a bus ride returning them
to Mexico, Mr. Marin said, they would be on their way to the United
States again.
Like roughly half of the other officers, Mr.
Marin began his career in the military, serving as a Marine. He amassed
tattoos the way others collect shot glasses: On his left forearm is the
first letter of the word “Christian” written in Arabic, commemorating
his work collecting intelligence on the Taliban in Pakistan.
Though he had to pass a basic Spanish course
early in his career, today Mr. Marin hardly speaks a word of it. But
many officers do. Nearly 40 percent of Mr. Marin’s officers are Latino,
he said, and many of them hear refrains of “How can you do this to your
own people.” They do not apologize.
But the agency is under a microscope here.
Arrests in the Los Angeles region are up only 17 percent since Mr. Trump
took office, far less than in the rest of the country, according to
I.C.E. statistics.
Members of Congress and local officials routinely call Mr. Marin’s cellphone when they hear of arrests in their area.
“People want to know if we’ve gone into
schools, if we’re standing in the market, but that’s not what we do,”
Mr. Marin said, driving before dawn. “We know an arrest is a traumatic
event for a family. We know the impact it has, and we take it very
seriously.”
Luck Runs Out
While Mr. Delgado was being questioned, other
members of the team were waiting for Mr. Lucero, who had already been
deported once.
Mr. Lucero, 51, and his wife, Jamie, 47,
arrived from a small village in the Mexican state of Puebla more than
three decades ago. He had built a thriving landscaping business, tending
to yards of homes in upscale Orange County.
In 2006, Mr. Lucero was convicted in a domestic
violence case and spent several months in jail, then was deported. But
he had reconciled with his wife and was eager to return to her and their
six children, two of them born in the United States. So he crossed the
border illegally again.
Immigration officials had tried to get the
Orange County sheriff’s office to hold Mr. Lucero for them when he was
in jail for a day on a new domestic violence charge in 2014. But the
sheriff declined, according to I.C.E. Many California sheriff and police
departments do not cooperate with immigration officials, saying it
erodes trust in law enforcement among immigrant populations. Mr. Trump
has threated to punish these so-called sanctuary cities and counties,
saying they harbor lawbreakers.
For several nights before the I.C.E. team
showed up, Mr. Lucero said, he had dreams of immigration agents coming
to get him. The night before, he and his wife tried their luck at a
nearby casino, playing the slot machines until daybreak. They had won a
couple of hundred dollars and left just before 6 a.m.
When they began driving home, Ms. Lucero’s
brother, with whom the family lives, warned them that immigration
officers were near. But Mr. Lucero was unable to evade them.
Anselmo Lucero in the I.C.E. van.
Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times
Hours after his arrest, Jamie Lucero, her eyes
red with tears, pulled out a blue folder with Mr. Lucero’s papers neatly
organized, including documents showing he had completed an
anger-management program and followed the rules of probation from his
domestic violence case. She was planning to take the folder with her
when she visited him in detention, though the papers are unlikely to
have a bearing on his new deportation case.
Barbara Davidson for The New York Times
Their 29-year-old son, Urie, said that the week
before, four officers had come to the door holding a picture of a bald
man they said they were after. They never mentioned the man’s name, and
Urie Lucero said he did not recognize the man.
But the officers came inside the home and
looked around. The family is convinced that the visit and the picture of
the bald man were ruses to try to scope out Anselmo Lucero’s
whereabouts. “That’s how they are getting people,” Urie Lucero said.
Jamie Lucero said the officers had told her not to bother paying for a lawyer because he faced certain deportation.
By lunchtime, the agents had five immigrants in
custody: three of their six targets of the day, as well as Mr. Delgado
and another man they found in the home of a target. Typically, officers
successfully arrest about half the people they are looking for, Mr.
Marin said, so this was a good day.
“Criminals off the street, that’s our goal,” he
said while standing inside the San Bernardino processing center, where
immigrants from the region are taken each day.
The men they had arrested sat inside a small
holding cell clutching their brown-bag lunch of a turkey sandwich and
apple. Mr. Marin and one of his deputies headed for lunch at a small
Mexican taqueria.
Produced by MONA EL-NAGGAR and ANDREW ROSSBACK
Additional video production by BRENT MCDONALD, JESSEY DEARING, BEN LAFFIN and TODD SHERIDAN
NYT
Additional video production by BRENT MCDONALD, JESSEY DEARING, BEN LAFFIN and TODD SHERIDAN
NYT
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