This is what mass deportation looks like. In Atlanta, unshackled Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are terrorizing immigrant communities, making “nearly 80 percent more arrests in the first half of this year than it did in the same period last year,” the New York Times reports, “the largest increase of any field office in the country.” In the state, local law enforcement collude with ICE through a program known as 287(g), handing over undocumented moms and dads for even the most minor of traffic offenses. A broken taillight should never merit being torn from your family. But it could happen to parents like Gabriela Martinez, a single mom of three U.S. citizens:
She knew the risks. The father of her 5-, 7- and 10-year-old daughters, was deported after being pulled over in 2012. Ever since, she had taught the girls to be extra diligent about wearing seatbelts. Once Mr. Trump took office, she rode with friends and took Ubers as often as possible.
But she said she had no choice but to drive to her daughters’ school, to the doctor or to the houses she cleans. As rapidly as the Atlanta area has grown, public transit is practically absent outside Atlanta itself.
“Every time I pull out of here, I think, ‘Please, God, please, God, don’t let me get stopped,’” she said.
But last April, she was. Martinez was moving items to the family’s new home when she was pulled over for a broken taillight and held in the county jail for four days before being transferred to an immigration detention center. While Martinez was allowed to return home to her young children, she was fitted with an ankle bracelet and still faces possible deportation. But, her story isn’t unique. In the Gwinnett County area this past summer, “almost two-thirds of those detained for ICE had been charged with a traffic infraction such as failing to stay in their lane, speeding or driving without a license.”
Since Donald Trump’s poorly attended inauguration, ruthless ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have targeted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, undocumented immigrant parents with no criminal record, and even a 10-year-old special needs child following emergency gallbladder surgery. The girl, Rosamaria Hernandez, was kept in detention for over a week and denied two follow-up visits with her doctors.
Remember that when Trump tells you his mass deportation force is targeting “bad hombres,” he’s lying to you:
In nearby Cobb County, Maria Hernandez, a school janitor from Mexico, was arrested while driving home from work one night in May. An officer conducting a random license tag check, a common practice in some police departments, had determined through a state database that the tag had been suspended because the car lacked insurance. After pulling over Ms. Hernandez, the officer then discovered she had no driver’s license.
Her boss tried to bail her out of the Cobb County jail, but was told that the money would go to waste: She was headed to immigration detention, where she would spend three days trying to explain that she was a single mother with a sick child. Estefania, her 13-year-old daughter, was being treated for depression after a suicide attempt.
Ms. Hernandez was released, given an ankle monitor and told to report back with a plane ticket. (A lawyer has helped delay the deportation.)
It turned out that police had made a mistake and Hernandez’s car had been insured all along, but that didn’t matter. She was still going to be punished for driving without a license despite the fact that Georgia doesn’t allow undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses in the first place. When ICE’s Atlanta field director says, in a rare moment of honesty, that “if you’re in this country illegally, you should be scared … we’re probably going to come knocking at some point,” it’s no wonder why Latino and immigrant-owned businesses are lagging and undocumented immigrants are avoiding driving at all costs:
Atlanta’s immigrants can do little but hide. At strip-mall taquerias and fruit stands, business has lagged. Word of the arrests flows through neighborhood phone trees, and Facebook has become an early-warning system for people desperate for clues about where ICE is operating. All around the metropolitan area, cabs and Uber cars are picking up immigrants who know driving their own cars may get them no further than detention.
As the Trump administration pushes the rest of the country toward tougher immigration enforcement, the Atlanta area offers a glimpse of what could be.
And, it’s a vision the Trump administration will gladly offer a bounty for, quite literally. Days ago, the Department of Justice announced it would financially reward local police departments that turn over undocumented immigrants to federal immigration agents, which will only result in more and more Gabrielas and Marias. Instead of focusing resources on dangerous people who actually do pose a threat to public safety, police and federal immigration agents are sweeping up people trying to get to work and dropping their kids off at school. How in the world is any of this making America safer?