Campaign Action
Since ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program last September, Donald Trump and his sycophants have continued to insist that undocumented immigrant youth have nothing to worry about. “Tell them not to worry,” he said as recently as last week, but that assurance meant shit to Christian Gomez Garcia, a Dreamer who was arrested earlier this week by plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) mass deportation agents at traffic court in Chicago, Illinois:
As Gomez Garcia left the room where driving offenses are heard in Cook County’s Skokie branch court, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents approached and arrested him, shipping him off to a holding facility in Wisconsin, apparently with plans to begin deportation proceedings.
Following an outcry two days later by immigration advocates and his lawyer, who appeared at a news conference in front of the courthouse with Gomez Garcia’s tearful mother, federal authorities reversed course and released him Thursday.
ICE has escalated their arrests of immigrants in courthouses since Trump took office, and just this week it formalized a directive stating that agents “will enter courthouses only for specific targets, such as convicted criminals, gang members, public safety threats and immigrants who have been previously deported or ordered to leave.”
But Gomez Garcia was in court for running a stop sign, and even though his DACA had lapsed because a mistake on his renewal application caused it to be rejected, you can’t have serious offenses as a DACA recipient. “ICE officials did not elaborate on why they targeted Gomez Garcia in the first place or why they decided to release him, other than to say it was ‘after further review of his case circumstances.’”
Gomez Garcia’s horrific experience adds the fears of hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients, and the 18,000 who have lost their work permits and protection from deportation following Trump ending the program last September. While a court recently forced the administration to begin accepting renewal applications again—Gomez Garcia has already submitted his, but forms can take three months to process—new applicants are not being accepted, and too many young people continue to remain vulnerable.
Gomez Garcia’s advocates are now trying to figure out how the young man fell onto ICE’s radar in the first place. “The Cook County Board approved its sanctuary ordinance in 2011,” reports the Chicago Sun-Times, “restricting local law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration agents to detain anyone unless the feds have a warrant”:
Juan Soliz, Gomez Garcia’s lawyer, said his client has no criminal record and Cook County’s sanctuary ordinance was violated when he was detained.
“He should have never been arrested, unfortunately someone in the Skokie Police Department or the Skokie courts reported him to ICE,” he said. “This is happening every day, unfortunately.”
A Skokie Police spokesperson said in a statement that the department is “confident” its officers weren’t the ones who called ICE.
“He’s never had any criminal record, the only thing he’s ever dedicated himself is to study and work,” said Gomez Garcia’s mother, 52-year-old Luz Maria Garcia, during a Wednesday news conference outside the Skokie courthouse, adding that she left her family in Mexico to flee domestic violence. She and Gomez Garcia live in Skokie, where he helps support her.
After his release, Gomez Garcia said that during his arrest he was treated "very aggressive, inhumane, very unfair. You don't have a chance to react, to think, to do anything. They ask for a name, they turn you around and handcuff you. We’re here just working, making a living, trying to become somebody in this world, and anybody that has this could go through this same process that I'm going (through)."
The administration is already appealing the court’s decision in an effort to stop renewals, and ICE has been targeting young immigrants with current DACA protections for even just taking a wrong turn. What immigrant youth need is permanent protections in the form of the DREAM Act. While DACA has been vital, it continues to be under constant threat by this administration. And, this courthouse action shows that ICE has no plan to stick to its own directive when it comes to courthouse targets.