It’s clear that a Michigan police captain sicced federal immigration officials on a detained U.S.-born Marine veteran because he was Latino, but an internal investigation by the Grand Rapids Police Department has exonerated him. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center (MIRC) are now calling on the Grand Rapids Civilian Appeal Board to reverse the decision.
Internal documents reveal that Captain Curt VanderKooi, who is currently on administrative leave, emailed Immigration and Customs Enforcement after seeing images of Jilmar Ramos-Gomez on television. Ramos-Gomez, who has PTSD, had been arrested for setting off a fire alarm in a hospital. He had his passport and other documents on him, but VanderKooi apparently saw a brown face, and that was that. “Could you please check his status?” he emailed.
Ramos-Gomez would spend three days in ICE custody, further traumatizing an already traumatized man, before being released to his family for follow-up care. “The GRPD’s own reports say that Mr. Ramos-Gomez did not pose a danger and was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder,” said MIRC attorney Hillary Scholten. “To pretend this was not racial profiling is to ignore the facts.”
Any action on this matter may not happen until next month. “When we called for an investigation of the Grand Rapids Police Department’s appalling treatment of Mr. Ramos-Gomez, what we wanted was an independent investigation,” said the ACLU’s Miriam Aukerman. “What we got was a whitewash. The evidence shows Captain VanderKooi called ICE because Mr. Ramos-Gomez is Latino. The failure of the Internal Affairs investigation to recognize that this was racial profiling, plain and simple, shows that the police cannot police themselves.”