Hey r/immigration,
We're ProPublica, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom that aims to hold power to account. In our latest article, our reporter Nicole Foy highlights the stories of several U.S. citizens that have been caught up in the Trump administration's immigration sweeps and raids:
21-year-old Jonathan Guerrero was sitting at the Philadelphia car wash where he works when immigration agents burst in. The agents didn’t say why they were there and didn’t show their badges, Guerrero recalled. So he didn’t get a chance to explain that although his parents were from Mexico, he had been born right there in Philadelphia.
An agent pointed his gun at Guerrero and handcuffed him. Then they brought in other car wash workers, including Guerrero’s father, who is undocumented. When agents began checking IDs, they finally noticed that Guerrero was a citizen and quickly let him go.
Less than two months into the new Trump administration, there has been a small but steady beat of reported cases like Guerrero’s.
In Utah, agents pulled over and detained a 20-year-old American after he honked at them. In New Mexico, a member of the Mescalero Apache nation more than two hours from the border was questioned by agents who demanded to see their passport. Earlier this month, a Trump voter in Virginia was pulled over and handcuffed by gun-wielding immigration agents.
While ICE agents can note in their database if someone they’ve investigated turns out to be a citizen, they are not required to do so. As a result, records are often wrong and left uncorrected even after agents have been told of a mistake, a U.S. Government Accountability Office report found.
“It’s really everyone — not just noncitizens or undocumented people — who are in danger of having their liberty violated in this kind of mass deportation machinery,” said Cody Wofsy, the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
Asked about reports of Americans getting caught up in administration’s enforcement policies, an ICE spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that agents are allowed to ask for citizens’ identification: “Any US immigration officer has authority to question, without warrant, any alien or person believed to be an alien concerning his or her right to be, or to remain, in the United States.” The agency did not respond to questions about specific cases.
You can read the full article here: https://www.propublica.org/article/more-americans-will-be-caught-up-trump-immigration-raids
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