How Trump’s policies are reshaping Puerto Rico immigration enforcement

In Barrio Obero, a Dominican predominance district in Puerto Rico, the frightening effect of unprecedented immigration raids on American territory was paralyzed.

With desolate houses and companies, a truck with speakers crossed the streets of the working class district with a message.

“Suddenly, in this darkness, they heard:” Immigrants, you have rights “”, told NBC News Ariadna Godreau, human rights lawyer in Puerto Rico.

The legal non -profit organization she directs, Ayuda Legal Puerto Rico, hired the truck, known as “Tumba Coco”, to educate people about their rights and announce the launch of a new hotline, the first to Puerto Rico providing legal support to immigrants, Goddreau said.

More than 300 families have already called the hotline and spoke freely with lawyers when they include their legal options against an immigration changing landscape, Godreau said.

Porto Rico residents are now afraid that President Donald Trump’s efforts to make mass expulsions fundamentally change the way immigration policies are applied in an American territory that had long been perceived as a sanctuary for immigrants.

This perception was broken for the first time on January 27, the same week that Trump took office. Immigration authorities have descended into the Obrero Barrio and arrested more than 40 people. Witnesses told Telemundo Porto Rico, NBC’s sister station on the island that they saw agents decomposing the doors of several houses and businesses. The detainees were handcuffed, placed in vans and kidnapped, they said.

During his 40 years living in Puerto Rico, Ramón Muñoz, a Dominican immigrant, had seen the authorities sporadically hold undocumented people but never “with aggressiveness” displayed during this raid.

Compliating questions for immigrants to Porto Rico, detained persons are transferred to the continental United States – an ocean far from their families and lawyers who managed their immigration cases – because there are no permanent detention centers on the island which can hold prisoners for prolonged periods, according to Rebecca González -Ramos, the special agent in charge of internal safety in San Juan.

A “nightmare” in the midst of racial profiling concerns

Aracely Terrero, one of the 732 immigrants at least arrested by the federal immigration authorities in Puerto Rico so far this year, spent a month bounced around three different detention centers in the United States before being released last week after an immigration judge determined that she should never have been detained in the first place.

A local police officer in the coastal city of Cabo Rojo alerted the federal immigration authorities about Terrero after the officer found his ice cream at the beach without a business license, Télemundo Porto Rico reported.

Terrero had a visa and was obtaining a green card when she was placed in police custody, her lawyer Ángel Robles and Annette Martínez, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Puerto Rico, told NBC News.

Local policies in Porto Rico limit coordination between the application of local laws and the federal immigration authorities, said Martínez.

However, ACLU in Puerto Rico see more cases in which local police are suspected of racially profiling from Dominican immigrants with the aim of alerting federal immigration authorities, rekindling the concerns concerning the Renaissance of “discriminatory police practices” which led to police reforms to Porto Rico a decade ago, said Martínez.

Terrero’s case has also highlighted the difficulty for families and lawyers to keep track of prisoners once they are sent to the United States, added Martínez.

“It was a nightmare,” Terrero told Telemundo Puerto Rico after his release. “It was a very difficult trip because I had never been arrested in my life. I have never seen myself like that, with handcuffs, like a criminal. ”

A raid changes everything

González-Ramos, HSI special agent, said last week in a local radio interview that his office was preparing to speed up immigration efforts in Puerto Rico since November. She said they had started to “reorganize” resources and “change the priorities” after Trump’s victory.

However, the big raid on January 27 surprised most people. Porto Governor Rico, Jenniffer González-Colón, reassured immigrants in an interview with Telemundo Puerto Rico the same week that Trump was “concentrated on what is happening in Mexico and the United States, on this border”.

This helped create a “false feeling of security,” said Godreau. “These consecutive raids then begin in areas historically inhabited by the Dominican population.”

While the immigration authorities increase their efforts to Porto Rico by getting a descent of hotels, construction sites and neighborhoods, more than 500 of immigrants arrested so far from the Dominican Republic.

The Dominicans constitute most of the immigrant population of Puerto Rico. It is estimated that more than 100,000 Dominicans live in Puerto Rico. We think that about a third party is undocumented. Many of them are business owners or jobs of work, construction and care for the elderly, the last two being the industries struggling with the shortages of labor, said Godreau and Martínez.

González-Ramos said that his office has people illegally present in Puerto Rico, “in particular those whose judicial lockers constitute a threat to our communities and our national security.”

But only 13% of the 732 immigrants arrested this year have a criminal record, according to data from Homeland Security Investigation in San Juan.

Following an assignment to immigration and the application of customs, the administration of González-Colón, a republican who supports Trump, recently delivered the names and addresses of 6,000 people who obtained driving licenses under a friendly immigrant law from 2013 which allowed people without status of legal immigration to obtain them.

González-Colón said that she would not dispute Trump’s immigration policies so as not to risk losing federal funding.

“The governor’s attitudes and expressions have been quite misleading,” said Martínez, adding that local courts frequently restore and oppose federal policies in order to protect local residents.

Nowhere to hold

A spokesperson for internal security surveys in San Juan told NBC News that González-Ramos was not available for an interview this week. But in his interview on local radio last week, González-Ramos said that immigration agents periodically achieved “daily interventions” in order to find more than 1,200 people who have end orders “that we must execute”.

Everyone was arrested during raids, whether or not he has deportation orders or not, “must be detained, whatever happens,” said González-Ramos in Spanish. “Right now, these are the instructions.”

The Martínez de l’Aclu said that in Porto Rico, immigration arrests have an “aggravating factor”: immigrants arrested are placed on a plane and sent to detention centers on the American continent

For more than a decade, the island does not have an immigration detention center which can permanently house the prisoners.

While immigration arrests accelerate, “temporary detention centers” have germinated through Puerto Rico, according to González-Ramos.

One of them is in a federal building of the General Services of Services in Guaynabo. Equipped with nearly 20 beds, it was nicknamed “Neverita” or Beabox, by immigrants who spent time there before being transferred to the United States

An old installation of ice in Aguadilla which closed in 2012 was recently reopened to temporarily hold prisoners, according to Godreau and Martínez, who heard immigrants who are taken there.

Before its closure over ten years ago, “complaints were filed at the time about inhuman and inadequate conditions in which prisoners in this center were held,” said Martínez in Spanish.

Mayor Julio Roldán approved an order on Thursday to declare Aguadilla a “sanctuary city” for immigrants in response to the climbing of implementing efforts in the region.

When at least two dozen prisoners are in temporary detention facilities, ice aircraft come to Puerto Rico to transport them to permanent detention centers in different states, according to González-Ramos.

Many of them are placed in immigration detention centers in Florida and Texas. But Puerto Rico prisoners were also found in Louisiana and New Mexico facilities.

“We see a model of disappearances,” said Martínez, stressing that in the case of Terrero, it took ACLU and her week as a lawyer to find out where she was detained.

The situation raises concerns concerning “multiple violations of human rights and civil rights,” said Martínez, adding that ACLU continues to monitor these cases and request changes in local policies in order to guarantee the protection of immigrant rights.