In Barrio Obrero, a predominantly Dominican neighborhood in Puerto Rico, the chilling effect of unprecedented immigration raids in the territory of the United States has been paralyzed.
With desolate houses and businesses, a speaker truck has been sailing through the streets of the working -class neighborhood with a message.
“Suddenly, in that darkness, they heard: ‘Immigrants, you have rights,” said Ariadna Godreau, a human rights lawyer in Puerto Rico, A NBC News.
The non -profit organization that directs, legal help Puerto Rico, hired the truck, known as a “coconut tomb”, to inform people of their rights and announce the launch of a new direct line, the first in Puerto Rico that provides legal support to immigrants, Godreau.
More than 300 families have already called the direct line and have spoken with lawyers for free, since they discover their legal options against a changing immigration panorama, Godreau said.
The residents in Puerto Rico now fear that the efforts of President Donald Trump to carry out mass deportations will fundamentally change how immigration policies in an American territory that had been perceived for a long time as a sanctuary for immigrants will change.
That perception was destroyed for the first time on January 27, the same week that Trump assumed the position. The immigration authorities assaulted Barrio Obrero and arrested more than 40 people. The witnesses told Telemundo Puerto Rico, NBC’s sister station on the island, which saw the agents break down the doors of several houses and businesses. The detainees were handcuffed, placed in vans and taken, they said.
In his 40 years living in Puerto Rico, Ramón Muñoz, a Dominican immigrant, had seen the authorities stop undocumented people but never “with aggressiveness” shown during that raid.
To complicate things for immigrants in Puerto Rico, detainees are transferred to the continental United States, an ocean away from their families and lawyers who handle their immigration cases, because there are no permanent detention centers on the island that can celebrate detainees for prolonged periods, according to Rebecca González-Ramos, the special agent in charge of the native security investments in the native security investments in the native security investments in the periods.
A ‘nightmare’ amid racial profiles
Aracely Terrero, one of the at least 732 immigrants arrested by federal immigration authorities in Puerto Rico so far this year, spent a month bouncing around three different detention centers in the states before being released last week after an immigration judge determined that it should never have been stopped first.
A local police officer in the coastal city of Cabo Rojo alerted the federal immigration authorities about Terrero after the officer found her selling ice cream on the beach without business permits, Telemundo Puerto Rico reported.
Terrero had a visa and was in the process of obtaining a green card when they took her in immigration custody, said lawyer Ángel Robles and Annette Martínez, executive director of the American Union of Civil Liberties in Puerto Rico, to NBC News.
Local policies in the Coordination of Puerto Rico limit between the application of local law and federal immigration authorities, Martínez said.
However, the ACLU in Puerto Rico is seeing more cases in which it is suspected that the Local Police is profiling the Dominican immigrants with the purpose of alerting federal immigration authorities, reviving concerns about the rebirth of “discriminatory police practices” that led police reforms in Puerto Rico a decade, Martínez said.
Terrero’s case also highlighted how difficult it is for families and lawyers to follow up on the detainees once they send them to the United States, Martínez added.
“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 had never seen myself, with wives, like a criminal.”
A raid changes everything
González-Ramos, HSI’s special agent, said in a local radio interview last week that his office had been preparing to increase immigration application efforts in Puerto Rico since November. She said they began to “reorganize” the resources and “changing priorities” after Trump’s victory.
However, the great raid on January 27 was a surprise for most people. The governor of Puerto Rico, Jenniffer González-Colón, had reassured immigrants in an interview with Telemundo Puerto Rico that same week that Trump was only “focused on what is happening in Mexico and the United States, on that border.”
He helped create a “false sense of security,” Godreau said. “These consecutive raids begin in areas historically inhabited by the Dominican population.”
As immigration authorities intensify their efforts in Puerto Rico by attacking hotels, construction sites and neighborhoods, more than 500 of immigrants arrested so far are from the Dominican Republic.
Dominicans constitute most of the immigrant population of Puerto Rico. It is estimated that more than 100,000 Dominicans live in Puerto Rico. It is believed that approximately one third are undocumented. Many of them are business owners or hospitality, construction and care of the elderly, the last two industries that deal with work shortages, Godreau and Martínez said.
González-Ramos had said that his office would be stopping people illegally present in Puerto Rico, “specifically those whose criminal records represent a threat to our communities and national security.”
But only 13% of the 732 immigrants arrested this year have a criminal record, according to national security research data in San Juan.
After a summons of the application of immigration and customs, the administration of González-Colón, a Republican who supports Trump, recently delivered the names and directions of 6,000 people who obtained driving licenses under a friendly law with the 2013 immigrants that allowed people without the state of legal immigration to obtain them.
González-Colón has said that he will not challenge Trump’s immigration policies so as not to risk losing federal funds.
“The governor’s attitudes and expressions have been quite misleading,” Martínez said, adding that local jurisdictions often challenge and oppose federal policies in an effort to protect local residents.
Anywhere to be arrested
A spokesman for national security investigations in San Juan told NBC News that González-Ramos was not available for an interview this week. But in his local radio interview last week, González-Ramos said that immigration agents periodically carry out “daily interventions” in an effort to find more than 1,200 people who have final deportation orders “that we must execute.”
All arrested in raids, regardless of whether they have final deportation orders or not, “they must be arrested, regardless of what,” González-Ramos said in Spanish. “At this time, those are the instructions.”
Martínez de la Achu said that in Puerto Rico, immigration arrests have an “aggravating factor”: the arrested immigrants are placed on an airplane and sent to detention centers in the United States.
For more than a decade, the island has lacked an immigration detention center that works that can permanently house the detainees.
As immigration arrests increase, “temporary detention centers” have sprouted through Puerto Rico, according to González-Ramos.
One of them is located in a building of the Federal Administration of General Services in Guaynabo. Equipped with almost 20 beds, he has been nicknamed “La Neverita”, or the ice cream shop, by immigrants who have spent time there before being transferred to the United States.
An old ice installation in Aguadilla that closed in 2012 was recently reopened to temporarily keep the detainees, according to Godreau and Martínez, who have heard immigrants taken there.
Before its closure more than a decade, “the complaints were presented at that time about the inhuman and inadequate conditions in which they were held in that center,” Martínez said in Spanish.
Mayor Julio Roldán approved an ordinance on Thursday to declare a “sanctuary city” for immigrants to Aguadilla in response to intense application efforts in the area.
When at least two dozen detainees are at temporary retention facilities, ice aircraft arrive in 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 detainees have also been found in facilities in Louisiana and New Mexico.
“We are seeing a pattern of disappearances,” Martínez said, noting that in the case of Terrero, it took the Acl and his lawyer weeks to find out where he was detained.
The situation raises concerns about “multiple violations of human rights and civil rights,” Martínez said, adding that ACLU continues to monitor these cases and requires changes in local policies to ensure that immigrants are protected.
