Trump’s Deportation Dragnet Widens and Puerto Ricans Are Getting Caught in It
The collateral damage increasingly appears to be lawful U.S. citizens.
WHEN THE NEW ADMINISTRATION set up shop, White House border czar Tom Homan acknowledged that collateral arrests would be part of the coming immigration raids. Yes, the administration was going to focus on those with criminal histories, he stressed, but if undocumented immigrants without criminal records got detained, so be it. After all, they too were here illegally.
What was never part of the deal was U.S. citizens being swept up in ICE raids. But less than three weeks into the Trump administration, that’s exactly what’s happening. And the Puerto Rican population on the mainland is bearing the brunt of it.
Already, there have been a handful of documented examples of raids and confrontations at Puerto Rican businesses, despite Puerto Ricans having automatic U.S. citizenship.
The raids have startled Puerto Ricans, who are rushing to get passports out of fear that they could be targeted just for speaking Spanish or having brown skin.
In Newark on January 23, a dozen agents raided Ocean Seafood Depot during which they targeted, among others, the Puerto Rican warehouse manager, a U.S. military veteran who Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said “suffered the indignity of having the legitimacy of his military documentation questioned.”
The warehouse manager has declined media interviews given the crush of attention. But his treatment appalled those who know him.
“He’s been a worker here for a few years,” a coworker told The Bulwark, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted. “We were shocked this happened because he’s a U.S. citizen.”
In late January, ICE agents barged into Puerto Rican restaurant Boricua Restaurant 2 in Philadelphia, looking to take away one of the two owners. The two Puerto Rican men are well regarded in the community. One of them, Hector Serrano, had created a salsa dance troupe. His business partner, Robert Acevedo, who was harassed by ICE, is a retired Philadelphia police officer. The video they took after the incident went viral on TikTok and Instagram.
“They came in here and they thought we were undocumented because this is a Puerto Rican restaurant. We of course knew how to defend ourselves and had to check them, that not every Latino is undocumented,” Serrano said in the video posted on January 30, which had 1.1 million views on Instagram.