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.
In an interview, Serrano told The Bulwark that after the video went viral, he heard from the owners of Dominican restaurants and bodegas who appreciated their defense of their culture and community. He noted that on their restaurant menus they include facts about Puerto Rico; the first one being that they’re U.S. citizens.
“As a Christian-owned business, we know we’re not perfect, but as Cristianos we said ‘God has reasons for what he does, so let’s just do this video in one take,’” he said. “People have responded, but we say we’re not heroes, please don’t even use that word, those are the police officers, the firefighters that risk their lives. But the reaction was some people felt hurt, others that we were a voice, and the one thing we saw was the majority were proud that we weren’t ghetto. We professionally defended ourselves and our business.”
A third incident involving ICE targeting Puerto Ricans in raids was recently documented by Telemundo Puerto Rico. The network featured an anonymous Puerto Rican man on January 27, who said his sister in Milwaukee was grabbed by ICE after speaking Spanish, along with her mother-in-law and a child. They were driven to a facility but were not ultimately taken inside. Instead, they were released when she showed documentation and said they were from Puerto Rico. The agents, according to the report, responded simply with “Sorry.”
The family has not been publicly identified. And in the days since the incident, ICE has seized on the lack of confirmation to deny they ever were detained. But the brother made clear that the family wished to remain anonymous because it has been a difficult process for the family to be targeted despite being U.S. citizens.
Roberto Cruz, the supervising attorney for the southeast region with civil rights organization LatinoJustice PRLDEF, said he was limited in how much he could share about the case because his organization is working on a possible lawsuit.
“We are still investigating the facts, but because we are involved in potential litigation, we cannot make comment,” he said, when asked about the matter by The Bulwark during a webinar he cohosted to help Puerto Ricans to know their rights.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION HAS NEVER exhibited much concern about collateral arrests as it enacts the president’s harsh new immigration enforcement policies. But the targeting of Puerto Ricans has left its critics feeling vindicated.
“This is masked racial profiling,” said Frankie Miranda, president and CEO of the Hispanic Federation, a nonprofit membership organization active in 42 states and additional territories, including an office in Puerto Rico. Miranda argued that the incidents involving Puerto Ricans belie the administration’s talking point that these efforts were about getting dangerous criminals off the streets.
“We hear about only some of these cases, we know there are more of them,” he added. “Puerto Ricans are the best example of how these immigration policies are not really working, this is about quotas and racial profiling.”
Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.), a leading Democrat on immigration issues in Congress, said she too believed Puerto Ricans were being targeted for how they looked and for speaking Spanish. She pointed the finger at White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller.
“It shows that what they’re doing has no real enforcement priorities, when you have this guy Miller pushing for quotas, it encourages ICE to round up as many people as possible without regard for due process,” she told The Bulwark.
Velázquez said her Puerto Rican constituents are among those concerned about being stopped and asked for documents. She cited an El Vocero report that showed an “incredible increase” in passport and passport-card requests from Puerto Ricans due to fears they could be caught up in enforcement actions.
“Let’s be clear—Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens and they should not be forced to live in fear on the mainland or on their own island of Puerto Rico,” Velázquez said.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt forwarded The Bulwark’s request for comment to Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin, who said “DHS enforcement agents conduct targeted enforcement actions.”
“We do our due diligence,” McLaughlin wrote. “We know who we are targeting ahead of time. If and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, the men and women of ICE are trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine alienage and removability.”
But some Democrats say the current practices are not good enough.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, wrote a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE Acting Director Caleb Vitello on February 4. In it, they requested more information on “troubling” reports that U.S. citizens have been detained during enforcement operations, citing the Milwaukee report and an NBC News article highlighting multiple incidents of American citizens being wrongfully detained.
On the webinar, Cruz said his group, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, has seen both alarming trends of Puerto Ricans subjected to discriminatory treatment at airports and government checkpoints, as well as instances of agents telling them their Puerto Rican ID or driver’s licenses are not sufficient to prove their citizenship.
The Zoom call, organized by Power4PuertoRico, a Puerto Rican diaspora advocacy coalition, was a clear illustration of the chaos that has surrounded Trump’s enforcement efforts. Cruz, giving “Know Your Rights” training to Puerto Ricans, warned that ICE agents often claim to be police officers. He advised those doing the training to ask for IDs, and if detained, not to sign any documents. He also advised recording any ICE agents who force their way into a home.
The administration is also putting itself in legal peril if it’s haphazardly storming businesses and worksites and rounding up brown people who speak Spanish or look Latino. As The Bulwark previously reported, this approach by the first Trump administration during a 2018 raid in Tennessee led to a class-action lawsuit on behalf of seven workers who were racially profiled and experienced excessive force. They won a $1.175 million settlement in 2022 that required the U.S. government to pay the plaintiffs $475,000.
Ray Collazo, the executive director of the UnidosUS Action Fund, the political arm of one of the oldest Hispanic civil rights organizations in the nation, is very active in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. He said Puerto Ricans there are so concerned that they have begun asking him if they should carry their passport.
He said he knows the owner of the Boricua Restaurant 2 in Philadelphia very well, and noted that Latino areas and small businesses he is in contact with are seeing less foot traffic because of the raids.
“You can’t say you’re going to target criminals, but the brand is ‘mass deportation’—it doesn’t equate,” Collazo said. “We knew it was going to be heavily focused on racial profiling. It’s not targeted, like they say; it’s going to be random. If you really wanted to do it that way, you wouldn’t be targeting and harassing urban and Latino small businesses to cause fear and terror.”
Carlos Calderon, one of the best known influencers in Puerto Rico, with close to 1.7 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, said Puerto Ricans don’t see themselves as special because of their citizenship. Calderon works with top brands and travels a lot to the mainland. Recently his mother has begun worrying about his travels, he told The Bulwark.
“Now my mom is saying, ‘Take your passport book and get a passport card,’” he said. “I say, ‘Mami, you’re taking it to a whole other level.’ I’m trying to maintain the sanity of the world we live in, but we don’t live in that world anymore, and it hasn’t even been a month.”
One Last Thing
The Department of Justice is suing Chicago and Illinois over their sanctuary city/state practices. The lawsuit alleges that those cities are engaged in an “intentional effort to obstruct the Federal Government’s enforcement of federal immigration law and to impede consultation and communication between federal, state, and local law enforcement officials.”
You might remember Chicago as the site of recent raids, and Homan’s frustration over Chicago residents being too prepared and fending off ICE with what they learned in “Know Your Rights” training.
This makes my blood boil. Arresting or even detaining US Citizens simply for speaking another language is disgusting. Welcome to the Fourth Reich.
Adrian is a brilliant addition to the Bulwark team. Excellent content. Much appreciated.