Ride the Lightning

ICE Using Secret Police Databases to Arrest Immigrants

September 5, 2017

On August 29^th, The ABA Journal recounted a story. In 2011, then 19-year-old Luis Vicente Pedrote-Salinas was leaving a relative's house and getting into his car when he was stopped by Chicago police. Officers found an unopened can of beer in the cup holder and booked him for underage drinking. He spent a night in jail, and the charges were dropped.

Sadly, that was not the end of the story. The police who arrested Pedrote-Salinas were out on a "gang suppression mission" that night and added his name to their citywide database of suspected gang members. Officers claim he admitted to being a member of the Latin Kings – he denies that and said that he's never been a member of any gang.

According to a federal lawsuit filed in July, Pedrote-Salinas was arrested later in 2011 during an immigration raid targeting gangs and then detained for approximately six months. When he was released on bond, he applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status and, after being robbed at gunpoint while working at a Subway, he applied for a U visa for crime victims in order to remain in the U.S. He was denied both despite having no criminal convictions. Now Pedrote-Salinas faces deportation to Mexico, which he left when he was five years old.

This seems to me to be one of a growing number of tragic stories as the current administration is aggressively tracking down immigrants in gangs. Local police departments have shared gang intelligence with federal immigration agents for a long time, but Customs Enforcement arrests have increased nearly 40 percent from last year. Critics of gang databases say that because of the loose criteria used to identify potential members, people with no gang affiliation are likely to be swept up in raids meant for serious criminals. Several recent lawsuits have been filed by immigrants who say they were wrongly identified as gang members and detained by ICE as a result.

Understandably, police departments use gang databases to keep track of criminal activity in their cities and to aid with homicide investigations. But advocates criticize the lists for casting too wide a net and say they are a form of racial profiling. Individuals can be added to gang databases for wearing certain colors, hanging out in places frequented by gang members, or knowing or being related to someone in a gang. Individuals are rarely notified when they are added to these databases or given a way to fight the designation.

Needless to say, if you are supposed to be a gang member, you are more likely to be targeted in a raid and be a higher priority for deportation. As illustrated above, if they try to use something like DACA or a U visa, they may not succeed. They may also be denied bond, therefore remaining in detention until their case is decided – which can take years with the current backlog.

It is difficult to prove the negative that you are not a gang member – and probably more difficult to prove that you were once a member of a gang but quit the gang.

ICE stated in May that the agency's largest gang enforcement effort yet had led to the arrest of 1,095 "confirmed" gang members and affiliates. "Individuals are confirmed as gang members if they admit membership in a gang;…or if they meet certain other criteria such as having tattoos identifying a specific gang or being identified as a gang member by a reliable source," the agency said in a press release. A similar series of raids this July, which focused on alleged teenage gang members, netted 650 people. Only 130 of them had criminal convictions.

For immigrant advocates, the cooperation between local police and federal officials shows how some cities that claim to be havens for immigrants, Chicago for instance, are anything but. Advocates think they have an argument that it's unconstitutional when there are such heavy consequences for something that doesn't have a judicial process.

Other legal battles include an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, filed in August, over the evidence (or lack thereof) that ICE is relying on in Suffolk County, New York, to identify high school students as gang members. Law enforcement has labeled the plaintiffs members or associates of the MS-13 gang for doing things like wearing an El Salvador soccer jersey (really?), being observed in the presence of other alleged gang members or writing El Salvadoran area codes in their notebooks. Local and federal law enforcement in Suffolk County have been focused on tracking down MS-13 members, who police say are responsible for 17 murders there in the last 18 months.

"They'll just arrest them based on an evidence-free allegation," said immigration attorney Bryan Johnson, who represents some of the plaintiffs named in the ACLU suit. "They don't have to share that information in court. There's no process to challenge the allegations."

It seems to me that the entire process is constitutionally flawed. I hope the courts agree. Surely we can work on deporting those who truly are criminals without trampling on constitutional rights.

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