Hugo Vinicio Hernandez knew immigration agents could detain him at any time for having disregarded a deportation order in 2001. But the Guatemalan didn’t think he would wind up in the custody of immigration agents as a result of a routine traffic stop.
He was deported after being pulled over by a police officer in January.
It’s a fate that a growing number of illegal immigrants are facing as federal officials add thousands of names of people with outstanding deportation orders into the FBI-run National Crime Information Center database, which police use to search for warrants.
In Montgomery County, Md., outside Washington, where Hernandez was stopped, officers have taken about 60 people into custody on immigration warrants since last year. Now relatively low, such numbers are expected to increase as more records are uploaded, which concerns immigrant advocates and some local police officials.
Supporters of the effort say enlisting the help of police officers to identify and remove the roughly 600,000 immigrants who are thought to have outstanding deportation orders is long overdue.
But two police associations have lobbied against the inclusion, saying that by acting on the warrants, departments risk alienating recent immigrants, a segment of the community that has historically had an uneasy relationship with law-enforcement agencies.
Separately, immigrant advocacy organizations are suing the government, saying that it had no legal standing to add administrative records to what has traditionally been a database for criminal warrants. Disregarding a deportation order is a violation of administrative, not criminal, law.
Because many outstanding deportation orders date back several years and in some cases don’t reflect the person’s current immigration status, some law-enforcement officials and immigrant advocates say they fear people could get picked up because of sloppy record-keeping. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says it screens records carefully before adding them to the database.
Montgomery Police Chief Thomas Manger and other area police chiefs have concluded that they must enforce National Crime Information Center warrants, even at the expense of being perceived as an extension of the federal bureaucracy.
Hernandez, who entered the U.S. illegally in 2000 through the Mexican border, joined relatives in Hyattsville, Md., found work as a welder and began dating Brenda Cruz, a Guatemalan woman. Their sons, a 5-year-old and a 10-month-old, were born in Maryland.
Cruz, who also came to the country illegally and is now seeking legal status, was a victim of a 2002 home invasion. She called the police in that case, which remains unsolved. Last month, she decided against reporting that someone had broken into her van.
“Who knows how many questions they’re going to ask?” she said recently.
In letters Hernandez wrote to Cruz from jail, he urged her to file their federal income taxes on time and asked her not to tell the children that he was being deported. But the 5-year-old found out, Cruz said.
“He used to be a playful boy,” Cruz said. “Now he doesn’t want to leave the house. He’s terrified of the police.”
