How the Government Created ‘Stop-and-Frisk for Latinos’

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http://www.thenation.com/article/181477/how-government-created-stop-and-frisk-latinos


Yestel Velazquez went to pick up his truck from an auto shop on a Tuesday evening three months ago. He had left it in Kenner, Louisiana, with a mechanic named Wilmer Palma, a fellow Honduran immigrant he’d met doing construction work after Hurricane Katrina. Velazquez was inside his truck, ready to drive away, when several unmarked cars pulled up and blocked the exits. He recalls men in plainclothes and bulletproof vests that said Police, along with an officer in a Kenner Police Department uniform, getting out of the cars.

Minutes later, Velazquez and Palma were lined up behind a Ford Expedition, along with more than a dozen other employees and customers of the auto shop and people from a neighboring business. They were all Latinos. One by one, the men were ordered to press their fingertips to a machine in the back of the Expedition. Palma’s hands were coated in auto grease, which briefly delayed what he and Yestel knew was inevitable.

“I always thought this would happen,” said Velazquez on the phone from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Basile, Louisiana. He spoke in a low, precise voice, as if he was too tired for bitterness. Before his arrest, Velazquez had grown accustomed to peering out the window before leaving his apartment; to keeping an eye out for the immigration agents he sometimes saw crouched behind their unmarked cars in the morning as people left for work; and to avoiding public places—even grocery stores—where other Latinos hung out, because they drew ICE like flies to honey.

New Orleans is bearing perhaps the heaviest burden of an immigration-enforcement strategy launched by the Obama administration amid the pandemonium of a presidential election. President Obama said in 2011 that he wanted to focus the government’s resources on undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions, rather than (as he put it at the time) “folks who are here just because they’re trying to figure out how to feed their families.”