A powerful tool in Trump’s immigration crackdown: The routine traffic stop

Miguel Rojas Mendoza, a TPS holder, worked as a caretaker of horses in Louisiana before he was arrested and sent to El Salvador's megaprison. Photo / Family Photo, Washington Post

Chelsea White and her husband were driving home from cleaning office buildings one May evening when they happened upon a Tennessee Highway Patrol checkpoint. It was a situation the couple feared – and had taken precautions to avoid.

White rolled down the driver’s side window on the Ford Fusion with their company’s logo. She drove because her husband, Hilario Martínez García, 46, is undocumented and cannot obtain a licence in Tennessee.

One of the officers looked at Martínez, she recalled, and instructed them to pull into a nearby parking lot and step out of the car. Agents in black vests began patting them down and reaching into their pockets. They let White, 31, go when they saw her driver’s licence. But her husband had no proof of US citizenship.

The officers escorted him away.

“That was the last time I saw him,” she said.

As the Trump administration aims to ramp up the number of unauthorised immigrants arrested across the United States each day, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is dramatically expanding its partnerships with police agencies, effectively deputising local police officers as immigration agents. Some departments have made hundreds of arrests, many of them during routine traffic stops.

The consequences for those arrested have been swift. Some have been deported back to their home countries. At least four immigrants stopped for traffic violations were sent to a notorious mega prison in El Salvador, according to records obtained by the Washington Post. And while some were people with criminal records, others included a teenager on his way to volleyball practice, a young father picking up baby formula and construction workers on their way to jobsites. Martínez had no violent criminal history, though he did have several misdemeanour charges in his early 20s, over two decades ago.

The partnerships – known as 287(g) agreements – were first authorised in 1996. But ICE had only 135 active agreements with local police departments across 16 states when President Joe Biden left office in January, all of them involving immigration enforcement in jails or in executing search warrants.

Today, ICE has more than 700 accords in 40 states – a 419% increase in just five months. And half of the partnerships signed under President Donald Trump specifically deputise police officers on patrol to help enforce immigration laws.

“There are now legs and arms of ICE in so many places that did not exist before,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

Many police departments have avoided involving local officers in immigration enforcement because of concerns that it would encourage racial profiling and undermine community safety by dissuading immigrants from co-operating with police. But the Trump administration says partnering with local agencies is key to its campaign to remove unauthorised immigrants from the country.

Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement to The Post that the agency is looking “for more agreements like that across the country, and we will continue to build on it”. She disputed the idea that the accords encourage racial profiling.

“Law enforcement targets someone not because of their skin colour – but because they are illegal aliens,” she said.

Martínez had been living in the US for 25 years when he was taken into custody. After his arrest, White said she drove home in silence. She was four months pregnant and returning to a house with three children who were used to being tucked in by “daddy”.

“I had to walk in alone and tell them that he wasn’t coming back home tonight,” White said through tears. “Everybody started crying. They wanted to know what happened. Where was their daddy, what did he do wrong.”

“I said, ‘Baby, he didn’t do nothing wrong. We was just driving and we got stopped.’”

A 9/11 call to action

Immigration enforcement had long been considered exclusively a federal responsibility until the 287(g) programme was enacted at a time when the Republican Party sought to crack down on illegal immigration.

For five years, no local agency signed up for it. Then came September 11, 2001. The attacks were committed by terrorists who had entered the country on visas and sparked a massive overhaul of national security and immigration operations and led to the formation of DHS and ICE.

Several of the terrorists who hijacked the planes had been stopped by police for traffic violations – one just days before the attacks – and some argued that 287(g) partnerships could help catch future potential terrorists. After the first pact to deputise local agents was signed in Florida in 2002, other agencies slowly began following suit.

The accords soon came under scrutiny: local deputies accused of racially profiling and harassing immigrants drew multiple lawsuits and civil rights investigations, none more attention-grabbing than Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona.

Arpaio enlisted ICE to deputise his officers as immigration agents in 2007 and made headlines for his anti-immigrant rhetoric. He promoted the false theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the US and directed deputies to conduct workplace raids that detained hundreds of people. In 2011, a Justice Department investigation found Maricopa County deputies had engaged in racial profiling and unlawful stops, detentions and arrests of Latinos. A federal judge upheld the DOJ finding in a ruling two years later.

The Obama administration eventually terminated the “task force” model that Arpaio had enlisted in, and under the first Trump administration and during Biden’s presidency, no similar accords were signed. Trump did, however, expand ICE’s co-operation with local jails and started another initiative to permit local law enforcement officers to execute civil immigration warrants.

Under Trump’s current administration, task force agreements are back. ICE has signed more than 330 new pacts with agencies across 30 states geared at empowering local officers to enforce immigration laws while on patrol.

Several studies by academics and non-partisan organisations have shown that 287(g) agreements do not lower crime. Others have found that the initiative increases discriminatory practices in police departments. And while ICE says it pays to train the officers, the cost of the work falls on the localities. Many of those identified by local agencies for immigration violations have no violent criminal history.

“I think the programme imposes costs on American taxpayers without producing any outcome that’s worth it,” said Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank which in 2018 did a study on the effects of 287(g) in North Carolina. “Every dollar they spend going after a nonviolent person is a dollar that could have been spent going after real criminals.”

From Louisiana to El Salvador

Some recent 287(g) traffic stop arrests have made national headlines. On May 5, Ximena Arias Cristóbal was pulled over by police in Georgia after dropping her mother off at work. An officer alleged the 19-year-old had made an illegal right turn on red. The case quickly went viral on social media after people learned she had been brought to the US from Mexico at 4 years old and was the recipient of a scholarship for high-achieving undocumented students.

The cross-country runner was taken to the Whitfield County Jail, which has a 287(g) agreement. That meant ICE was notified and agents took her into custody – three weeks after her father, who is also undocumented, was arrested during a traffic stop and put in the same immigration detention centre in Lumpkin, Georgia.

Body-camera footage later showed that Arias had not made an improper turn. The officer had mistakenly pulled her over instead of stopping a driver with a similar-looking pickup truck. The officer resigned and Arias was released after two and a half weeks in detention with a court date more than a year away.

The teen’s attorney, Dustin Baxter, said racial profiling is built into a programme like 287(g) “because you have to question someone’s nationality to put an immigration hold on them, and the first reason you question that, in most cases, is the skin colour or the way they talk”.

Other detentions have been shrouded in secrecy. Miguel Rojas Mendoza was arrested during a traffic stop in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, on January 27 – just seven days after Trump became President.

Rojas, who fled Venezuela and arrived in the US in May 2023, was living and working in the US legally after receiving temporary protected status, or TPS, a special permission given to people from countries experiencing war or other extreme hardship.

He was driving back from the ranch where he took care of horses when he was stopped and charged with driving under the influence, driving without a licence and driving without a proper plate, according to a copy of the police report. His girlfriend, Blanca, who spoke on the condition that only her first name be used out of fear of being targeted by immigration authorities, said he had just purchased a new car and was waiting to get his new plates.

When Blanca went to the jail the next day to pay his bond, she said officers told her he was in immigration custody. The Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office now has a 287(g) jail agreement with ICE, though a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office said it was not in effect at the time of Rojas’ arrest.

He was transferred to a Nacogdoches, Texas, jail for a month, Blanca said, before he was taken to the El Valle Processing Center in South Texas. In early March, he called his family from El Valle and told them he believed he was getting deported back to Venezuela. Instead, on March 15, he was sent to CECOT, a Salvadoran prison where US immigrants have joined thousands of criminals locked up without access to lawyers or their families. His family discovered where he was after a list of CECOT detainees began circulating online.

“Just hearing my son’s voice, even if it was from far away, that would be a win,” said his mother, Doris Mendoza, who lives in Venezuela.

“I’m losing everything”

In Tennessee, Martínez’s arrest was part of a broader immigration enforcement operation in early May. Over several days, ICE officers in unmarked cars trailed Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers to pick up unauthorised immigrants at routine traffic stops.

Nearly 200 immigrants were arrested. According to ICE, 70 had no previous criminal records. Thirty-one had committed a felony by re-entering the country illegally after being deported. The remaining 95 had prior criminal convictions or charges for other offences.

Law enforcement agencies in Tennessee have over a dozen pending or approved 287(g) agreements with ICE, up from two at the start of the year. Meanwhile, the Republican-led legislature created a new Tennessee immigration enforcement agency to serve as a liaison between ICE and local authorities; it is nearly entirely exempt from state public records laws, which means it will be able to operate largely in secrecy.

In Nashville, immigrant advocates said whole communities are afraid to leave their homes as the environment grows increasingly punitive.

“We are deeply disturbed about the infrastructure that is being built to carry out mass deportation and the long-term impact that is going to have on local communities,” said Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrants & Refugee Rights Coalition. “It’s going to take a generation to unwind and untangle from these harmful policies.”

After Martinez was arrested, White did not hear anything for a week. She began to worry that her husband had been taken to Guantanamo or El Salvador. She couldn’t eat or sleep. She became so stressed she thought she was going to miscarry.

Finally, with the help of a lawyer, she made contact. “First thing that came out of his mouth was, ‘Are you okay and are the kids okay?’ And I said the same thing – ‘How are you?’” White said. He told her the guards hadn’t allowed him to make calls at the jail until he was about to be transferred to an ICE detention centre.

Last week, Martinez was deported back to Mexico. It’s not clear what the next steps are for him. Though there is a pathway to citizenship through his 2013 marriage to White, a US citizen, he never got his papers because they could not afford the legal fees. Now, his lawyer, Michael Holley, said his wife could petition for a visa for him, and he could apply for an exemption from the 10-year ban on his return that is currently in place. But that process, if successful, would take at least five years, the attorney said.

In the month and a half since Martinez has been gone, White’s life has begun to unravel. Without her husband’s income, she has fallen behind on rent. One of her cars was repossessed. And she was forced to withdraw from classes at a community college where she was pursuing a nursing degree, a lifelong dream.

She still gets questions from her children, who are 6, 9 and 11. They didn’t know their father was undocumented, and she has struggled to explain it – and why they are paying the price.