Hey, remember how decent people warned that Donald Trump’s presidential pardon of the lawless, criminal, and very racist Joe Arpaio would only give the green light to others in power to continue the scourge of racial profiling? Here’s The Oregonian:
Federal agents mistook a longtime Washington County employee for an [undocumented] immigrant just as a nearby demonstration against arrests of undocumented immigrants ended at the courthouse in Hillsboro.
The mistake rattled Isidro Andrade-Tafolla, a married father of three children who lives in Forest Grove and has worked as a road maintenance worker for the county for nearly 20 years.
"It was frightening, disturbing, humiliating and I'm still trying to process being stopped because of my color and my race," he said Tuesday.
Andrade-Tafolla was leaving a court hearing with his wife when two people in plain clothes approached him to demand his name and identification, but refused to identify themselves. Andrade-Tafolla, who is Latino and a United States citizen, later recalled that both had been seated near them inside the courtroom:
"They never identified themselves even when my wife and I kept asking who they were and why they wanted my information," said Andrade-Tafolla, 46.
"I gave them my name. They said they had a picture of me, that I wasn't here legally and when they showed my wife and I the picture, there was no resemblance except we were both Hispanic." The woman in the van had the photo on her cellphone.
According to Andrade-Tafolla, several more unmarked cars pulled up—all to try and detain one person, but remember, there’s no money for Head Start—with those agents also refusing to verbally ID themselves.
As shown in the video captured by a bystander, Andrade-Tafolla and his wife continued to insist he was not the man in the picture with the bystander asking if they had a warrant. “Does anybody have a warrant?” she repeatedly demanded to deaf ears.
Finally, Andrade-Tafolla told The Oregonian, one of the agents relented. "That's not him,” he said. “Let's get out of here”:
The woman said "sorry" and then they left, Andrade-Tafolla said. He estimated the encounter lasting about a minute and a half.
"It was like seeing roaches scatter when you turn on the light," he said. "They just left my wife and I standing there.”
The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Oregon said its legal observers have seen at least 10 people arrested by ICE agents at the county courthouse since April. That same month, Oregon Chief Justice Thomas Balmer wrote a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then-Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly urging ICE to stop making arrests in and around Oregon's courthouses.
Sarah Armstrong, an Oregon ACLU spokeswoman, said observers now go to the Washington County Courthouse every Monday since receiving a tip that the ICE arrests were still occurring.
Among the arrests, she said, were three people taken into custody while leaving the courthouse in May, including a mother who said she had two children to pick up from a babysitter; three others arrested in a fourth-floor courthouse hallway in July; and one man arrested by ICE at the courthouse last Monday and loaded into a car with two other apparent detainees.
An ICE spokesperson told The Oregonian that “ICE officers are required to identify themselves to people if they're interacting with them as part of their official duties,” but then again there’s lots of things ICE is required to do. Following the rules is only for the little people, or if you lack papers.
It needs to be said that a fish rots from the head down. In July, the Trump administration endorsed Texas’s “show me your papers” law, which has been largely blocked by a judge but would allow local enforcement to question the immigration status of anyone they stop—read: brown people—for any reason.
Just this month, news broke that ICE had also colluded with two Motel 6 locations to arrest brown guests who front desk staff somehow deemed to be here without permission.
"As Oregon officials have repeatedly made clear, targeting immigration enforcement in areas near courthouses deters individuals from accessing our justice system and is contrary to the fair administration of law in Oregon," a letter from Oregon Reps. Suzanne Bonamici and Earl Blumenauer said in response to Andrade-Tafolla’s apprehension.
"More seriously, targeting U.S. citizens on the basis of race is a clear violation of their constitutional rights."