After many years of efforts to increase U.S. protection for Puerto Rico from drug smugglers and gangs, Puerto Rico is now in the center of the crackdown on what Washington is calling “narcoterrorism.” At the same time, Puerto Rico is also seeing immigration raids across the Island. The federal government hopes that these raids, which are focused on identifying illegal aliens and removing them from the United States, will reduce crime, especially drug trafficking. The territorial government shares these hopes, and is cooperating with these efforts, providing personal information such as drivers license records to help ICE identify possible undocumented aliens.
ICE raids are taking place across the nation
Every state in the Union has seen some raids from the immigration service. Some states are more cooperative than others, and those states — including Florida, Texas, and Arizona — are seeing more raids than the states that have protections for immigrants. Puerto Rico is one of the more cooperative jurisdictions, so there have been plenty of raids on the Island.
ICE agents have been visiting homes, conducting surprise raids at workplaces, and stopping people on the street to determine whether they are undocumented. Again, this is happening in the states as well as in Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, arrests of immigrants have increased fivefold in the past year.
In Puerto Rico, as in most of the states, the people being arrested are primarily undocumented workers who have not committed crimes beyond illegal entry or overstay in the United States.
What’s different in Puerto Rico
There are no large detention centers on the Island. People who are detained are therefore being flown to Florida or other locations. According to the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, detainees are given a list of lawyers, but all of them are in Florida. Some detainees in the states are quickly separated from their families and removed from the area where they have been living, but in Puerto Rico, this applies to all those who are arrested.
Communities in Puerto Rico are being affected in the same ways as communities in some states, since they are losing workers and consumers and therefore seeing effects on the local economy. But Puerto Rico, with a shrinking population and a weaker economy than the states, is more vulnerable than any of the states.
The aggressiveness of the ICE actions and the high level of cooperation of the territorial government are also leading to a high level of fear and uncertainty in some communities. This is true in the states as well, but some observers in Puerto Rico believe that the Island is also more vulnerable to the psychological trauma of the experience. In some communities, children are no longer attending school and families are afraid to venture out of their homes.
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