Char Miller

CLAREMONT, Aug. 15 - We were heading home from the movies, a fun Saturday night out that turned dispiriting.

The first sign that something was amiss came as we approached Foothill Boulevard’s busy intersection with Garey Avenue in Pomona, CA, a major city in Los Angeles County.

That’s when we spotted a pair of young men, standing beneath the pale wash of a streetlamp. They were waving large pieces of posterboard, hoping to attract drivers’ attention, placards that had two words scrawled across them - Retén Adelante!

Although we absorbed the phrase we did not comprehend its message: it was dark; it was late; and our Spanish was not quick enough to catch the words’ significance. But they weren’t meant for us in any event, which we realized within seconds as we crossed Garey and were forced to slow down: bright-red cones lined either side of our lane and narrowed as they approached a well-lit police barricade. That’s when we realized we had been snared by a search-and-seizure operation that has made the Pomona police department infamous. That’s what the “Checkpoint Ahead” signs had been warning us about.

For years, local police have used National Highway Traffic Safety Administration funds to mount “sobriety” checks to reduce drunk driving and insure that all drivers are properly licensed. Sure enough, no sooner had I lowered the window at the officer’s command than I was asked if I had been drinking and whether I was carrying a valid driver’s license. When I relied “No” and “Yes,” we were waved through.

Now, I’m not in favor of unlicensed or drunk drivers. But everyone swept off the road that evening was Latino: they clustered along the curb, watching and waiting; their confiscated cars lining nearby parking lots and roadways soon would be towed to police impound lots. The loss of ready transportation, the fees and fines their owners would incur to secure these many autos’ release, made it clear that this checkpoint strategy was just another way to harass undocumented immigrants.

Expect to see a major increase in such harassment, and an intensification of distress among some of our poorest residents, all courtesy of the Obama administration. It has just boosted funding for an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program called Secure Communities that will especially focus on the 25 counties lining the U.S.-Mexico border. Participating police departments will automatically forward fingerprints and other arrest data to ICE; if the federal agency wants, it can compel local police to detain individuals until it can take them into custody. Without the legal right to appeal, detainees are at the mercy of ICE, which frequently, increasingly is deporting them.

ICE argues that Secure Communities only targets dangerous criminals but independent investigations indicate that 79 percent of those detained have no criminal record, or had but minor violations. Most egregious is data emanating from Travis County, Texas, home of Austin, the state’s capital: 82 percent of those detained for ICE had no criminal record.

Observed Bridget Kessler of the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law: this pattern "indicates police officers are picking up people on pretext, the criminal charges are getting dropped or dismissed, and they're getting shuttled into deportation."

Those figures are shocking in a legal sense but also in a political one: the next time I see signs warning Retén Adelante, I’ll better understand my wife’s distressing insight as we pulled away from the checkpoint: “It’s as if we are living in a police state.” 

Char Miller is director of the environmental analysis program at Pomona College, Claremont, CA. He is author of Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life in South Texas and editor of River Basins of the American West. His columns appear regularly in the Guardian.

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