ICE’s Philadelphia office is fanning out into communities across its three-state region and making more “at-large” arrests of immigrants without criminal convictions than anywhere else in America.
by Deborah Sontag and Dale Russakoff
This story was co-published with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
QUAKERTOWN, PA — From the time they first flirted at a party,
Anne and Ludvin Franco were inseparable. It did not matter that Anne, a
waitress, was Pennsylvania Dutch going back generations, while Ludvin, a
cook, had grown up in the scrublands of eastern Guatemala.
It also did not matter to Anne or her open-armed family that Lulu, as
they called him, was undocumented. At their wedding in 2013, the
Americans and the Guatemalans danced the night away with Latin DJs
imported from Queens.
On lawyers’ advice, the Francos waited to start legalizing his status
through their marriage until late 2016, after he had lived a
productive, crime-free decade in the United States. They never
anticipated that President Trump’s promised immigration crackdown would
be so swift, and so ruthless in their region.
By last spring, when Pennsylvania roads were starting to feel like a
dragnet for immigrants without papers, Ludvin Franco had mostly stopped
getting behind the wheel of a car. Often he relied on his wife to drive
him, their twin toddlers buckled into the backseat. But the night his
soccer team faced a rival in the semifinals of an indoor league, his
wife was in the queasy first trimester of a second pregnancy. He headed
out alone.
As Franco drove north on Route 309, a Hyundai pulled out of Bubba’s
Pot Belly Stove Restaurant and crossed into his lane. He swerved to
avoid hitting it, he later said, but failed. Nobody was injured. Franco
got a couple of tickets.
A few weeks later, as Franco was leaving for work at dawn, lights
flashed. Men in police vests approached: federal agents from the ICE
section that normally pursues violent criminals. They knew about the
crash.
“Oh, God,” Franco thought. “I’m done.”
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Source: ProPublica
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