Texas traffic police have been helping immigration officers find illegal immigrants for two years

In the past two years, road patrol officers in Texas have provided the federal immigration authorities with the names of hundreds of people they stopped for breaking traffic rules.

Фото: Depositphotos

This information became known during the trial of the case of an illegal from San Antonio Gaspar Rodriguez Garcia, writes NBC News.

Garcia was stopped by a patrol police officer for a partial stop at a crossroads, after which the Immigration and Customs Control (ICE) came to him, accusing him of having illegally re-entered the US after the deportation.

In court, ICE officer Omar Esquivel explained how the Texas police work with immigration authorities.

“The Department of Public Safety (DPS) puts together a list of people they stop and they forward it to us to check all the names that are on there,” Esquivel said.

This news caused sharp criticism from immigration lawyers in the state.

Fernando Garcia, Executive Director and Founder of the Organization Border Network for Human Rights, said that the exchange of information between police and ICE causes fear and mistrust of police among residents of Texas.

“This is a very unfortunate practice because Latinos represent a large portion of the population in Texas, and to us this is a clear attack against Latinos in Texas,” Garcia said.

Transferring the list from the police to ICE existed even before Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a law that gives the state law enforcement officers the right to request information on the citizenship and immigration status of the detainees.

The DPS explained that they have a request from ICE to provide them with information about drivers who are detained for driving without a license or in a state of drug or alcohol intoxication. The ministry noted that the state police had been transferring lists of violators to ICE since August 2016 on a monthly basis. However, the information in these documents does not include the immigration status of the violators: the names of the violators were entered there regardless of their race or ethnicity.

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