It was Mother’s Day when Chelsea resident Kenia Guerrero was driving to church with her husband, Daniel Flores Martinez, and their three children when their vehicle was surrounded by federal immigration agents in several unmarked cars.
“Everything happened so fast. I saw one of them raise what looked like a gun or a weapon, and they threatened to break the [car] window,” she said at a roundtable for impacted immigrant families in East Boston on Monday.
Guerrero was one of several people to speak out at a roundtable hosted by U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley at Maverick Landing Community Services, publicly sharing for the first time about the impacts of recent detentions of their loved ones by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Guerrero recounted her husband’s detention last month, which was posted on social media.
“I begged them not to be violent because my children were present,” she recounted. “But they smashed the passenger side window anyway.”
Agents, she said, unlocked the car door, grabbed her husband, who she said didn’t resist, and “slammed his face on the sidewalk” with knees on top of him. Guerrero said their children, ages 3, 12, and 14, were “screaming in fear and crying.”
When she exited the car to see more of what was happening, an officer grabbed and restrained her.
Flores Martinez is being held in ICE detention facility in Rhode Island on unknown charges. Guerrero said their children are afraid to go to school and have nightmares.
“He needs to come home, please,” she said. “I can’t do this on my own.”
Iván Espinoza-Madrigal of Lawyers for Civil Rights, which is representing the family, said Flores Martinez asserts that every step of his detention was illegal, including opening the car door without reason.
“The law also says that the car’s interior as a whole is subject to Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable intrusions by the police,” he said. “What happened to Mrs. Guerrero and her family, because there were three children in the car, is nothing short of a violation of their well-established constitutional rights under federal law and state law.”
Espinoza-Madrigal said Flores Martinez had a “minor legal issue many years back.” He said it was “handled through probation and counseling and has long been behind him.”
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the cases mentioned in this story. But the roundtable took place as federal officials in Boston announced they had made almost 1,500 immigration arrests locally in the month of May.
Yolanda, a Randolph resident who didn’t want to use her last name due to fear of deportation, said her husband Santo was recently detained and was transferred to an ICE facility in Louisiana. He’s originally from the Dominican Republic.
She declined to comment on his immigration status but said he has no criminal record and is a diabetic who was “without medication for 10 days.” He doesn’t have an attorney and has reported feeling side effects of not taking his medication.
Yolanda said she and her son would rather her husband be released to her or be deported to his native country than continue to be detained.
Pressley and advocates urged the public to stand up for immigrant neighbors and defend their rights.
“There is a coordinated assault and attack that is very hyper-focused on the immigrant community, but these violations are a threat to all of us,” said Pressley. “This is wholesale harm that is very discriminative. It is very precise, and it has nothing to do with public safety.”
Nicole Eigbrett is the co-director of the Asian American Resource Workshop and part of the LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of MA, which runs a hotline about ICE sightings.
She said the network has trained more than 1,000 community members to verify ICE sightings and collect information about them.
“ICE agents [are] acting with complete impunity coming into our community wearing balaclavas, military gear, being fully undercover, refusing to identify who they are,” she said.
In the past week, Eigbrett said the hotline has had over 600 calls, and more than 95% of them were responded to by the volunteers.
“We’re feeling really proud of this. However, that doesn’t displace the fact that more than 400 people, maybe more, have been ripped apart from their families this past month alone,” she said.
“There’s no such thing as a good or bad immigrant,” Eigbrett said of the detentions.
One advocacy organization, Centro Presente, launched a campaign last week after the detention of José Pineda, a resident of East Boston.
His wife, Mercedes Pineda, said he was detained while working his job in construction, and has no criminal record. Originally from El Salvador, she said José Pineda has Temporary Protected Status and has been in the U.S. for over 30 years.
“The ICE agents who detained my husband told him that only people born here have rights and that it didn’t matter if they had a work permit,” she said.
He was detained in Burlington’s ICE office for two days, and slept on the floor of a cell with at least 50 other people, she recounted.
“He suffered racist, unjust and inhumane treatment by ICE agents,” she said. After two days of public pressure, Pineda’s husband was released, but the family continues to be scared to go out in public.
Pineda’s 12-year-old daughter, Michelle, who is a U.S. citizen, spoke at the event and told GBH News that she has had anxiety attacks since her father was detained.
“I’m glad he was released, but sometimes I’m most afraid when he goes to work,” she said.
Michelle said she plays piano and violin, and plays Billie Eilish songs on repeat to calm down when she gets anxious.
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